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Artist Casey Reas’ work will be on display at the Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont as part of 2020 Vision. Andrea Rosen, the curator for the Fleming Museum who also founded the Vermont Curators Group, has had a key role in planning this statewide arts initiative. Image by Casey Reas

An arts group is highlighting Vermont technology in a variety of mediums through a yearlong series of exhibitions across the state.

“2020 Vision: Seeing the World Through Technology” will include 36 exhibitions, along with several keynote events throughout the year.

Vermont Curators Group wants people to associate Vermont with technology and culture and to think about the state’s relationship to innovation, said its founder Andrea Rosen, who is organizing the series.



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“A lot of Vermont tourism for the last 100 years has been based on this version of Vermont that’s rural and farm life and skiing,” Rosen said. “This theme provides us the opportunity to challenge that perception but also not to throw it out entirely.”



Rosen brought the idea of a statewide arts initiative with her from her previous job in Maine, where the Maine Curators’ Forum has organized several similar series. When she moved to Vermont and started the Vermont Curators Group in 2016, she pitched the idea and planning began.



Participating institutions include art centers, science museums and the Vermont Historical Society and were chosen from the Vermont Curators Group’s 60 members.



Rosen said it is the first time such a wide variety of establishments will put on a series of shows with one theme across the state.



Gillian Sewake, the project manager for 2020 Vision, said the goal of the initiative is to encourage collaboration and to bring in a wider audience than many of the smaller institutions could get on their own.



Sewake hopes that the initiative will encourage Vermonters to visit galleries and museums they have never been to before. To that end, the group will be offering prizes to participants through their passport program.



This early steam engine, invented in Vermont by Samual Morey in 1793, will be displayed as part of the Vermont Historical Society’s exhibition. Morey’s engine was said to be the first steam engine invented in the United States. Photo courtesy of Gillian Sewake.

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“Part of the reason for doing this is to boost the visibility of the Vermont cultural sector … to incentivize people to visit more than one exhibition,” Sewake said. “Since the theme is about technology, we figured it had to be technology-based so we are asking visitors to take a selfie or a photo of the exhibition and then either tag us on social media or send it to us in an email.”



Each photo sent or tagged enters participants into the drawing. While the full list of prizes has not been finalized, Sewake said it will include original artwork and a membership in the North American Reciprocal Museum Association, which offers admission to over 1,000 museums in five countries.



Sewake also highlighted the wide variety of exhibitions that will be open to the public through the 2020 Vision initiative — everything from an exploration of X-rays and taxidermy to paintings about politics to textiles.



The Helen Day Art Center in Stowe is exploring love and relationships through technology in an exhibition called “Love Letters” that opened Jan. 16. Rachel Moore, the center’s executive director, said the 2020 Vision series gave her the opportunity to pursue an idea she had already been thinking about.



“Love has the ability to transform a life, and from that ability to transform one individual’s life, to a larger, sociopolitical action, love is a really powerful force,” she said. “This exhibition really celebrates the concept of love with artists who work to illustrate it as a memory, as honor, as hope, as a call to action. There are many important ways artists are looking at love in this exhibition that aren’t about gender or power or traditional structures or restraints.”



Moore said the center’s exhibition explores many kinds of relationships — those between parents and children, between strangers, between LGBTQ folks and even the relationship between the viewer and the painting.



“The artists really focus on love in the past, love lost, love hoped for, but in a way where love lived in a way that honors relationships but also propels the power of love beyond two individuals,” she said.



The Middlebury College Museum of Art has taken the technology theme in a different direction. Sarah Laursen, the curator of Asian art at Middlebury, said she hopes her exhibition titled “Into the Screen: Digital Art from teamLab,” which opens in May, will help viewers appreciate a traditional art form in a new way.



Cold Hollow Sculpture Park in Enosburg Falls is participating in Vision 2020 with a one-day event on June 20. This piece on display at their park by David Stromeyer is called “Things May Have Shifted” Photo by Jock Gill

Partnering with teamLab, a digital art collective from Japan, the exhibition will juxtapose Japanese screen painting with art on digital screens.



“This show will include both the original screen paintings from Middlebury’s collection alongside digital reinterpretations of this medium that modern artists have undertaken to make the form more relevant to their experiences today,” Laursen said.



Through this comparison, Laursen hopes to explore what digital art forms mean for the future of museums.



“There are a lot of new possibilities for supporting the museum experience and helping visitors have a more in-depth look at objects, understand the context better, through technology,” she said. “This is a case where we’re using technology not to replace the art but actually to help modern audiences understand it and appreciate it more.”



The Middlebury College Museum of Art will include this interactive digital piece by the Japanese art collective teamLab in an exhibit that opens in May. The digital screen responds to the movements of viewers. Photo courtesy of teamLab

The Vermont Historical Society, whose exhibition opens in August, will use 2020 Vision to work with smaller, local historical organizations.



Amanda Gustin, public program manager at the society, said it will host a crowdsourced show at an exhibition space in Montpelier.



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“We will provide the panels on the wall that gives the viewers basic context but we’re actively seeking applications for an object or group of objects from local collections that show innovation in Vermont,” she said.



Gustin said that Vermont and Vermonters have been responsible for a wide variety of important inventions, from the first steam engine to the first sports bra.



“We really want to call people’s attention to the fact that Vermont has always been a place where technology and innovation have flourished,” she said.



With the initiative just ramping up for the year, Rosen said she hopes that efforts like this put Vermont on the map as a cultural destination.



“There have been a lot of conversations recently about the creative economy in Vermont,” she said. “It’s important for people who think that the arts are secondary to the ski industry to show that the arts are a big part of our state’s identity, a big part of what we have to offer our residents and our visitors. So the goal of a project like this is to create some energy around that to demonstrate it in this sort of big concentrated push.”



Sewake said that the dawn of a new decade is a good time to take stock of how we see the world, and how technology has changed our point of view.



“When you think about the year 2020 in science fiction, this time frame has been used as an example of a distant high tech future,” she said. “This is a really relevant time to reflect on what technology has done and is doing to shape how we see the world, and in Vermont that conversation is really relevant, not just as a cultural center but pretty broadly.”