John Stomberg, director Hood Museum of Art talks with our Guest Curator, Peter Moriarty and gallery owner, Anni Mackay in an upcoming conversation at BigTown Gallery

The land is fundamental to who we are, defining our sense of work, beauty, sustenance, identity, and culture. The land can also be a source of deep meaning and artistic inspiration, as the artists in this program will share with you. Ben Cosgrove is a composer whose music is an expression of his sense of a place, of moving water or a forest or the space between stars. Helen Whybrow is a writer who's fascinated with what it means to belong to a place, to find oneself inter-woven with nature and facing the transience of all things. These two artists will weave together music and readings immersing us in place while transporting us.

Helen Whybrow is a writer, editor and organic farmer whose current project is a book about shepherding, land, and belonging called The Salt Stones, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2025. She has authored two books, Dead Reckoning (W. W. Norton, 2001) and A Man Apart (Chelsea Green, 2015) and edited several anthologies, including Hearth (Milkweed, 2019). Her essays have appeared in Cagibi, Hunger Mountain, Orion and other literary journals. Helen farms and lives at Knoll Farm in Fayston, Vermont. 

Ben Cosgrove is a traveling composer, pianist, and multi-instrumentalist from northern New England. He performs regularly all over the country, presenting a unique variety of original instrumental music that explores themes of landscape, geography, and environment while straddling a line between folk and classical music.

Throughout his career, the strongest forces guiding Ben’s composition and performances have been his deep and abiding interests in landscape, geography, place, and environment. For years, he has been fascinated and inspired by the different ways people understand and interact with the landscapes around them. He seeks to explore those relationships and reflect them in sound.

Cosgrove’s new album Bearings, to be released in October 2023, represents the latest chapter in a career that has included solo performances in 49 states (all but Delaware). To write the new record, Cosgrove relied on a novel and improvisation-focused compositional style that aimed to reflect the real experience of learning topographical space through movement.

The new songs further illuminate Cosgrove’s unique position as a musician suspended somewhere between genres. He collaborates with artists from across the worlds of folk, rock, and Americana music, his years of experience operating in the worlds of folk, pop, and Americana/roots music are reflected in impassioned and percussive moments.

For more about Ben Cosgrove and his music, please visit

www.bencosgrove.com

BigTown Projects Presents:

NO PLACE LIKE HERE: Photographs of Vermont Past and Present in the Documentary Tradition

Farm Security Administration Photographs of Vermont (1936–1943) and Peter Moriarty Vermont Photographs (1978–1998)

Join us for a very special evening of art, music, and celebration at BigTown Gallery. Following the opening of In Memoriam, Lex Brown and Samuel Beebe will premiere Carnelian, an original musical, as an intimate vocal-piano performance on the lawn.

Carnelian is an eclectic musical written by Lex Brown and co-composed by Samuel Beebe. In the course of a day, three mythical figures – Necyria, Bicyclus, and Orachrysops – await the imminent arrival of a cataclysmic event: the “Boom.” Throughout 8 songs, each character contends with their own definition of power, whether it be natural, political, technological, or spectacular. Carnelian sparks conversations about an unknown future, and finds humanity in the face of these existential threats.

Following the performance Brown and Beebe will host a brief Q&A about the work, which began as a film and will travel to the Celebration Barn Theater in Maine and the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in September as a full musical show with a live band.

This event is the first performance collaboration between BigTown Gallery and the 8th House Artist Residency program, where Brown was a resident in 2022.

Ridgeline Outdoor Collective Celebrates 10 years
@ BT—VT Pavilion

Presented by: The Stable Inn

Our day to gather the community and officially launch the Stable Inn by celebrating with our local and state partners. Tour the inn, hear the story, and enjoy local musicians and food prepared in our wood-fired oven.
Festivities begin at 3pm.