Cold Hollow Sculpture Park in Enosburg Falls showcases the work of a single artist: David Stromeyer, a sculptor who makes large-scale works in steel. He and his wife, Sarah, live from May to November on the land Stromeyer bought in 1970, spending winters in Austin, Texas. The artist has sited more than 70 of his enormous, mostly colorful pieces around the park’s 45 acres of rolling fields, and he makes a couple more each year.
Yet ever since the Stromeyers opened the park to the public in 2014, they have regularly offered it as an extraordinary setting for the work of other artists — from musicians to poets to dancers — who present workshops and talks about their own creative endeavors.
“Some presenters are scared” by the prospect, Stromeyer said during a phone interview. “They never did their thing in a sculpture park. But they often end up expanding what they do because of it.”
This season’s roster of events, titled “Amazing Makers,” is among Cold Hollow’s busiest. It’s the culmination of a three-year celebration of creativity, following 2021’s “Why We Make Things” and 2022’s “How We Make Things.” The Stromeyers, in consultation with the park’s new director, Chloe Vogt, and a six-person advisory council headed by senior adviser Rosemary Gill, have invited six artists to participate in five major events before the park closes for the season on October 9.
Among these visiting creatives is the 2023 artist-in-residence, Olaniyi R. Akindiya, a mixed-media and performance artist who lives in Pflugerville, Texas, and Lagos, Nigeria. Resident artists stay for two weeks on the park property, in a 30-foot-long Airstream, and are given a stipend and studio space. Previous artists since the program started in 2018 have included Easthampton, Mass., composer Phil Acimovic; Middlebury College assistant professor of dance Laurel Jenkins; and last year’s Kisa Sauer, a kite artist from Germany.
On July 29, Akindiya’s residency will culminate with a temporary installation he will create in collaboration with visitors. He’s encouraging the public to bring materials from home and will contribute whatever materials strike him during his residency.
“I became an artist to be able to travel around the world, to start a conversation, to change who we are and how we see ourselves.” Olaniyi R. Akindiya
“We have no idea what is going to develop,” Akindiya said during a phone call from his current residency in North Carolina — one of four around the U.S. he’s doing this year. “It will be a kind of performance between me and the audience as we put it together. [It’s partly about] how we collaborate with the material. I hope they’ll come to play with me. It’s just to have fun with it.”
Akindiya, who signs his work “Akirash” because “it’s too long if you use all the names your [Nigerian] family and community give you,” considers residencies a large part of his practice. His work interrogates trauma, governments, architecture and ways of life, often through fabric or materials that suggest its abstraction, such as aluminum or paper.
Having grown up in a remote fishing village from which he walked “two to three hours” to school, he said, “I became an artist to be able to travel around the world, to start a conversation, to change who we are and how we see ourselves.” He has won two Pollock-Krasner Foundation awards and has participated in biennales and international festivals in Senegal, Ghana, South Africa and Tanzania.
The artist’s former residencies include a Vermont Studio Center fellowship in 2011, but the Stromeyers first met him in 2019 when they saw his work during a studio tour in Austin.
Akindiya’s work during that tour, Sarah recalled by phone, consisted of “small, three-dimensional sculptures in a combination of paper and textiles, mounted on walls. The shapes and colors were intriguing.” The couple invited the artist to their house, where he showed them images of his performances in which he and other participants had painted their bodies.
“The range of what he explores — his body as a material, beads, shells, the diversity of things he does, performing as well as making, engaging other people — we haven’t had anyone quite like that in any of our presentations,” Sarah said.
Akindiya is only one of the makers whom director Vogt (pronounced “vote”) is excited to host. Over lunch at the Spot in Burlington, the 29-year-old, who grew up in Colchester and lives in Burlington, raved about the season’s opening event on June 24 — in which the Boston-based Puerto Rican musician Fabiola Méndez played and explained the cuatro. And she rattled off many more to come.
Abenaki birchbark canoe maker Aaron York will explore how Native American material culture can unite people across other cultures. A panel discussion between Hanna Satterlee, founder of Vermont Dance Alliance, and Christy Mitchell, executive director of Burlington’s South End Arts + Business Association, will reveal the viewpoints of two “makers” of community arts in Vermont. A professor of fiber science and apparel design from Cornell University, Juan Hinestroza, will explore scientific uses of fabric, including a wearable diabetes sensor made from cotton threads.
Vogt, who earned a degree in art history and arts administration at Maryland’s Goucher College and has held related jobs at Shelburne Museum and Madison Square Park in New York City, said Cold Hollow’s attendance has increased annually, reaching almost 4,000 visitors in a season. More than 100 people turned out for last year’s Family Kite Day to make and fly kites on the grounds, she said. The park will repeat the workshop on October 1 using a cache of materials that kite artist Sauer left behind.
“I’m really excited to be hosting these larger family programs,” Vogt said, noting that “kids up there [in Franklin County] don’t have a lot of arts venues to visit.”
Among other events for the public — including photography, singing and drawing workshops — is Picnic for Potluck, a celebration of Stromeyer’s newest sculpture, “Potluck.” At 55 feet in diameter, the blue and red work is his largest in area and required a record four painting sessions. The piece reassembles parts of seven previous works that Stromeyer dismantled.
“I’ve made a lot of pieces in my life; I may have learned all I can,” the artist, who is in his seventies, explained. “And the reality is, we don’t have endless real estate. So I’ve destroyed many pieces. I’m a tough curator.”
Akindiya noted that “David’s work is [about] communication, beauty. After you stand in front of it, you always find something different. It’s an opportunity for me to learn more from him.”
Visitors, meanwhile, have the opportunity not just to see and hear from dedicated artists but to become makers themselves.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Acres of Art | “Amazing makers” descend upon Cold Hollow Sculpture Park this summer”
This article appears in The Cartoon Issue 2023.
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