June 6 – November 2, 2025
This exhibition will explore Magic Realism as it was practiced in Vermont during the mid-to-late 20th century, through the work of Ivan Albright, John Atherton, Vanessa Helder, Patsy Santo, George Tooker, Jared French, Pavel Tchelitchew, Luigi Lucioni, William Christopher, John Semple, Shirley Jackson, and more.
Each of these artists had ties to the state of Vermont and a taste for the fantastic, painting or writing with a brand of realism that could make the seemingly mundane uncanny or the uncanny mundane.
What was it about Vermont that drew these artists and served as an inspiration for their improbable, dream-like visions? This exhibition, while exploring themes of mortality and metamorphosis, isolation and human relationships, covert activism, and the power of fantastical world building for those othered by mainstream society, seeks to answer that question and ask many more.
Unlike Surrealism, the works in this exhibition were rarely inspired by dreams or the subconscious. Rather, they are images of the real world ⎼ often mixed and matched, with skewed perspectives ⎼ that are so meticulously rendered that they seem to vibrate with a crystalline clarity that draws attention to the fantastic nature of things we might otherwise overlook.
Curator, Jamie Franklin dives deeper, “Take, for instance, Patsy Santo’s Spring, from 1940, which was exhibited in MoMA’s 1943 exhibition,” he begins. “This painting depicts a scene with which the artist was intimately familiar: a view of his backyard off of Dewey Street in downtown Bennington. You can get lost in the seemingly hypnotic details: the rickety wooden footbridge, with every knot and swirl of wood grain captured; the siding on the wood shed, each board carefully painted in mottled shades of brown and grey; the laundry floating ambiguously high on a line, seen through the wiry branches of a tree, each new leaf indicated with minute dabs of vibrant chartreuse paint; every shrub and weed seems to be accounted for; the chickens pecking away in the grass, which is delineated down to the individual blades. With his crisp depiction of details, Santo creates a scene drawn from his daily experience with an energy that elevates the mundane to the sublime.”
The Museum is hosting an opening reception and preview party on Thursday, June 5th from 5-7pm including music, food, drink, special pieces on view, and a curator talk and first gallery viewing. Tickets are available for purchase on the Museum’s website.
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