Amid change, Brattleboro pieces a shattering past into a vision for the future - VTDigger

BRATTLEBORO — Talk to longtime locals who’ve witnessed a rising number of Main Street closures and crimes and they’ll tell you the community they remember is cracking.

Mary Lacy and Corrine Yonce, armed with cement and creative eyes, instead see things as the start of a potentially surprising metamorphosis.

The 33-year-old Vermont artists, commissioned to create a wall-size mosaic in downtown’s Pliny Park, recently asked residents to donate ceramic household scraps, be they chipped plates or scratched tiles.

Children added outgrown marbles and plastic game pieces. Adults offered stray earrings, beads and buttons. Elders parted with mementos as storied as shells from the faraway shore where one family’s ancestors shipped off three generations ago.

Lacy and Yonce invited townspeople to don safety glasses and break everything to bits. Then, as signs of new life have sprung up in nearby storefronts, the artists have pieced together the shattered vestiges of the past into a kaleidoscopic vision for the future.

“It’s really symbolic in a lot of ways,” Kate Trzaskos, executive director of the Downtown Brattleboro Alliance, said of the collective collage. “You have to break the old to have the new.”

Historic photos show downtown Brattleboro is constantly changing, from long-ago blazes that incinerated the first wooden storefronts to the advent of brick retail and residential blocks to, most recently, business closings, bank consolidations and the twin problems of panhandling and drug dealing.

Enter the Epsilon Spires nonprofit arts organization, which spearheaded a $25,000 mural project in 2022 to transform a retaining wall along the artery from Interstate 91 to Main Street into a four-season Vermont vista.

Eyeing the Chamber of Commerce’s blank wall at Pliny Park, Epsilon Spires director Jamie Mohr raised a similar amount of money through a state Better Places matching grant to hire two mosaic artists with colorful backstories.

Lacy, of Jericho, purchased a bucket truck in 2015 and went on to paint murals from Greenville, Mississippi, to Gallup, New Mexico, under the sponsorship of Benjamin Moore.

Residents in the Vermont town of Bethel can see Lacy’s rainbow trout swimming along a 200-foot wall at the intersection of routes 12 and 107, while Manhattanites can spot her four-story-tall pinyon jay on a Harlem building at 151st and Broadway.

Fellow artist Yonce, of Winooski, has found creative inspiration in social work, first as an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer and now as a staffer at the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity.

Yonce has partnered with Vermont Folklife and the Housing & Homelessness Alliance of Vermont to interview and illustrate residents of affordable housing communities for the audiovisual project “Voices of Home.”

Although Lacy and Yonce have created their share of mosaics — including a 30-foot-wide one along Burlington’s waterfront bike path — neither has completed anything as large as the 70-foot-long Brattleboro project.

Children who see the emerging wall consider it a giant “I Spy” game of colors and shapes. Adults, in contrast, ask “what is it?” before taking time to decipher things like a great blue heron with legs fashioned from a spatula and spoon.Local leaders view the work as a picture of hope. Downtown’s onetime largest and longest-operating storefront, Sam’s Outdoor Outfitters, remains vacant after closing in April, while residents continue to complain about problems in and around the municipal Transportation Center parking garage on Flat Street.

“If we don’t address that area,” Selectboard member Franz Reichsman told his colleagues at their most recent meeting, “I think we’re putting the economic, social and cultural future of Brattleboro at stake.”

That said, Main Street’s cornerstone Brooks House and River Garden buildings report new anchor businesses, and the shuttered M&T Bank is set to become the new home of the Snow Republic Brewing Company.

For their part, local Afghan refugees who call themselves the ArtLords are planning a new mural on nearby Green Street, while the Downtown Brattleboro Alliance is working to creatively cover electrical boxes in hopes of, in its words, “sparking vibrancy.”

Back at Pliny Park, Lacy and Yonce are set to caption their collage with quotes from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book “Braiding Sweetgrass.”

The first: “There is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another.”

The second: “If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can live it back to wholeness again.”

The artists, making connections through mortar and grout, want to finish in time for a wrap-up celebration at September’s first-Friday Gallery Walk.

“I hope people see beauty, see play, see intimacy, see comedy,” Lacy said of the work. “I hope, every time, people see something new.”

Disclosure: Mary Lacy is the daughter of Gaye Symington, board president of the Vermont Journalism Trust, which operates VTDigger.

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VTDigger's southern Vermont and features reporter. More by Kevin O'Connor