The boat is stuck in a stairwell. Its bow points proudly toward the attic; its stern is firmly wedged on the landing. Five people — three curators, one artist and a friend — coax, lift, twist and push to usher the craft up the steep, narrow stairs, mindful not to mar either the boat or the peeling vintage wallpaper and crumbling plaster walls that surround it. Months ago, measurements were taken and mock-ups made to avert this scenario, but sometimes this building must make itself known. Everyone takes a breath, adjusts their grip and gives a good heave; the boat squeaks through to arrive mostly unscathed in a second-floor bedroom, where throngs of people will soon scratch their heads and ponder how it got there.
Vermont artists seem to fall into one of two camps: Either they have never heard of Art at the Kent, or they are devotees who make a pilgrimage to the long-ago tavern in Calais every fall. Vergennes boatbuilder Douglas Brooks said he was one of the former until he was asked to show his work. “My wife’s jaw dropped,” he recalled, “and she said, ‘You’re being invited to be in an exhibit at the Kent?’”
Brooks is one of 20 artists in “Throughlines,” this year’s iteration of the annual art exhibition at the Kents Corner State Historic Site in Calais, which runs through October 11. No longer stuck in the stairwell, his boat is now suspended on a stand over another vessel, an 1880s dinghy he found for sale by the side of the road, grayed and weathered with age. Brooks, who specializes in traditional Japanese boatbuilding, meticulously researched the antique craft’s designer (Henry Rushton of Canton, N.Y.) and history before taking its lines — a boatbuilder’s term for transferring measurements — to build a newer twin.
Each Art at the Kent show coalesces around a theme. This year, like Brooks’ boat, the show takes a reflexive look at its own making and the connections between the artwork, the site and its community. “Throughlines” is the 20th exhibition in the series, which has become Vermont’s unlikely annual version of a biennial — a survey of some of the state’s most intriguing artists and a curatorial statement in its own right. The show asks viewers to consider not only what goes into a production like this one but also how it can possibly be sustained.
Kents Corner is at a crossroads, literally speaking. To one side sits the stately 1830s red-brick inn and tavern where Art at the Kent appears each fall; across a narrow dirt road, a weathered barn overlooks fields of bobbing goldenrod and the burbling brook that fed the 1803 sawmill down the hill. It’s a bucolic spot and the last place anyone would expect to find one of the state’s most anticipated shows of contemporary art. Yet the strange confluence of a building in a liminal state of historic preservation, a trio of thoughtful curators who happen to be neighbors, and enthusiastic participation from artists and thousands of visitors alike has made it just that.
Now, Art at the Kent stands at a more figurative intersection. As the state seeks to preserve the fragile building from crowds of art lovers and the curators contemplate their own futures, the fate of the exhibition series is uncertain. Everyone involved seems to agree that the shows should go on, but the question of how the labor-intensive endeavor can continue and exactly what shape it takes is as open to interpretation as the constellation of artworks that lead visitors through the old tavern.
Art at the Kent is a monumental undertaking for curators Cornelia “Nel” Emlen, Allyson Evans and David Schutz, Calais neighbors who are all close to or past retirement age. Early on, Evans said, the trio would start working on the show in April. “Now, of course, we start when the last one ends,” she said.
And then there’s the building, owned by the state but not usually open to the public. Though the Calais community has come to expect the annual exhibition, the curators are never certain from one year to the next whether the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation will allow them access to the Kent or what new restrictions the state will introduce — and which ones the space will impose on its own.
The Kent, as it’s widely known, was built in the 1830s and, for about a decade, served travelers on what was then a major thoroughfare between Montréal and Montpelier. It later included a post office and a general store, selling shoes and saddles made at a now-demolished leatherworker’s next door and butter tubs and household goods made upstairs, before becoming a family home. From 1953 to 1988, the Vermont Historical Society ran it as the Kent Tavern Museum. By 1991, the building was deteriorating, and the state took it over.
Today, visitors might expect a cozy museum with 19th-century furniture and dusty interpretive labels. Instead, they will find evidence of conservation in medias res. Room after room boasts holes in the plaster, exposed lath, half-scraped vintage wallpaper, or unexpected pink, blue and green paint. Fireplaces in one half of the building have new surrounds with unfinished wooden mantels where leaky chimneys were removed. Some ceilings have a rough base coat of new plaster; others are studded with bolts to hold up the old. The rooms seem to keep going forever.
All of which is to say: The Kent is anything but a white-cube gallery, and installing there is a specialized skill. The curators know what each and every wall will bear, where every hole is, which wooden moldings or patches of new construction can support intervention, and which surfaces are best left to shine on their own.
And though every show, including this year’s, has been, as Emlen understates it, “a lot,” the effort is well worth it. At the opening reception on September 12, the crowd — Calais neighbors and art lovers from across New England alike — seemed to agree. Through the chaos of old friends greeting each other, colleagues admiring each other’s work, families catching up and curious souls exploring a weird old building, the links that make a site historic echoed through the space — connecting the building’s past life as a bustling tavern to its current one hosting a joyous crowd; the art people to the rural community; the aesthetic to the prosaic; and ideas to plans.
Patty Hudak’s prints yelled across a void to Elise Whittemore’s, each asserting bold shapes and then retreating behind delicate details. Alan Stirt’s porcelain-thin wooden bowls met Jerilyn Virden’s elegantly chunky ceramic vessels. The stillness of Celia Reisman’s and Bob Hannan’s heavy, hushed vignettes of ordinary places, hers painted and his photographic, balanced the dynamic speed of Kathleen Fleming’s landscapes. Dorsey Hogg’s cut-paper sculptures and Amy Morel’s torn metal ones seemed to reach toward each other, while Stephanie Suter’s still lifes and Robert DuGrenier’s farm tools embedded in molten glass whispered in the corner with Denis Versweyveld’s quiet sculptures.
The show was up — though as the curators will tell you, it’s never finished.
Let’s Put On A Show!
A red thread emerges from the open neck of an old horse collar, surrounded by a vulval swath of leather and suspended within an open closet. Like Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting “L’Origine du monde,” the installation is suggestive of a source, an unknowable beginning. Through the hole, the string seems to recede back forever into the darkness at the heart of the building. Exiting the closet, it finds a path along baseboards and up doorjambs, wrapping itself around forgotten nails and looping through wooden lath as it snakes, often subtly, through every room in the exhibition. It evokes a reminder tied on a finger; a child’s paper-cup telephone; an umbilical cord.
The piece, “Whence It Came,” is by Colchester artist Kevin Donegan, who is spending Labor Day stringing the installation through the space. From the attic, off-limits to the public, he retrieves something he found on an earlier visit: extremely dusty leather shoes, likely made at the cobbler’s workshop that was once next door. They are similar, Emlen says, to one that she’d found buried in the wall of her house. Neither she nor Evans had seen these before, despite hundreds of trips to the attic to keep an eye on the leaking roof. The thread laces through the shoes’ eyelets on its journey around the building, a literal throughline leading a viewer’s eye from architecture to art and back again.
In the early days of Art at the Kent, Schutz said, the curators were contributing to what they thought would be a full restoration of the building sometime in the near future “with an art show that was drawing upon a resource that, happily, is easy to find in Calais — which is artists.” By 2008, the state’s plans to restore the building had stalled. That same year, the organizer of an annual fall foliage art show up the hill at the Old West Church had to cancel it. Emlen, Evans and Schutz, who all live a stone’s throw from the Kent, offered to hang something there instead as a fundraiser for Historic Kents Corner, a nonprofit whose goal is to supplement funding for the state’s preservation efforts.
The public responded as strongly to the building as to the work, and the trio of curators started organizing other exhibitions under the Art at the Kent banner. Those included a couple of retrospectives of Calais artists who had died, a fine furniture exhibition and a show of locals’ collections. Among the last: a lunch box covered in fruit stickers and a giant ball of string.
Schutz, 72, is the official curator for the State of Vermont, in charge of explaining the Statehouse building and its history to visitors as well as stewarding the state’s art collection. Evans, 62, and Emlen, 68, both have backgrounds as practicing artists. Together, the three have an uncanny visual sensibility and seemingly boundless “Let’s put on a show!” energy that has allowed the “exercise,” as Schutz calls Art at the Kent, to snowball into a Vermont art-world institution.
With a few early exceptions, the Art at the Kent exhibitions have all been group shows that include a selection of works from each artist, mixed together and hung throughout the building as well as on the grounds. Past participants, now numbering 360, live all over Vermont. Artists are only featured once, a rule that has contributed to the cachet of an invitation and given each show a distinctive vibe.
The setting is a major factor in the show’s success. Donegan, of the evocative string installation, had been aware of Art at the Kent for years, he said, and has been especially drawn to the way artists respond to the space. Over the summer, he created several site-specific works for the exhibition. “Nel and Allyson called the house ‘a force,’ and I do feel like it has that quality,” he said. “The work has to be in conversation with the building.”
The show now draws 6,000 visitors annually over its five-weekend run. That includes several hundred at opening and closing receptions and others who attend a parade of artist talks, tours, workshops and Sunday afternoon “Words Out Loud” readings at the Old West Church, which poet Mary Elder Jacobsen has organized since 2015.
Down the road from the Kent at the Maple Corner Community Store & Whammy Bar, general manager Jamie Moorby said the deli’s busiest days of the year are when Art at the Kent is open. Visitors from all over New England show up to grab lunch, often remembering their sandwich order from the last time they were there.
Many artists have seen robust sales of their work from the exhibition, which draws collectors from across the state. Though the organizers happily take donations, which cover exhibition costs, pay the state for use of the site and benefit Historic Kents Corner, Art at the Kent has never taken a commission. To do so could create a barrier for artists who can’t afford to give up that portion of a potential sale.
Jamie Franklin, director of collections and exhibitions at the Bennington Museum, has made the trek to Calais for the show half a dozen times. “I love the idea of an exhibition at a kind of crossroads in the middle of nowhere,” he said. He regularly finds new artists through Art at the Kent, some of whom have subsequently shown at the Bennington Museum.
In 2015, the first time he went, Franklin encountered works by Michèle Raté — delicate, sea creature-like constructions made from gold wire, fishing line and bits of prints, presented under glass cloches on pedestals — in an upstairs bedroom that the late Louise Andrews Kent had covered in a hodgepodge of wallpaper samples. An author and journalist who once lived next door, she spearheaded restoration of the building in the 1930s and ’40s.
“It worked so perfectly with Michèle’s work that I thought she had done it,” Franklin said.
What the curators are particularly good at, Franklin said, is not only selecting great artists “but making it work in a really unusual and unique space — and actually taking advantage of that space.”
The Fourth Curator
Swallows once nested in the room above the store, a former workshop whose cracked plaster is covered in ancient graffiti, such as “Jan 18 – 1913. PM — rains hard, no snow nor has there been enough for sledding, road’s all ice.” Though most of the window sashes are now too fragile to move, one must have been left open long enough for birds to make a home here. Aimée Papazian has practically made it hers as well, spending days in the sweltering room assembling an installation: hundreds of tiny ceramic birds that hang from wires, floating across the space like the M-shaped geese in a child’s drawing.
Most of the birds are the same color as the graphite writing on the walls, but a horizontal white stripe crosses the murmuration, echoing the long cracks in the plaster. The sculpture seems like a memorial to the space that contains it, a marriage between the looped, cursive script and the swallows that must’ve swooped down and out, fledging past rippled glass on their way into the world, also attuned to the day’s weather.
Emlen, Evans and Schutz call the building “the fourth curator,” a reference to the constraints it places on hanging the work. New nails or screws can’t be hammered into most of the walls, forcing a creative approach to installation. Brightly painted or wallpapered surfaces dictate some of the works’ placement. Others are limited by the weight each wall can carry. Lighting is mostly accomplished at the very end with a patchwork of clip lamps and extension cords supplementing the natural early fall glow through wavy glass panes.
More than simply an unusual backdrop of exposed lath or funky wallpaper, Schutz said, “it is the building’s reverberations with artists, and vice versa, that makes the installations what they are.”
It is the building’s reverberations with artists, and vice versa, that makes the installations what they are.
David Schutz
The Kent is large, but its variety of spaces contributes to an intimate experience of each piece. Artists are asked to bring more work than the show requires so that the curators can find the right fit for each space, often making selections on the fly. The curators invite artists to tour the Kent when it’s empty, which gives a sense of the place and often spurs ideas for specific installations.
All of this advance planning might suggest that the show is, well, planned. In reality, it’s a never-ending back-and-forth between the works that are set — those site-specific to a particular room, or large outdoor sculptures — and those that are moved many times, usually with much deliberation between Emlen and Evans. Schutz often guides the group to a final decision, though even that is not always final.
“We always say the show’s not done ’til the last day, when we’re taking it down,” Emlen said. Someone will visit a second time, and the curators have to explain that a piece has moved. “We keep seeing it with fresh eyes, and that [placement] doesn’t really make sense anymore.”
Restrictions aside, the arrangement of each room is driven by a word the curators use often: resonance. That factor — how each work enlivens those around it; how its palette, shapes or subject echo with a detail of the building or its history; the view out a window or around a corner — propels the curators to do what they do, no matter how much time and energy is required to make the whole exercise sing.
The artworks in the show not only reverberate with the building as it is today; they must contend with echoes from the site’s history. The Kent family has lived in Calais since 1798. Abdiel Kent built the inn and tavern between 1833 and 1837, using bricks made just down the road to the east and lumber milled at the Robinson Sawmill, up the road to the north. Abdiel and his brother Ira — two of seven Kent brothers — ran the general store until 1860, and the family farmed and owned the property until 1916.
Louise Andrews Kent, who wrote the popular 1941 novel Mrs. Appleyard’s Year, was born in Massachusetts, married into the family and came to Calais with her husband; they spent summers in the house next door to the inn and tavern. She convinced a wealthy Kent cousin to buy the property in 1930 and then led its restoration. A member of the Vermont Historical Society, she drove efforts to create the Kent Tavern Museum and was its first curator.
Inspired by the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago, Louise Andrews Kent created dioramas of decorated interiors in a room off the Kent’s general store. Art at the Kent has used that room as a “spotlight gallery,” a separate mini show, which this year hosts a display about typewriters. Members of the Kent family have bequeathed funding to the state to help establish a more comprehensive exhibit about Louise Andrews Kent, which the state’s Division for Historic Preservation intends to do in the near future. That means this is the last year Art at the Kent can use the spotlight gallery.
When the Vermont Historical Society transferred the inn at Kents Corner to the state back in 1991, the division had plans for the site. “The idea was to open it up as an interpretive museum,” State Historic Preservation Officer Laura Trieschmann said, “but that never came to fruition, because the first priority was the stabilization of the building — which was pretty intense.”
The state secured grant funding for some improvements, such as the addition of an ADA-compliant lift and bathrooms and installation of an HVAC system to prevent mold. After removing one entire wall of bricks and laying it on the ground before rebuilding it, Trieschmann said, preservation officials realized that a center for conservation studies would be a better use for the tavern. “The structure itself, architecturally, had so much history to tell us of how it was built.”
We always say the show’s not done ’til the last day, when we’re taking it down.
Nel emlen
The division partnered with Historic Windsor’s Preservation Education Institute to teach workshops at which students learned repair techniques such as traditional plasterwork, with the goal, according to a flyer, of preparing the site “for opening to the public before the year 2000.” But interest and enrollment flagged, according to Preservation Education Institute executive director Judy Hayward, and concrete plans — for either a teaching center or a museum — never materialized.
Neighbors, including Emlen, Evans and Schutz, formed Historic Kents Corner, of which Art at the Kent is a subcommittee, as a fundraising organization to support maintenance and preservation at the site. The group pays the state for use of the property, and the curators keep an eye on the place year-round, letting division staff know if anything’s amiss. James Duggan, the division’s director of preservation, periodically assesses the building for damage and decides whether something needs to be fixed or should simply be off-limits to the public.
As Art at the Kent has become more successful, the state has imposed new restrictions on the site each year. “The number of people in the building at the same time is a huge concern,” Trieschmann said, for fire and public safety reasons as well as structural and preservation ones.
Though the curators are adept at working with the building’s limitations, visitors can also cause damage. People rub up against walls and create vibrations that loosen fragile surfaces. That happened to one ceiling last year, Trieschmann said: “That’s not something we necessarily want to fix, but we also can’t have plaster falling on people.”
This year, traffic above the general store is limited to five visitors at once; next year, it will likely be entirely off-limits.
Despite their concerns, staffers at the Division for Historic Preservation want events such as Art at the Kent to continue — whether they are other temporary exhibitions, performances or perhaps an artist residency program. (Though, they added, fewer people in attendance at once might make them a little less nervous.) What the state lacks isn’t enthusiasm but funding and capacity: The division has only a handful of employees to manage 84 buildings on 25 sites.
The curators and the other members of Historic Kents Corner agree with the state — both that the show should happen and that they aren’t quite sure how. “What we’ve been saying amongst ourselves,” Emlen said, “is that some version of Art at the Kent is going to continue, but we don’t know what it’s going to look like.”
Emlen suggested the next step could be a pause or possibly working with an expanded crew on next year’s show. A few years ago, she said, the curators invited the artists back for a party at the site, and she imagines doing something similar again as an opportunity to put the question to the community: “What could this be?”
The Other Three
Dennis Versweyveld’s sculptures occupy space differently from other objects in this building. Whitewashed forms taken from still lifes — a soup pot, a jug — sit heavily atop their pedestals and columns, their tables with spindly, off-kilter legs. They have not yet been permanently placed but lurk in corners, hugging the walls like introverts at a party. Light from the windows falls softly on their talc-like surfaces, plain and subtle enough to make you aware of your own breathing. Their charged stillness is supernatural, conveying a sense of presence out of time from the rest of the room.
Schutz likes to joke that Kents Corner has more curators, per capita, than anywhere else in the nation — or possibly the world. Though he and his cocurators are all volunteers who think of themselves as a “ragtag” bunch rather than museum professionals, he isn’t wrong.
Schutz grew up in Ohio and came to Vermont in 1979 as a 26-year-old research assistant to help a Dartmouth College professor create comprehensive new museum-style labels and information at the Statehouse. Before being hired as the state’s first official curator in 1987, he worked at what’s now the Vermont Arts Council and at one point shared an office with Emlen. Central Vermonters might recognize his booming voice from his stint as the emcee of last spring’s Statehouse “No Kings” rally and the rest of him as a Pirates of Penzance-themed Mr. July in the famed 2002 “Men of Maple Corner” calendar, a project Emlen initiated.
Schutz has a deep understanding and appreciation of Kents Corner and its context. As a historic preservationist, he sees his role in Art at the Kent as helping people understand the building; showcasing art alongside the exposed guts of its construction is a unique way to do that.
The parallels between 19th-century craftsmanship and the artists’ 21st-century modes of creation are ever present. Though the approach is less formal than the kind of interpretive text and information you might see at the Statehouse, the goal is the same, he said: “It is all about what curators are supposed to be doing, which is guiding an audience to a story, or guiding them to an experience that is equally resonant.”
After art school, Emlen was a park ranger at Mount Rainier in Washington until Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980. Then, after a chance meeting with the grandson of Electra Havemeyer Webb, she came to work at Shelburne Museum. When the Vermont Historical Society posted a curatorial job that included free housing, she jumped on it — which is how she ended up living in the Kent Tavern Museum for two summers of her nine years as the museum’s curator.
Though the few tiny rooms of the apartment were hot and cramped, she was living out a kind of childhood dream, she said, likening her experience to that of the kids who run away to live at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Emlen knows every inch of the building and has a keen understanding of the typical audience for a historic house museum. After mounting the first art show at the Kent, she said, “I loved seeing it used so differently, because it’s not what people expect.”
Evans trained as an art therapist and taught in a low-residency program at Vermont College in Montpelier in the 1990s. Soon after she moved to Vermont from Philadelphia to become the program’s assistant director, it was eliminated in one of the institution’s many upheavals.
“I had bought this old farmhouse; it was totally falling down,” she said, “and I couldn’t suddenly resell it.” The house became her anchor, and she fixed it up while she worked as a pastry chef at Shelburne Farms and sometimes took jobs out of state, including as a ceramic artist at a factory in Connecticut.
Evans, often clad in overalls with a pencil in her hair, thrives on intensive projects in short bursts. She and Emlen install most of the 300 or so works for each show, working more than full time for the two weeks before the opening, often at night, by headlamp.
Even if they can find other folks willing to put in the requisite time to take over Art at the Kent — a big if — the curators worry that their knowledge of the building’s quirks is not easily transferrable. Neither is their proximity to the site, which allows them to run across the street to borrow tools and furniture from home, check on the building during the winter, and work on the show as though it were taking place in their own backyard.
“We’ve done it this particular way for so long,” Schutz said, that Emlen and Evans “have invented all kinds of techniques that nobody else would have put the time and energy into developing.”
Evans is also attuned not only to the building’s easily observed weirdness but to its ghosts.
She believes it was Louise Andrews Kent, who died in 1969, “who was controlling all the strings for all three of us moving here,” she said. “I think she’s the one who really wanted this to be happening.”
Doing the Thing
The concrete sculpture arrives strapped to pallets on a trailer pulled by a pickup truck. Justin A. Kenney has brought it here from Brattleboro — one of several deliveries he’ll make before the show opens — on the same day his third child is due. The sculpture is an accumulation of interlocking slabs assembled like a house of cards. Its patina matches the building’s granite foundation.
Kenney pulls the truck around onto the grass, expertly back-and-forthing his 3,000-pound cargo into place. He parks it, then surveys the scene with Emlen and Evans. Here is too close to the stop sign; there, too tight to the stairs. They reverse the truck and try again.
Kenney likes one spot, but Evans knows it will interfere with the view of James Payne’s piece, which isn’t there yet. They do this for a long time before sliding the sculpture out of the trailer and onto the grass and carefully pulling out its supports. Finally in place, its angles are in perfect conversation with the barn across the street, as though it was always supposed to be there.
This year, Art at the Kent didn’t receive its final agreement from the state until March. By that point, as they do every year, the curators had already started looking at artists from a running list they keep, surveying websites and works in other shows. Then they conducted around 20 studio visits across the state.
Each show’s theme develops organically, Schutz said: “We go with our gut instincts about feeling something, and those feelings turn into artists.” Once they have an initial group, they start to tease out common threads to arrive at a cohesive idea. “It takes a fair amount of talking.”
The shows are always notable for the breadth of the work, from conceptual artists to craft artisans. Kevin Donegan, whose practice ranges from found-object sculpture to performance, said he could tell the curators were already familiar with his work when they stepped into his studio. “There’s a real sense of being seen but then also being open to something they hadn’t seen yet,” he said. “Just that initial conversation gave me tons of ideas.”
On a visit to David Hurwitz’s woodshop in Randolph, the curators spent more than an hour looking at his materials and process, sussing out which pieces might be available in September. Hurwitz is most known for his wavy-edged mirrors, but only one ended up in the show. So did carved wall reliefs, an end table made from a found piece of petrified wood and another, taken from Hurwitz’s home, in an odd yellow hue that fits right in at the Kent. None of those is pictured on his website. The studio visits are invaluable, the curators said, because they’ll often see older pieces or unfinished ones — sometimes the work the artist isn’t showing off becomes the most interesting.
While the Kent is still empty, some of the artists install their own work, particularly large sculptures and installations, in consultation with the curators. One of Seven Days’ visits coincided with Stefania Urist’s installation. Her dramatic outdoor sculptures are made from phragmites, the invasive reeds that teams of volunteers are trying to eradicate from nearby Curtis Pond as well as from wetlands in Londonderry, where she lives.
Once she and the curators had determined the best place for her sculptures, Urist cut and fanned her reeds into arches and whorls, twisting them around rebar that she carefully pounded only the state’s requisite less than 18 inches into the ground.
Meanwhile, the curators were considering a different piece of hers inside: a group of prints made from the charred surface of a cut oak tree, a subject echoing the historic Robinson Sawmill, a “thunder mill” that only ran when the water in the dam was high enough. Depending on how they’re arranged, the panels evoke a cross section of the log or the thick ribbon of a river.
The curators moved them around the floor, shifting directions, adding space between them, nudging them apart and back together, swapping panels. They discussed the piece’s impact on the other works in the room, its closeness to the corner, which layouts were too crowded or sparse. They talked over each other, finishing each other’s sentences, acting on someone else’s suggestion before their thought was articulated. After 45 minutes, and without bringing in the artist, they were happy with the arrangement. A week later, it was totally different.
‘Every Year’s Our Last Year’
James Payne’s brightly colored sculptures bristle across the landscape. Painted wooden planks fan out from central axes, straight lines that create the illusion of a curve twisting through space. Inside and upstairs, a case displays tinier, more fragile versions of his robust constructions. Each of these is a simple, delicate object — a credit card, cut almost all the way through and splayed out, spiking in different directions like a newly woken hedgehog. The pairing is a reminder of how a small gesture can snowball.
Emlen jokes that she needs a T-shirt printed with her favorite imagined tagline for the project: “Art at the Kent: Every Year’s Our Last Year.” It’s how they feel each fall, she said, when they’re burnt out and can’t even contemplate the next show. But because “Throughlines” is their 20th, it feels different.
“We’re doing this, reflecting on how much longer we can even keep this going,” Schutz said.
The logistics of putting on Art at the Kent have always been complicated, but it’s grown more unmanageable at scale. The curators have felt recently that juggling everything from artists’ requests to the state’s requirements to cleaning the bathrooms is getting harder each year.
All of them worry about one of the others needing to back out suddenly because of illness or to take care of an aging parent. Emlen closed her floral design business because she couldn’t manage both; Schutz is considering retirement from his position at the state. And there’s the ever-present question all successful artists face: Will the next show be as good?
“As we get older,” Emlen said, “I, for one, feel less competent, and I don’t want to go beyond where we can do it well.”
I don’t want to go beyond where we can do it well.
Nel Emlen
Evans feels the state’s rules and rigidity are driving them toward a scaled-down version of the show. And while the curators are proud that the exhibition has become such a juggernaut, it also creates pressure for each show to be at least as good as last year’s. “There’s this expectation that never used to be there,” Emlen said.
What has kept Art at the Kent going — and will likely continue to do so, no matter what form it takes — is perhaps its most basic throughline: Calais itself. Twenty exhibitions in, the overall effort still relies on the dedication and spirit of the people who live there. A recurring crew of volunteers — many of whom are past participants — keeps things running smoothly, year after year.
Jacobsen, the poet, not only organizes “Words Out Loud” readings but also helps with what she calls “finding the language” — articulating the theme and editing the artists’ statements. Artists Linda Mirabile, Mary Azarian and Kate Burnim manage publicity; Lissa Fox assembles gallery books. Juliana Jennings, who co-owns J. Langdon antiques store in Montpelier with her husband, furnishes each exhibition with tables, chairs and display furniture. Barbara Butler, who recently retired as Calais’ assistant town clerk, wrangles an army of about 100 local volunteers for each show, who keep the building open and answer visitors’ questions.
During installation for this year’s exhibition, neighbors and friends popped by the Kent so often that it felt like “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” or perhaps “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” Still in his helmet, Eric Small paused on a bike ride with an idea about food for the opening reception. Syver Rogstad, a machinist who often helps behind the scenes, came over to install metal hardware he’d custom-fabricated so that one of Robert DuGrenier’s sculptures — a metal vise, dripping with melted glass — could rest safely on the wall. Chip Haggerty, who showed his work last year, dropped off a painting of a typewriter for the show’s mini exhibition on the subject (which, he was assured, doesn’t break the curatorial rule of being included more than once). His wife, Amy, brought chocolate. Even Sugar on Snow, Evans’ cat, made an appearance, curious about the new outdoor sculptures invading his territory.
At the opening reception two weeks ago, an unintended meaning of “throughlines” became apparent, starting with long lines of cars parked along both roads. People waited their turn to get into the Kent, queuing for the stairs to the second floor and in a separate line for the five-person-only room with graffitied plaster.
Visitors swept slowly around the building’s sort-of-circular floor plan, passing through clustered conversations, only some of which were about the art: “It’s always so much work.” “Are you still looking for a babysitter?” “There are a lot of monochrome pieces this year. I wonder if that’s on purpose.” “How’s your retirement going?” “There’s too many people to see upstairs — I’ll catch it next time.” “Mom, there’s a dog in that lady’s bag!” “Have you found the string in the floorboards?”
The lines eventually dissipated as visitors ambled across the lawn. Justin Kenney’s two older boys climbed his concrete sculpture while he showed off pictures of their newborn brother. James Merrill, whose pen-plotter drawings populate the show, held his 2-month-old, who squinted and made faces in the golden-hour sunlight. Calais poet Geof Hewitt composed rhymes on the spot, clacking them out at a portable typewriter set up on the lawn. Neighbors stopped by with their dogs to take in live music and hors d’oeuvres, enjoying the scene without ever going inside.
The curators, having hung the last pieces just moments before the crowds arrived, finally took a breath. Between greeting friends and slipping out to the lawn for a well-earned plastic cup of wine, they said they felt good about how this year’s show had turned out. It’s a little like theater, Emlen explained: You really don’t think it’s going to come together until the last minute, when it magically does.
And besides, once the crowds are gone, they can go in and fix things, she said. Tomorrow morning, all of the work would still be waiting.
On an old sewing cabinet next to a window, James Merrill’s drawings make themselves. His intricate pen-and-ink compositions, reminiscent of circuit boards, are drawn via pen plotter; he writes the code that draws the drawings. The work might seem antithetical to the historic setting, but this was always a place of industry and innovation. The curators tell the artist that they don’t really understand what he is doing, but they’re OK with that. They are always fascinated by something new.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Art at a Crossroads | After 19 years and 20 shows, Art at the Kent in Calais faces an uncertain future”
This article appears in September 23 • 2026.
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