Online Programing

Artists in the Archives: Community, History & Collage

In conjunction with the Henry Sheldon Museum exhibit “Artists in the Archives: Community, History & Collage” (September 2, 2022 – January 7, 2023), the Sheldon Museum and Kolaj LIVE Online presents a series of monthly webinars featuring artists, curators, and archivists as part the Sheldon Museum’s “Elephant in the Room/Archives” multiyear theme.

Artists in the Archives: Community, History & Collage

Thursday, October 20, 2022, 7PM EST

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Join project curator Ric Kasini Kadour, Stewart-Swift Research Center Archivist Eva Garcelon-Hart, Kolaj Institute Coordinator Christopher Kurts, and artist Jeanna Penn for a conversation about the intersection of art, collage, history, and archives. Local history museums, archives, and collections are vital to building healthy communities and to anchoring our understanding of the world around us in the place where we live, work, and play. Collage artists have unique skills that are particularly useful in our historical moment. They understand that something beautiful, something meaningful can come from chaos; that destruction is easier than creation, which takes patience, precision, thoughtfulness, and intuition. What happens when we bring those two groups together?

 On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Stewart-Swift Research Center, the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History invited an international network of collage artists to engage with historic material in the archive and to create a folio of collage prints that reflect on the idea of community in a 21st century world.

 ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Ric Kasini Kadour, a 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts Curatorial Fellow, is a writer, artist, publisher, and cultural worker. Working with the Vermont Arts Council, Kadour curated four exhibits: “Connection: The Art of Coming Together” (2017) and Vermont Artists to Watch 2018, 2019 and 2020. In 2017, he curated “The Art of Winter” at S.P.A.C.E. Gallery in Burlington, Vermont. In 2018, Kadour curated “Revolutionary Paths: Critical Issues in Collage” at Antenna Gallery in New Orleans, which bought together collage artists whose work represents the potential for deeper inquiry and further curatorial exploration of the medium; followed in 2019 by “Cultural Deconstructions: Critical Issues in Collage” at LeMieux Galleries in New Orleans, which furthered the conversation. Since 2018, he has produced Kolaj Fest New Orleans, a multi-day festival & symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society. As Curator of Contemporary Art at Rokeby Museum in Ferrisburgh, Vermont in 2019 and 2020, he curated three exhibitions, “Rokeby Through the Lens” (May 19-June 16, 2019), “Structures” (August 24-October 27, 2019), and “Mending Fences: New Works by Carol MacDonald” (July 12-October 25, 2020). He also curated “Contemporary American Regionalism: Vermont Perspectives” (August 17-October 20, 2019); “Where the Sun Casts No Shadow: Postcards from the Creative Crossroads of Quito, Ecuador” (November 1-30, 2019); and “Many Americas” (August 20-November 27, 2022) in the Wilson Museum & Galleries at the Southern Vermont Arts Center. “The Money $how”, co-curated with Frank Juarez, was presented at the AIR Space Gallery at Saint Kate-The Arts Hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (April 10-September 12, 2021). For Birr Vintage Week & Arts Festival in Birr, County Offaly, Ireland (August 13-20, 2021), he curated “Empty Columns Are a Place to Dream”, which traveled to the Knoxville Museum of Art in January-February 2022. At 516 ARTS in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Kadour co-curated with Alicia Inez Guzmàn two exhibitions: “Many Worlds Are Born” (February 19-May 14, 2022) and “Technologies of the Spirit” (June 11-September 3, 2022). Kadour is the editor and publisher of Kolaj Magazine. He has written for a number of galleries and his writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, OEI, Vermont Magazine, Seven Days, Seattle Weekly, Art New England (where he was the former Vermont editor) and many others. Kadour maintains an active art practice and his photography, collage, and sculpture have been exhibited in and are part of private collections in Australia, Europe and North America. In January-February 2020, he was artist-in-residence at MERZ Gallery in Sanquhar, Scotland. He holds a BA in Comparative Religion from the University of Vermont. Kadour splits his time between Montreal and New Orleans. www.rickasinikadour.com

 Eva Garcelon-Hart has overseen the Sheldon Museum’s Stewart-Swift Research Center archival collections since 2011 where she has particular interest in bringing the Center’s overlooked stories and visual collections to public attention. While there Eva curated several exhibits including: “Charity & Sylvia: A Weybridge Couple,” “Conjuring the Dead: Spirit Art in the Age of Radical Reform,” and “Elephant in the Archives: Silences, Erasure & Relevance.” During 2021/22 she and her colleagues organized a popular virtual talk series, the “Elephant in the Room: Exploring the Future of Museums.” Eva earned her MA in History of Art and MLIS from the University of California at Berkeley.

Christopher Kurts is a storyteller, an artist, the Coordinator for Kolaj Institute, and the co-founder and lead organizer of the Mystic Krewe of Scissors & Glue, a group of creatives in New Orleans who meet monthly to collage, converse and foster community. Inspired by science fiction and fantasy, Kurts plays with genre and escapism in order to tell archetypal stories that reach into history and ruminate on the future.

Jeanna Penn is a contemporary artist who lives and works between Oakland and Los Angeles, California. She has been creating art for over twenty-five years in various forms including mixed media collage, soft sculpture, photography, zines and documentary film. Much of Jeanna’s work is centered around recontextualizing found imagery and documenting material histories. She received her BA in African American Studies from Morgan State University and continued graduate work in African History at Howard University and Historical Documentary Filmmaking at George Washington University.

Artists in the Archives: Absence in the Archive

Wednesday, November 9th, 2022, 7PM EST

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 Join artists Carmen Lizardo and Ginger Sedlarova, and Stewart-Swift Research Center Archivist Eva Garcelon-Hart, for a conversation about absence in the archive and the role artists can play in making archives more representative of the whole community. The panel will also include Jillian Hartke, archivist at the Albuquerque Museum's Photography Archive in New Mexico who will speak about that Museum's approach to absence, acquisition, representation.

 No archive or collection is perfect and not all people of a community are well-represented in an archive. How do we make sense of these absences and how can we make archives more representative of the whole community?  On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Stewart-Swift Research Center, the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History invited an international network of collage artists to engage with historic material in the archive and to create a folio of collage prints that reflect on the idea of community in a 21st century world. A number of artists focused on what communities are absent in the archive. By projecting and photographing images of women of African American descent onto the physical storage room of the archive, Carmen Lizardo's collage draws our attention to the absence of Black people in the collection. Seeing "minimal Jewish material in the archive," Ginger Sedlarova hopes to draw attention to what material is there to "inspire the Jewish residents of Middlebury to donate archival materials." Using tools of projection, subtraction, and speculation, contemporary artists can fill gaps in the material of local history keepers in a way that invites underrepresented community members to engage and, possibly, contribute to the archive.

 ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

 Eva Garcelon-Hart has overseen the Sheldon Museum’s Stewart-Swift Research Center archival collections since 2011 where she has particular interest in bringing the Center’s overlooked stories and visual collections to public attention. While there Eva curated several exhibits including: “Charity & Sylvia: A Weybridge Couple,” “Conjuring the Dead: Spirit Art in the Age of Radical Reform,” and “Elephant in the Archives: Silences, Erasure & Relevance.” During 2021/22 she and her colleagues organized a popular virtual talk series, the “Elephant in the Room: Exploring the Future of Museums.” Eva earned her MA in History of Art and MLIS from the University of California at Berkeley.

Carmen Lizardo's process begins by creating temporary collages--projecting or copying the original pictures and "floating" them on different fabric, wallpaper patterns, water, sand, or paint. She then photographs the temporary collages, printing them on transparent paper. The printed photograph is further transformed by using paint, gold leaf, and iridescent pigments on the backside of the print. These works become one-of-a-kind physical records of their previous ephemeral existence. She holds a BFA in Photography and an MFA in Digital Art from Pratt Institute. Originally from the Dominican Republic, Lizardo served fifteen years as a tenured faculty for SUNY New Paltz’s Fine and Performing Arts program and now is solely dedicated to her studio practice. She lives and works in the Hudson Valley, New York. See Lizardo’s webiste here.

Ginger Sedlarova an emerging collage artist living and working in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. Sometimes her work is a short story, sometimes it’s a novel. But it’s always surreal, full of observations about the absurdity of daily life or conversations with the cities she’s lived in, visited and loved. Her practice grew from her love of making digital photo collages in a former career as a graphic artist on newspapers in Canada and magazines in Central Europe--only now she does this by hand, without an editor looking over her shoulder while she works.

 Jillian Hartke is the digital archivist at the Albuquerque Museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She studied History at the University of Missouri and completed a Master’s of Library Science at the University of Missouri. She has worked as a librarian in academic, public, and non-profit institutions for over a decade, and has managed the Photo Archives of the Albuquerque Museum since 2018. She is an advocate for access to information and public transparency of collections held in libraries, archives, and museums. She believes in communicating the strengths and weaknesses of a collection to help build stronger community participation in the collecting process and more enthusiastic support for preserving collections for future generations.

Artists in the Archives: Women in the Archive

Wednesday, December 14, 2022, 7PM EST

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 Join artists Alexa Frangos, Elaine Luther, xtine, Vicki Scheele, Nancy Bernardo, archivist Bernadette Birzer, and American Studies Associate Professor Ellery Foutch in a conversation about the representation of women in the archives and the role artists can play in drawing out stories of women's lives and experiences in the past.

In the past, the history of women's lives and experiences was marginalized in favor of a "Great Man" approach to history, but in the last fifty years, greater attention to women's history has produced a rich understanding of women's lives in the past. Materials relevant to women’s studies are well-represented in the Stewart-Swift Research Center’s collections. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Stewart-Swift Research Center, the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History invited an international network of collage artists to engage with historic material in the archive and to create a folio of collage prints that reflect on the idea of community in a 21st century world. A number of artists focused on the stories of women from the past. Artists pursued their interest in the lives of women. Using letters of women working at textile mills in the 19th century, At the Loom by Illinois-based artist Alexa Frangos speaks to the experience of being forced to labor away from one’s community. Elaine Luther uses a 19th century advertisement for Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound which promised “a positive cure for all female complaints” to draw attention to the historical role women play as healers in the community. A Portrait of Emma Willard by xtine offers a dreamy meditation on the women’s education activist’s life and philosophy. Since 2004, the proportion of women in the archives profession has increased to 71%, a statistic that suggests women are playing a leading role in the preservation and care of history. Vicki Scheele‘s collage is an homage to the community of people who have maintained the Henry Sheldon Museum and the Stewart-Swift Research Center archives throughout its history. Nancy Bernardo draws upon early 20th century photographs of maids and laborers at The Breadloaf Inn to highlight unknown women and men who are integral to the infrastructure of a community. Bernardo is currently working with a group of collage artists to illustrate Kate Chopin's 1899 early feminist novel, The Awakening. 

 ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Elaine Luther is an independent studio artist with a sense of humor. Her mission is to make art that’s brave, vulnerable and true, and sometimes funny. She uses collage and assemblage to express ideas, feelings, complaints, and protests, in the form of something that people recognize. These forms have included medals, household shrines, tiny houses, and clothing. Based in Chicago, she has been an Advisory Board member for Woman Made Gallery; an ambassador for the Self-Employment in the Arts Conference and President of the Board of the Chicago Metal Arts Guild.

 Alexa Frangos. Utilizing cut paper, photographic ephemera and found objects, Frangos constructs realities that reflect on psychological states and identity. "I am interested in both the tactile nature and transformative power of the photograph," she wrote. From Chicago, Illinois, Frangos studied Visual Communications and Photography at Washington University in St. Louis before receiving her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She attended law school and practiced law for many years before returning to a full-time art practice.

Vicki Scheele's work is analog collage using vintage material, photographs, magazines, altered paper, paper transfers, and painted paper. Her life experiences shape her work and frequently engage with narratives of mortality and identity. Now in her 70s, the artist considers herself mainly self-taught and had been practicing collage for over 15 years. She lives and works in Costa Mesa, California.

 xtine burrough’s media artwork is image-based and participatory—projects center on women’s stories and experiences and responds to the social fabric into which they are woven. She relies on remix as a method for artmaking that includes appropriation, juxtaposition, and computation. Originally from Albany, New York, burrough is a Professor and Area Head of Design + Creative Practice in the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at the University of Texas at Dallas, where burrough directs LabSynthE, a laboratory for synthetic and electronic poetry. 

 Nancy Bernardo. Playing off of the concept of “ephemera", Nancy Bernardo creates two-dimensional, three-dimensional and animated collages with imagery of women and nature from the first half of the 20th century. Her collage pieces refashion these items in order to preserve an aesthetic depth not originally intended in their construction. Bernardo is a practicing artist and graphic designer who currently teaches at University of Rochester in Rochester, New York. 

 Ellery Foutch is an Associate Professor in the American Studies Program at Middlebury College (Vermont), where she teaches classes on the art and material culture of the United States. After earning her PhD in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania, she held postdoctoral teaching fellowships at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and The Courtauld Institute of Art (London). She completed her MA at the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art and her BA at Wellesley College.