“All the dots connected”

“All the dots connected”

Brattleboro Museum & Art Center

Big Bang Votive is an installation at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) created by artist Yvette Molina in collaboration with students and teachers at the Windham Regional Career Center (WRCC) and oral historians at the Vermont Folklife Center (VFC). It is part of an ongoing project in which Molina gathers stories from people about what sparks delight or inspires love in their lives, then makes an egg tempera painting of a representative object from each story. The exhibit is on view at BMAC through June 12, 2022.

We asked some of the project’s collaborators to tell us what it was like working together and what made this project unique. VFC staff member Mary Wesley also shared her reflections on the exhibit and talked with Molina, as recounted in this post on the Vermont Folklife Center’s blog. 

BMAC: Tell us about your work on this collaborative project. What did you contribute? What was your role?

Kirsten Martsi, BMAC Manager of Education & Community Engagement Programs: I met with Sasha Antohin of the VFC last spring, and we talked broadly about program ideas and dreams we had. Later, Sasha reached out to me about a project the VFC had just launched called Vermont Voices, involving partnerships with two career and technical education centers, one of which was WRCC in Brattleboro. Sasha asked if BMAC might have a real-world project that WRCC students could work on. I had just talked with artist Yvette Molina about her upcoming exhibit, Big Bang Votive, and she had mentioned that she would need help with story-gathering, since she would be moving across the country when she would typically have spent time recording stories. I made the connectionconnected the two opportunities, and before long everyone was on board with this collaboration!

Yvette Molina | Photo credit: Kelly Fletcher

Mary Wesley, VFC Education and Media Specialist: The goal of Vermont Voices is to create opportunities for students to produce and present media projects on issues and topics that matter to them and their communities. When Kirsten described Yvette’s project, which draws on the act of listening deeply to individuals to understand their personal experiences of joy and delight, it only seemed natural to bring Vermont Voices and Big Bang Votive into collaboration.

Brandon Conrad, WRCC Professional English/Communication Teacher: My role was to introduce the collaboration to my classes, assist in the preparation and completion of the project, and offer support and advice while the students worked through each step.

Jesse Kreitzer, WRCC Filmmaking & Digital Editing Program Instructor: The creative process rarely provides any sort of immediate gratification. It often feels incremental and tedious. So, in my role as instructor, I herded cats, often reminding students of the bigger picture, and assured them that their work has value. When the exhibition was unveiled, and the culmination of their efforts was on display, I think it finally registered.

Photo credit: Kelly Fletcher

BMAC: How did you work together with the other participants, and what was unique about this collaboration?

Wesley: Sasha and I visited with WRCC students virtually and in person to offer training and advice ahead of sending them out to record interviews with people in their community. With support from the amazing staff at WRCC, the students took it from there, and before we knew it, they had recorded dozens of interviews! Coordinating a community interview project is a regular element in our educational programing at the VFC. What was unique about this collaboration was having the results of that interview project incorporated into an art installation and elevated to the walls of a local museum. It was wonderful!

Yvette Molina and Brandon Conrad | Photo credit: Kelly Fletcher

Kreitzer: I’ve admired the Vermont Folklife Center for many years, so when they first approached me about collaborating, I didn’t hesitate. The Center plays an integral role in our state, its staff is highly skilled in community-based media production, and I knew they would bring a lot to our classroom.  I am a filmmaker, not an ethnographer, so Sasha and Mary at the VFC were able to underscore the value of humanities-based research in ways that I could not.  

Conrad: Though I have participated in interdisciplinary collaborations in the past, I have never had the opportunity to work with multiple organizations during the same collaboration. While this created some challenges in aligning schedules, the end result was a rich collaboration that incorporated multiple layers and mediums.

Martsi: I was so impressed with the can-do attitudes of the teachers and really enjoyed working with them and their students. This project was such a special collaboration. All of the collaborators were so generous and positive. Yvette went out on a limb for this project, trusting students to do work that she normally would have done. Sasha and Mary were also amazing to work with—very flexible and open to shaping the project in a way that fit everyone’s needs. 

BMAC: What about this project did you love? What brought you joy and delight?

Conrad: The opportunity to listen to the interview clips while exploring the beautifully created and arranged paintings sent chills down my spine. To be completely honest, I was reluctant to commit my classes to this project, but my students’ level of professionalism and perseverance proved that I had underestimated their drive to complete the project.

Kreitzer: The unpredictable nature of interviewing, and what it may reveal about ourselves and others, can be exhilarating. Watching students break outside of their well-trodden routines to engage in new ways with family, friends, and the greater school community was certainly a highlight. There were days when they would return from an interview knowing that they had captured something special—as if they had just unearthed a rare fossil.   

Martsi: The concept for this show is lovely—putting more moments of love and delight into the world—and hearing the clips that the students collected always puts a smile on my face. The VFC grant is for a two-year collaboration, and I’m already thinking of cool things we can do in the fall with the lessons learned through this collaboration. I love that the project will live on beyond this exhibit, and that the Brattleboro stories these students gathered will continue to be part of the constellation Yvette is creating.

Wesley: Hands down, the greatest moment of joy for me in this project was standing in the gallery with Yvette and the students before the exhibit had opened to the public and watching the students realize that they were a big part of making the exhibit happen. I think it was extremely validating for the students and offered them a good lesson about the oftentimes slow pace at which projects involving individual human stories and creativity unfold. I don't think they could have imagined that moment in the gallery when they were working on their interviews; it probably just felt like a “class assignment.” But as they heard excerpts from their recordings and found Yvette’s paintings, which had been inspired by their work, all the dots connected like constellations in the sky.

Photo credit: Kelly Fletcher

“Ancestry.comb” by Mildred Beltré Martinez

“Ancestry.comb” by Mildred Beltré Martinez
“Constant flexibility, drive, and risk-taking”

“Constant flexibility, drive, and risk-taking”

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