"No Shopping this Side of Street"

This new sign at GreenTARA has meaning for us on many levels.

First, love supporting artist Kevin Donegan and his creative work. Second, am totally into the message of less consumerism the better for our health and that of the planet. And third, I hope this reads as a message of respect to our neighbors and their sense of privacy.

Kevin Donegan has been making art for over 15 years. Eschewing traditional education, he chose instead to emphasize mentorship, learning through doing, and living a multifaceted life. He primarily considers himself a sculptor, but flows back and forth between materials and modalities, such that “artist” is the only apt description. Kevin currently maintains a studio in Burlington, VT, which he shares with his partner, Susan Smereka.

Art is for me an organic process; a living, twisting, changing thing. It defies tidy explanations, resists containment, and is always jumping the fences erected around it. So, more than anything else, my art is the jumping, bucking, deeply held desire to roam free, be wild, and share in that expansiveness with others.

Love Is

PLEASE JOIN US FOR THE OPENING RECEPTION ON JUNE 10:

Love Is. A new show of work by Sally Linder                                       

May 27 – July 27, 2022

Love is not a burden, but a transmission of faith, an eternal instinct of our Spirit.  When we love we hold all as sacred. We cry for the little birds in pain and sing with them in the joy.

Love is the opening of our hearts to the truths we do not see.

Love is transcendence of the habits and standards we are taught.

Love is our eternal being, that immortal state that is our true Self.

Love is community when we breathe together as one with the Universe.

Sally Linder’s paintings show us the many forms and ask us to meditate on the meaning of love.  Love of course comes in many shapes – physical love, old love, puppy love, emotional lust, faithful friendship, love of others, love of self, and painful love.  Her paintings intoxicate us and fill us with the ecstatic beauty that is love and allow us to dissolve who we think we are.  Through love our hearts leap out to the eternal, to our immortal Self, to that which is pure and free.

EARTH DAY - Winona LaDuke : "Rights of Nature"

Celebrate Earth Day with renowned activist and author Winona LaDuke as she presents: Rights of Nature

Followed by an audience Q&A

Presented by Sustainable Woodstock & Pentangle Arts

Winona LaDuke is a Harvard-educated economist, environmental activist, author, hemp farmer, grandmother, and a two-time former Green Party Vice President candidate with Ralph Nader. LaDuke specializes in rural development, sustainable economics, food and energy sovereignty and environmental justice. She is also an international thought leader and lecturer in climate justice, renewable energy, and environmental justice, plus an advocate for protecting Indigenous plants and heritage foods from patenting and genetic engineering. Living and working on the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota, she leads several organizations including Honor the Earth (co-founded with The Indigo Girls 28 years ago), Anishinaabe Agriculture Institute, Akiing, and Winona’s Hemp. These organizations develop and model cultural-based sustainable development strategies utilizing renewable energy and sustainable food systems.

Her seven books include: The Militarization of Indian Country (2011); Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming (2005); The non-fiction book All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (1999, South End Press); and a novel, Last Standing Woman (1997, Voyager Press). Her new book, To Be a Water Protector: Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers (Fernwood Press/Columbia University), is an expansive, provocative engagement with issues that have been central to her many years of activism, including seven years battling Line 3 — an Enbridge tar sands oil pipeline in northern Minnesota.

Free and open to all with a suggested donation of $10. All proceeds will be donated to benefit Abenaki Communities in Vermont. Donations can be made through Pentangle Arts at: https://ci.ovationtix.com/35996/store/donations/46882.

Supported in part by the Vermont Humanities.

This event will be held online; programs@sustainablewoodstock.org; Phone: 802-457-3981

MOTHER’S DAY EVENT : Talk by Jane Taylor

Please Join us for a MOTHER’S DAY EVENT : Talk by Jane Taylor and Book Launch for Spirit Traffic: A Mother’s Journey of Self-Discovery and Letting Go.

Sunday May 8, 2022; 3pm GreenTARA Space, lower level. Kraemer & Kin service in Main Gallery.

Bio :

When C. Jane Taylor was a little girl, her mother owned the motorcycle shop, Honda of Ann Arbor. Motorcycles colored her childhood until she and her family moved to Northern Michigan and later to Vermont. At the age of 16, she went to Bard College at Simon’s Rock where she earned a BA in Literature and Music History.

She’s been a cook for a baroque orchestra, a sculptor’s assistant, a resume writer, and a yoga teacher. She started (and stopped) her own welding shop. She has repaired farm equipment under the blazing sun on the Fourth of July and decorated cakes resembling the Palace of Versailles on Bastille Day.

She is a writer, a biker, a mom, a wife, a warrior, and sometimes a bit of a chicken, but when she got the invitation from AARP to join their organization, she ripped the letter up and bought a motorcycle. And after a forty-year hiatus, she started riding again when her son graduated from college.

To celebrate his achievement and fill her impending empty nest, Jane, her husband, and son took a 10,000-mile motorcycle trek across the United States; this adventure is the subject of her new book, “Spirit Traffic: A Mother’s Journey of Self-discovery and Letting Go.”

She lives, writes, and rides in Hinesburg, Vermont with her husband John, a yoga teacher. 

SUNDAY MUSIC SUNDAY - May 15, 2022 3pm

SUNDAY MUSIC SUNDAY returns at GreenTARA Space with Music by Mary McGinniss - The Selkie Trio.

The wonderful Selkie Trio has a long history of playing music in the Burlington area. We are so delighted to have them joining us in North Hero for a Sunday of music. They weave together a blend of spacious strings, harmony, and deep rhythms from the well of rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, and Celtic song. The Trio is Mary McGinniss, Juliet McVicker, and Steve Wienert.

Join us : Sunday, May 15, 2022 3 - 5pm; in Main Gallery with drink and food offerings by Kraemer & Kin Microbrewery. Seating inside and out… Don’t forget additional parking is at the Town Library.

We are the Vessel.

FORM AND FUNCTION: WE ARE THE VESSEL

We are the vessel of what we know.  We are the open form that gets poured into by the Universe, by our environment, by one another.  We are the vessel of creative life whatever shape that takes up.

We are the vessel in which imagination takes form. We shape our needs, we create our objects… whether useful or harmful, refined or raw, open or closed…. they all come out of the emptiness of being, each a gift coming into existence.

This exhibition of weaving and pottery represents different places and times.  And the three collections have their own stories to tell from the Tea Bowls by Jeanne Claire Bisson of Romulus Craft, Washington, VT and the Rug Weavings by Diane Elliott Gayer, Burlington, VT to the 1940s collection of Clay Pots from the Southwest.

Each is an accumulation of knowledge, technique, and spirit.  Each is an embodiment of the world from which it arose.  Each carries overt and subtle meaning from the fibers found in each weaving to the clay used in each pot.  The clays, pigments, shapes, patterns, firings, finishes, and actually uses affect the energy contained by each piece whether weaving or pottery.

Form and Function: we are the Vessel.

Changing Conditions

I have been reading a book I found many years ago in London during an Open Architectural Weekend and we tried to visit the Gherkin Building, only to find that it was locked. Instead we happened into an amazing historic church, St. Andrew Undershaft. [Photo thanks to Rita A. on Foursquare]. This is where I found Sacred Spaces: Stations on a Celtic Way by Margaret Silf.

Among many things, she talks about angels as the light behind our shadow. When we are full of ego our shadows are very dark and solid, letting no light thru, our collective heavy shadows overwhelm the earth and, by extension, destroy what we know thru war and environmental degradation. Yet, as we let go of our self and become more open to the universe, the eternal light (the sun, if you want) is allowed to flow and fill our being.

In this time of devastating militarization, upheaval of homelands, and climatic crisis, to think that we can bring a fraction of light back into the world is powerful. Maybe the return of Spring is part of that reminder despite the darkness of conditions.

On a personal level, I learned that solid surfaces can break thru in unexpected ways. I was trying to get a closer look at a beaver house, or “igloo,” in the Burlington Barge Canal when suddenly the ice I was standing on gave way. I went thru up to my knees and my boots filled with water. It was an awakening I didn’t expect obviously and startling enough that I forgot what I was trying to do.

I love it when the unexpected happens and reminds me that I should pay more conscious attention to my world…. And am super grateful this had nothing to do with Great Ice 2022! Meanwhile, I want to remember that the light shines behind us even when we are in the dark.

SVAC Outing

Waiting for Great Ice 2022 to happen, and not wanting to focus on the changing ice & snow conditions in City Bay, a couple of us detoured south during those 40-degree days. We went to Manchester for an art outing at the Southern Vermont Art Center. The exhibition Hiroshige and the Changing Japanese Landscape on mokuhanga is both contemporary (curated under the guidance of Patty Hudak, a member of the Mokuhanga Sisters print collective) and classical (focusing on the work of 19th c. Japanese artist Hiroshige) works on paper. It was a treat to experience what woodblock printing can do—from the expansiveness of color to the extreme detail—and a breath of fresh air. www.svac.org