Fine & Performing Arts Department Stories

May 2008

John Miller is a featured speaker at the Rural Heritage Institute (RHI) at Sterling College. RHI is a four-day series of interdisciplinary academic, experiential, and instructional field-based workshops scheduled for June 11-14, 2008.
    John also has a one-person show at the Brown Library gallery for the month of June, tracing a number of his documentary projects over the past 35 years. These include rural agrarian culture, deer hunting traditions, elder women who continued to live independently into very old age, and a series documenting rivers in the Northeast Kingdom.
    A photographic exhibit from the summer 2007 Italy course, "Italian Art and Culture," taught by John Miller and Mary Martin, was featured at the JSC Visual Arts Center in April. Included in the exhibit were large color and black and white photographs
made by students as well as excerpts from their written journals chronicling their observations and reflections upon experiencing, for the first time, the the art and architecture of the Renaissance.

   The 2006 student photo-documentary about elders in the Craftsbury Community Care Center (which has already travelled to many venues) will be the featured exhibit for June, July and
August at the Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury. A Saturday symposium is being scheduled after the exhibit opening, which will feature John and members of his photography class discussing
the use of photography in mentoring youth.

Russ Longtin will play Tobias in Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance this coming August with the Stowe Theatre Guild. In summer of 2009, he will play Iago in Shakespeare's Othello and Baptista in the musical Kiss Me Kate — both with Quarry Works Theatre in Adamant. For summer of 2010, Russ is already booked to play George in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff.

Third and fourth graders at Cambridge Elementary worked with the Vermont Dance Collective for two days in March, tracing traditional dance styles popular in Vermont and New England back to their European ancestors. Entitled Dancing through History, the residency culminated in a final performance in the school gymnasium. The Vermont Dance Collective was founded by Maris Wolff.


April 2008

Ken Leslie won an American Scandinavian Foundation Visual
Arts Independent Research award. This grant, along with the JSC Advanced Study Grant that he has received, will fund two four-week residencies in Finnish Lapland, one this summer and the other next winter. Ken will produce paintings and artist's books about this Arctic community, to join his ongoing "Top of the World" series of work already completed in Iceland, northern Alaska, Svalbard and Baffin Island. In early March Ken travelled to the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts for the opening of an exhibition in which his work appears.

Carolyn Mecklosky led a Peace Flag Workshop at the Johnson
Village Winterfest. Participants printed 50 peace flags and raised money for the Johnson Food Shelf. Carolyn was also in a winter group show at Painted Caravan, Johnson.


Andrew Patterson-Tutschka has paintings in the Scott Gallery exhibit "Young Philadelphia Realists," featuring 10 emerging artists from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Andrew and his colleagues in this show received a very significant
and favorable review in a March issue of Seven Days.

February 2008

In February, Leila Bandar made use of a large barn for research, development, and crafting large-scale sculptures. Her objective was to restore the earlier social function of large-scale sculpture
and to use common materials that transcend their usual function. In March, Leila was be part of a two-person exhibition at Emma
Willard School in Troy, New York, exhibiting sculptures with paintings by Arista Alanis. Last January, she was a visiting sculptor in residence at Chapel Hill Chauncy Hall School in
Watertown, Massachusetts. Last June, Leila installed a large outdoor sculpture at the entrance of the Helen Spyner Theater, University of Louisiana in Monroe, for a one-year exhibition in the university's outdoor sculpture park.


Bethany Bond was featured in the group exhibit "Women to
Watch: Four Vermont Photographers," January 21 - February 9 in the Julian Scott Memorial Gallery at JSC. On February 7, Bethany lectured about her work in the Gallery.

This year the American College Theater Festival named JSC's Big Love, directed by F. Reed Brown, as an alternate production. This is considered a significant honor in the prestigious competition. Besides the director, nine cast and tech members were invited to Fitchburg State as part of the festival competition. This included students nominated for lighting, projection,
and stage managing as well as three actors and their alternates.

John Miller had a series of color landscape/text photographs in a
multi-media group exhibit at the Maple Ridge Gallery in Newark, Vermont until February 18. Recently he was asked to be on the Multi-Media Advisory Board at the Green Mountain Technical Center (GMTC) in Hyde Park. This will involve developing connections between high school students at the Tech Center and
upper-level Fine Arts majors in the photography and digital media programs at Johnson through artist residencies and internships at
GMTC. John has also recently become an advisor for the Vision & Voice Documentary Workspace at the Vermont Folklife Center
in Middlebury. The Workspace extends the Folklife Center's educational mission by providing a site for the planning, development, and exhibition of new documentary work.


Joe Salerno had a series of his landscape paintings in a group show at the Ober Gallery in Kent, Connecticut until March 2008.


December 2007

Professor John Miller provided a dual presentation (with Behavioral Sciences professor Gina Mireault) on their service learning initiatives for the Vermont Campus Compact annual meeting at JSC on November 12.

Part-time faculty member Joseph Salerno gave a gallery talk on October 25 at Helen Day Art Center. His series, "Interpreting Nature: Part III," ran from September 14 to November 17.


Professor Diane Huling Reed gave an all-Chopin piano recital in October at the Unitarian Church in Montpelier. The
recital was reviewed favorably in the Times Argus.

October 2007

Marjoire Kramer was awarded a painting residency at Governors Island in New York Harbor for June and July, 2007.  The island, a new National Park historic site with many lovely deserted mansions among hundred year old trees, is located just a few hundred yards from lower Manhattan with views of the Wall Street area.  A show at the New York Studio School Gallery on 8th Street features work done by the twenty artists in the residency program.  The show opened September 6 and runs through October 13.  Marjorie also exhibited in the Small Works Invitational 2007 show at Blue Mountain Gallery, on West 25th Street in New York City, during July and August.

 

Ken Leslie is one of nine artists from around the nation who were invited to contribute work to a group exhibition, Nature Remains: The Artist as Environmentalist, that opens September 14 at the Helen Day Art Center in Stowe.  The show runs through November 17.

“Top of the World”, an exhibition of Ken Leslie’s work at the Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium, opened in July and runs through January 27, 2008.  The show features paintings and artist's books completed in a number of Arctic locations, including Alaska, Iceland, Svalbard and Nunavut, and includes environmental commentary by Steve Maleski, well-known “Eye on the Sky” meteorologist at the Fairbanks.

Professors John Miller and Mary Martin traveled to Italy for 17 days in June with JSC art majors to study Italian art and create portfolios of digital photographs.  Besides visiting famous galleries, extraordinary churches, notable pieces of architecture, medieval towns, and major cities, the group also stayed in country houses amidst olive groves and vineyards and visited vintners, farms, and a number of contemporary artists’ studios and regional museums. They sampled many regional foods and attended a medieval festival (the Gaite) to enjoy an annual neighborhood feast.  Students will present an exhibit of their digital photography from Italy in the Visual Arts Center gallery during the spring 2008 semester.

Part-time faculty member Amy May organized the 14th Annual Throw-A-Thon to Benefit Operation Smile.  The event occured at the college’s Visual Arts Center on Friday October 19 from noon to midnight.  For a donation of $5, participants werre invited to create hand crafted and/or wheel-thrown ceramic forms.  Works made during the Throw-A-Thon will be donated and sold during the JSC Holiday Ceramic and Bake Sale in November.  All proceeds benefit Operation Smile.

 

Interpreting Nature: Part III, an exhibit by part-time faculty member Joseph Salerno, opened at Stowe’s Helen Day Art Center on September 14 and will run until November 17.  An artist’s talk is scheduled for October 25 at 5:30 p.m.

This semester marks the beginning of a campaign to transform the curricular approach to technology, eportfolios, cutting edge software, and 3-D applications in the Associate of Technical Theater program.  In May Dibden director Jan Herder made an e-portfolio presentation at the VSAC Pathways to College workshop at St. Michael's College.  He discussed new Web 2.0 applications and digital story telling as techniques for building an e-portfolio.  About 30 prospective college students and their parents attended.

 

In June, Professor Russ Longtin worked on a TV pilot for Robert Fritz productions.  In July and August, he rehearsed and performed in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night at Quarry Works Theatre in Adamant.  Russ is scheduled to perform his one-man Barrymore with Lost Nation Theatre in January and will be taking on the role of Iago in Shakespeare's Othello next summer at Quarry Works Theatre.

Professor Lisa Jablow has been appointed Chorus Director of the Pioneer Valley Symphony and Chorus beginning with the 2007-08 season.  The Pioneer Valley Symphony & Chorus, based in Greenfield, Massachusetts, is now in its 69th season.  Lisa is also Music Director of the current Lamoille County Players production, Spitfire Grill, at the Hyde Park Opera House. 

 

Professor Reed Brown assisted with the choreographic aspects of the Spitfire Grill production.  The musical stars JSC student Amber Couture 

 

Profesor Maris Wolff was one of four professors featured in “Where campus meets community,” an article appearing in the September/October 2007 issue of Vermont Magazine.  In the article Maris and her colleagues reflect on how Vermont’s small colleges help students connect the classroom and the outside world. You can read the article (in pdf format), courtesy of Vermont Magazine, by clicking here.

Fine and Performing Arts