On a recent Sunday afternoon, as some of Burlington’s homeless residents filtered through the red door of the First United Methodist Church for a weekly meal, Noni Stuart followed close behind carrying her art.
Stuart opened a folio and quietly arranged a series of charcoal portraits on a plastic table along a dining room wall. Her subjects included someone Stuart had dubbed “Pink Kitty,” a bright-haired woman who wore a studded cat-ear headband and a padlock around her neck. Another work captured the long face of a man Stuart knew only as “Gandalf,” who had told her of his ambition to organize a community volunteer corps composed of people without homes, like himself.
A third portrait depicted a couple who may be familiar to regular readers of Seven Days: Tony Pickard and his late wife, Ana Winn, who died in February at age 59. I wrote about their pandemic-era relocation to Vermont from Florida and the connections they made here, largely thanks to Winn’s charisma. Stuart had drawn the couple in a mutual embrace, their heads leaning in together as they smiled.
Stuart had met most of her subjects at these weekly church dinners, known informally as “the Share.” Stuart, 72, is not a congregant, but for the past four months, she has made the Sunday afternoon treks there from her Grand Isle home into something of a ritual. Each time, she has found attendees who are willing to pose for her at what’s often called the Red Door Church.
Taken together, the 21 portraits she arrayed on the plastic table reflected the surprising human diversity of Burlington’s streets and homeless shelters, from youngsters such as “Pink Kitty” to wizened elders with wispy hair and drooping glasses. They also hinted at more universal traits that Stuart sees in her subjects: strength, wariness, vitality, vulnerability.
“I come away from these meetings, and I feel like I’ve just been able to drink deeply at the well of humanity,” Stuart told me when we first met in May.
Stuart used to be a psychotherapist. She’s also an actor and only recently began honing her skills as a visual artist by signing up for a portraiture class. She took her drawing supplies on a Caribbean vacation to Guadeloupe, where she snapped a photo of a man on the street who appeared to be homeless.
Stuart said she was “too shy” to ask the man’s permission to use his image to create her first portrait of a homeless person. The process of trying to re-create “his intelligence, his pain, his fear” that she perceived in his face proved powerful for her. “I thought, I have to do more of this,” she said.
For her next piece, Stuart, who knows the pastor of the Red Door Church, Kerry Cameron, drew the portrait of Pickard and Winn, both church members. Winn died shortly after Stuart presented them with a print of her work.
Stuart became a regular visitor to the Share. She overcame her art-student shyness, and that has allowed for more interesting and meaningful directions for her work.
Stuart learned that she is not the only artist who attends the meals; she is merely the only one with a fixed address.
She encountered attendees who play guitar or carve wood. Another designs Halloween costumes. A man who gave his name only as Ezat is an experienced street artist; he practices on sketch pads while riding the bus, managing a steady hand despite the constant jolts and jostles. Ezat uses art to distract himself from the stresses of life, which, lately, involve his failing liver.
“It kind of keeps me on the level,” Ezat told me.
Stuart spotted Ezat in the dining room on the recent Sunday. “I’ve got your print!” she told him.
Stuart’s process begins with a cellphone photo of her subject. She uses the image to draw the portrait at home, then creates a print of the original to offer to them. “Pink Kitty” was gruff with Stuart during their initial meeting. But when Stuart came back a week later with the finished print, the woman cried upon seeing it.
Ezat thanked Stuart for his print. “I love it,” he told her.
Stuart, in coordination with the congregation, is organizing an outdoor exhibition of her portraits on Sunday, June 29, on church grounds. Some donated works by other artists will be for sale to raise funds for the church’s homeless outreach efforts.
A couple of Stuart’s subjects will speak, and Stuart and Cameron have invited some of the unhoused artists who frequent the Share to participate in the show. Ezat said he is excited to exhibit some of his work publicly — something he’s never done.
“No one’s ever gonna see our work, except to be on a bus and see us drawing,” he said. “Other than that, they’re never gonna know who we are.”
Sandi Taranto plans to offer some of her pen drawings for sale. Taranto, 53, moved to Burlington from New Hampshire earlier this year; she currently lives at a Burlington shelter known as COTS. Taranto, who said she has been diagnosed with major depressive disorder, has found better treatment for her mental health in Burlington than she did in her home state.
As her health has improved, Taranto said, she’s regained interest in creating art. She lugs a purple suitcase filled with supplies everywhere, including to the meals at the Share. She draws at the public library or at the round, cafeteria-like tables at COTS’ daytime center, her head bent close to her sketch pad. Taranto creates vivid, fantasy-like images using pen, markers and gel pens. She focuses on fine details, hoping to make images that become “more interesting the closer you get.” One of Taranto’s unfinished pieces includes a flowering plum tree born of five layers of pen strokes. Its petals seem to radiate light.
Taranto, who is self-conscious about her appearance, declined Stuart’s invitation to sit for a portrait. But she complimented Stuart’s work. It “reminds us of that essential humanity that is in everybody and that is very easy to forget when you’re angry, when you’re stressed out, when the world is in chaos,” she said.
Stuart wondered whether Taranto experienced the act of drawing another person the same way she did — as a shortcut to the soul, free of judgment and with “nothing going on but seeing deeply into that person.”
Taranto understood the sentiment, to a point. She tends to feel that connection with others during her daily conversations on the street — “when I’m listening to people.”
Across the room, Pickard was readying to leave. He couldn’t eat: He was recovering from major dental work that had been aided by the church. But he had stopped by the Share anyway. After his wife, Winn, died, Pickard had moved from their motel room into a shelter bed. Stuart had since painted a second portrait for him in oils that depicted Winn as an angel.
The church is storing the painting for safekeeping until Pickard finds a stable place to live. He is on waiting lists for apartments. If his name ever gets called, Pickard told me, he plans to buy a frame and hang Stuart’s painting in his new home.
The “Facing Homelessness” benefit art show will take place on Sunday, June 29, at the First United Methodist Church (aka Red Door Church), 21 Buell St., Burlington. The program is at 1 p.m.; the exhibit will be open until 5:30 p.m.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Being Seen | An artist created portraits of homeless people who live around Burlington. She found both strength and vulnerability — and artists in their midst.”
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This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2025.
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