Entering the Front in Montpelier last week, I didn’t think I’d be walking directly into Chip Haggerty’s brain. “Just More Self Sabotage + Purple,” his solo show on view through March 29, is filled floor to ceiling with his sprawling paintings on deconstructed paper bags, most of them tightly packed with handwritten, stream-of-consciousness stories and notes. The gallery was chockablock bonkers, and that was before the cardboard eyeball costume.
Haggerty was giving an artist talk, as members of the gallery collective usually do alongside their every-other-month solo presentations. Most offer an overview of their exhibition or insights into their studio process. Haggerty, 71, came out dressed in red lumberjack-plaid pants and a red fleece — an outfit identifiable in his self-portraits, he said — and shearling footwear painted with an X and a Y, for the chromosomes. He called them “Freudian slippers.”
Over that costume dangled a vaguely person-shaped cardboard construction, with rectangles for arms, legs and torso tied together with string and covered in painted eyeballs that he described as inspired by folk artist Gayleen Aiken. Haggerty soon added a mask and hat made from a plastic Twister mat.
He pointed out that he wasn’t wearing his full ensemble from last fall’s Art at the Kent artist talk, when he’d topped the hat with a paint bucket full of brushes and costume jewelry — an homage to Jennifer Koch’s assemblages in the show, but kind of heavy to wear. Even still, wearing all those layers over the artfully painted corduroys and shirt in which he would finish the evening performance for the little gallery’s full audience, he looked warm.
Over the next 45 minutes or so, Haggerty, who lives in Stowe, did something that weaved back and forth between performance art and standup comedy. Part of it was just a story about missing a turnoff in Hyde Park on the way to an oil change; part was a therapy-esque recounting of his anxieties before that previous artist talk. Haggerty starts a story, veers off course and comes back to pick up a thread when you least expect it — a self-aware technique that he said he admires in Laurence Sterne’s 1759 novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, one of his favorite books.
The literary allusion took him back to his car trip, during which he was trying to remember to mention Tristram Shandy in the talk (as he had just done). That led to missing his left turn but seeing a bird-watcher with a big camera by the side of the road, a moment of importance that he knew was “some material for something…
“I started to realize, between the stuff I was thinking about and the actual stuff that was happening in physical reality, this was like a manifestation of a metaphor — is the term I came up for,” he continued. “Came up for? With? What is the proper — Come on, brain! So anyway, I got the oil change.”
Haggerty’s frenetic thoughts appear in his paintings just as they did in his performance — looping, interrupting themselves, dropping you in the middle of an anecdote that might have no beginning or end.
Characters recur in both narratives and imagery, as though the artist is trying to fully capture a moment by replaying different versions of it. For example, a few paintings in the show feature black chickens drawn in Haggerty’s flat, cartoonish style, which nonetheless accurately conveys the bird’s posture and awkward run. His texts, written on the paintings in marker, describe entering a Waterbury parking lot after breakfast with a friend and watching a lady try to catch a runaway chicken.
The stories are all a bit different, as are the paintings — some even narrate Haggerty’s wonderings about how to later describe the kerfuffle or paint the bird. Together, they make a kind of meta-level thought sandwich: The artist remembers what happened and remembers his own real-time awareness of observing the action.
Haggerty never had much formal studio training. His painting style and sense of composition resemble those of some “outsider” artists, Aiken among them. But Haggerty’s articulate, writerly sensibility — he was a regular at open mic nights and poetry readings 30 or so years ago, he said by email — is clear from his texts’ attention to detail and descriptive immediacy. And his webs of references situate him as more of an “insider”— someone aware of and fascinated by how other artists interpret the world.
Haggerty’s talk pinged among mentions of other Vermont friends and artists and allusions to Harpo Marx, Samuel Beckett, David Salle, William Kentridge and the “Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In some paintings, he writes about 20th-century painter Milton Avery’s use of purple, highlighting the text in that color; one of the pictures in the Front’s window re-creates Andy Warhol’s interpretation of the Mobilgas Pegasus. Haggerty is clearly someone who looks outward yet is adept at articulating his inner thoughts and anxieties about what he sees.
Somehow, that level of intellectual rumination doesn’t impede the directness with which he paints, with no unnecessary shading or finicky bits. A tiger, more than 8 feet wide, is arresting and orange and accurately labeled “important raw tiger energy picture.” A goofy yet somewhat terrifying 6-foot-tall polar bear seems to have something to do with AI, as it’s captioned “the warrior artist preys on the algorithm (the situation just kinda screamed for a strong powerful statement it felt like).” But it’s also just a really fun drawing of a polar bear.
The stories behind many of the works seem unknowable, or at least only knowable to Haggerty, and that’s strangely fine. The piles and piles of material, the urgency of the need to recount the stories, the accumulation of thought, are more telling than what the paintings say.
At the artist talk, Haggerty had notes messily written on two large pieces of cardboard, which made them difficult to use as notes. That was part of the point, and nonetheless, looking at them afterward, I realized the text matched the performance. One descriptor stood out as particularly fitting for Haggerty’s art process: “there is this little section where i try to describe my stream of consciousness, which is a total failure of course, because of my inadequacies as a thought process describer — i was suddenly agonizing over my utter + complete memorized script failure when it hit me: lets have a little fun with this!! right?!” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Thought Experiment | Chip Haggerty brings paper-bag paintings and a performance to the Front in Montpelier”
This article appears in The Food Issue • 2026.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!