Selections from the Art in State Buildings Program from around Vermont
Annemie Curlin painting at the Rutland County District Courthouse
Wasserman team installation at Hebard State Office Building in Newport
Dan Gottsegen and Terrence Boyle glass banner at the Vermont Department of Public Safety and Forensics Lab in Waterbury PHOTOS Courtesy of Vermont art council
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vermontartscouncil.org
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the sculptures have a healing and calming effect on [the patients] that helps promote their recovery and return to their usual lives,” Bushey says. Hospital art won’t be a novelty to Vermont’s mental-health patients. Though the building will feel entirely different from the old hospital — not least because it meets current national standards by providing each patient with a private room and bath — it isn’t in this respect. The former Vermont State Hospital had art as far back as Rosenstreich can recall. “I have several decades of experience at that hospital; I was taken through there back when it had over a thousand patients,” Rosenstreich says. “There’s always been art there, and they’ve always had art-therapy activities for the patients.” She adds that she once bought a patient’s painting for her home. The sculptures created by Miller and his team are likely to surprise and please users of the new hospital such as Bushey, who was previously unaware of the Art in State Buildings program. The nurse says she notices and enjoys the inlaid marble floor at the new Addison County Courthouse in Middlebury (by Lawrence Lazarus and Allen Pratt) every time she enters. “It’s lovely,” she says, “but I had no idea of the process behind it. So that’s been just fabulous to learn about. “And isn’t it amazing to see talent like that,” Bushey says, “bring something like that to life that so many people can enjoy?” m
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parks and recently completed a crouching catamount sculpture for the University of Vermont, tail adhering firmly to a back leg. He already “design[s] for durability,” he says. “You anticipate people climbing on things to get their picture taken.” The committee, however, “mentioned a lot of things that patients might do, which were all foreign to me,” Miller adds. One was that patients might attempt self-injury by jumping off a sculpture. For this reason, the water feature was redesigned to be less than three feet tall. The meetings produced “a lot of constructive back and forth,” as Miller puts it. Ritchie, 38, one of only two women carvers currently working in Barre’s memorial industry, first proposed the beaver dam when the committee needed a “large-ish design for the entry area.” The idea was “a departure from my other stonework,” says the artist, who makes sculptures and paintings with “fantasy and grotesque” elements for her own business, Bonnie Wee Art. (The name is a reference to Ritchie’s Scottish heritage; her great-grandfather immigrated to Barre to carve granite.) The committee liked the dam but decided to move it to the courtyard, and asked Ritchie to incorporate a bench. “Sometimes you get a project where the client will say, ‘We love your work; here’s the budget, do what you want,’” comments Miller. “This was a really collaborative project. We would do sketches, they’d give feedback. We’d do models, they’d give more feedback. It was a really incremental thing.” The result is something all parties hope will bring comfort to the patients. “I hope
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Art Center in Stowe. Kathy Bushey, who will be the hospital’s associate director of nursing, represented its employees. Granite carver Mays, 35, says he was “fairly surprised” when the committee selected the sculptors’ animal-themed proposal. He has observed a recent preference for minimalism and abstraction in public art. Mays, who works in the memorial industry and carves “a lot of animal subjects when I’m not doing angels,” characterizes his own realistic dogs as a “throwback.” The art-selection committee, however, liked the animal theme, which was meant to evoke therapy and companion animals. And, recalls Mays, “They told us from the beginning that representational work seemed to be more effective with that population.” Bushey, who has worked as a psychiatric nurse for most of her 30-year career, hesitates to back such a “blanket statement.” But she does recall that a large part of the committee discussion focused on the suggestion that the art be “patient-accessible in a way that they could touch them.” The sculptors learned of other considerations, too, in the course of many meetings between the artistic team and the art-selection wcommittee. “Patient safety was a huge priority,” recalls Miller, “so we designed the animals with all softened edges and no limbs or ears sticking out in a way that would cause any injuries.” The sculptors also accommodated the committee’s concerns about “animals that stood up tall and might invite people to try to knock them down.” The carved animals are all in prone or curled positions. Miller, 55, has created pieces for public
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the department’s senior policy adviser, Judy Rosenstreich. As a Level 1 facility, she says, the hospital will house “acutely psychiatrically ill patients.” Hence the new building required a slightly different approach from previous projects. The VAC’s call to artists generally includes a request to “be welcoming.” For the hospital, it also requested proposals that would “strive to bring the natural world inside” and “reflect therapeutic and healing relationships.” Bailey explains that the call to bring nature inside reflected the architectural plans for the new hospital, which will have a secure exterior perimeter and two interior courtyards with access to shade trees and raised gardening beds. The perimeter eliminates the need for a wall or other enclosure, allowing the entry sculpture to be visible from the road. “They designed [the hospital] with ample space for people to move around,” Rosenstreich says. By contrast, the old Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury, flooded during Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, “was very confined. That leads to stress,” she notes. The “therapeutic and healing” request originated with the local art-selection committee, which in this case included patient advocates and what Rosenstreich calls “peers” — people with the lived experience of mental illness. The committee also featured the usual suspects: architect Anthony Garner of the New York-based firm architecture+; BGS project manager Mike Kuhn; and Rachel Moore, assistant curator at the Helen Day