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Mount Abe Graduate’s Book Aims to Help Both Creators and Lovers of Vermont Art

Sunday March 12, 2006

By Ed Barna

    There's a Robert Frost poem titled "Revelation" in which he remarks that in games of hide-and-seek, "all who hide too well away/ Must speak and tell us where they are."

That has been the plight of many artists who have found peace, quiet and natural surroundings in the Vermont hills, but who have found it difficult to make themselves known to potential purchasers of their works. Lately they have gained two allies: Mount Abraham Union High School 1992 graduate Ric Kasini Kadour and his collaborator and partner Christopher Byrne, creators and publishers of The Vermont Art Guide.

It came out in October under the Kasini House imprint. Kasini House is the business apparatus for Kadour and Byrne's creative projects.

These include publishing projects (Vermont Art Guide and the soon to be released Art Map Burlington); lectures and workshops (such as BUZZ: Art Marketing 101 on March 4th, Buying Art on February 18th, or Fresh Blood: An Art History of AIDS that debuted in October 2005 in Salt Lake City); and ArtShop, an online store that sells small art products and multiples.

Kasini House is also the home of Ric Kasini Kadour's writing—he is the Vermont Editor of Art New England and a frequent contributor to a number of other publications—and art—Kadour is a fine art photographer. Last year he released two series of work: Speed of Light, ten abstract photographs that employ the same visual strategies as abstract paintings, and Boring, a collection of twenty-five color figurative photographs.

Boring debuted in Toronto in November 2005 along side work by filmmakers Bruce La Bruce and Safyia Randera and painter Danny Buchanan. In December 2005, the work was collected by Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, the duo that makes up the London-based pop group, the Pet Shop Boys. The work was exhibited in Montreal this January.

Lately he and Byrne have been living in Montreal, but they spend approximately three days a week in Vermont. For several years they had a house in Shoreham, and one possibility is having an apartment on both sides of the border. "We're very much oriented toward Vermont," Kadour said.

If the name Ric Kasini Kadour doesn't ring a bell, that's because in 1994, he took his mother's maiden name.  Denise Altland, Kadour's mother, had the shop A Child's Dream next to the movie theater and later The Great Pumpkin in the Star Mill. She later went to New England Culinary Institute and recently worked as the private chef for the President of Middlebury College.

Bristol holds a lot of memories still, and Kadour owes debts of gratitude to people he now realizes made a difference: English teacher Sue Warner, who "pushed me to work harder but also allowed me to forge my own path;" Marietta Pomainville, his boss at the New England Spice Mill where he worked part-time, who became "like a second Mom;" Cindy Brisson, whom he met when he volunteered for the town's recycling committee, volunteered on the town's recycling committee, who "had all this knowledge about the environment" and "changed the way I saw the natural world around me;" and to the old Bristol Bakery, where he went each morning for a snack, VPR, and peace--"I don't think I would have ever gotten homework done if it weren't for that place."

Going to Burlington to attend UVM brought Kadour into a different world.    Vermont CARES hired him in 1995, and for that group he worked to build community among gay and bisexual men in Addison and Rutland counties as well as in the Northeast Kingdom. He went on to run the Vermont CARES Men's Health Project.

While at a conference in Seattle related to that work in 1996, he turned to a group of people waiting to cross the street for directions to his hotel--and thus met Byrne.

Kadour returned from Seattle with a new sense of direction. He worked to redefine HIV prevention and community organizing and introduce a whole-person approach to gay men's health in Vermont. He created a public sex outreach program that targeted men at rest stops and other venues; produced events for National Coming Out Week; served on the Chittenden County Domestic Violence Task Force and Vermont HIV Prevention Community Planning Group; produced a forum on lesbian health; and conducted diversity and health trainings for a number of providers and community groups.

In 1998, he moved to Seattle and, six months later, began working for Gay City. There, he was similarly active, with issues ranging from gay aging and same-sex domestic violence to tobacco prevention and cultural themes in the media.

A 1999 summit in Boulder, Colorado led to work on a national level. To give one examle, Kadour created the Gay Men's Health Summit eList, which continues today to provide a vehicle for discussing emerging gay men's health issues.

In the nine years that Kadour and Byrne have been together, they have lived in both Vermont and the Pacific Northwest.  But they really got to know Vermont after Ric got into a discussion with a bookstore owner about the lack of a good guidebook for finding top-flight, cutting-edge art in Vermont, and got the reaction that it would be a good idea--for him to do.

Other talks with other art world people encouraged the two to try it. Chris had a background of academic publishing from a past life in the Washington, D. C. area, and Ric had his contacts from Art New England (the author here acknowledges a minor conflict of interest: he has written reviews for Art New England), and they figured there had to be at least a hundred places for serious art lovers to explore and possibly acquire visual art.

"We came up with around 300," said Byrne. "It was surprising, in a good way."

That was after having to leave a lot of fine craftspeople out whose work (e.g. fabric art) might be classified as fine art. Painters, printmakers, sculptors, photographers, multimedia artists--these, they were able to list and describe, in 208 pages that range Alburg to Brattleboro and Bennington to Newport.

They were not only impressed by the quality of the artwork that originates in Vermont, but also by the extent to which the arts seemed interwoven with community life. Not just galleries and studios, but also banks, professional offices, local libraries, cafes and restaurants, and inns were helping to alert both natives and visitors to the state's wealth of talent.

The phrase "the creative economy" has by now become something of a buzzword, but the initial impetus for the book came when that emphasis was just gathering its present momentum. The Vermont Art Guide has been welcomed as part of that statewide project (look for the Vermont Palettes project this summer, a statewide community arts project that folk and contemporary artist Warren Kimble dreamed up down in Brandon).

Kadour and Byrne have done talks at bookstores around the state, including one at Dear Leap in Bristol in December. (This was a trip down Memory Lane: Ric once played Baby Bear in a town production of "Three Little Bears," and the former owner of Deerleap was Mama Bear.) He said they are now gearing up to market the book out of state, where for better or worse a lot of the financially qualified potential art buyers are located.

It's been quite the experience, they said, rolling into town after town and getting an initial response somewhat like an outsider's query whether someone knows any good berry patches. "There's no art around here," the general store would say, then after some thought, "Well, you know, if you go out back of the store over there..."

Or out some remarkable back roads. Just reading the names in the book tempts someone with a taste for exploring Vermont byways to get up and go. Vermont towns may have Plainfield names, but how about Blue Eyed Dog, the Enigma Gallery, the Furchgotte Sourdiffe Gallery, Random Orbit, Radio Bean, Wilson Castle, the Jimmy Shack, Inky Dinky Oink, Ink., Well of Stars, Rhapsody Cafe, the Kim Eng Yeo Studio, the Metropolis Wine Bar, and Northlight Digital Gallery?

For those who want to make it a project to visit all the places the book lists--the way the members of the 251 Club try to visit all of Vermont's municipalities--Kadour and Byrne recommend the Delorme Road Atlas and Gazetteer (so does this author, who used it to investigate all the state's covered bridges).

Some such quest would be rewarding for anyone, they said. "A lot of times we think we know where we live, and we think we know our community," said Kadour. "But it's interesting, how much discovery can be done right in our back yards."

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