After 86 years of moving from place to place, members of the Deerfield Valley Art Association realized their dream one year ago when the nonprofit arts group acquired a permanent (for now) home in Northfield.
“Our dream has always been to get a space of our own,” said Beverly Phelps, a DVAA board member and former president. “We decided to use some of the funds to have a little bit of our dream, and keep the organization going and have an exciting place in Northfield.”
The 105 Main St. location, called the Deerfield Valley Art Association Center for the Arts, doubles as the Museum of New England Art (MoNEA), an offshoot of DVAA that preserves and promotes the art and artists of New England. Since DVAA first started leasing the 3,000-square-foot space last year, the Center for the Arts and MoNEA have provided alternating exhibits that change every six to eight weeks, aiming to provide something to attract artists and enthusiasts alike.
“We want this to be a destination,” DVAA President Bucky Callery said at the center’s anniversary celebration. “A place that people think of when looking for arts and crafts.”
The art community in and around the Pioneer Valley has been consistently vibrant since at least the early 1900s, Phelps said, when the region’s natural beauty made it a fashionable vacation spot. In 1931, the DVAA was founded to help centralize the growing community of local artists.
“There have always been realists painting in the area,” Phelps said, although she maintains that there has never been stylistic unity in the region’s art. “Then there were people who sprang out of that, a little more abstract, bright colors.”
If there is anything that unifies Pioneer Valley’s artists, Phelps said, it is their common desire to respond artistically to different aspects of the region, both environmental and cultural. She gives as an example the two bronze sculptures at Veterans Mall in Greenfield, built in 1965 by Homer Gunn, who died in 2001.
One, shaped like a scroll large enough to walk alongside, shows a timeline with images in relief: between 1916 and 1918 are steamships, trains, early fighter planes, men on horseback; between ’41 and ’45, sleeker planes drop men with parachutes; between ’51 and ’53, the planes are dropping bombs. At either end of the scroll are doves holding olive branches.
The other sculpture, at the middle of the plaza, is shaped like an oversized anvil, with hammers coming down on swords, apparently unforming them back into shapeless steel. On the side of the platform there is a plaque, now hidden by a large leafy plant, with a line from Isaiah: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares.”
“It was controversial,” Phelps said. “They asked him to do a veterans memorial sculpture, and he did a sculpture for peace.”
DVAA members have always come from a variety of disciplines, Phelps said. The group’s membership of about 150 still includes artists who work in a diverse array of mediums and who come from vastly different backgrounds. For example, woodworker Michael Humphries operates a shop in Northfield that receives commissions from around the country, and Turners Falls artist Karen Evans creates impressionistic landscapes of local scenery. Bernie Ethier, on the other hand, paints striking images in panes of bold colors, like stained glass.
Part of the DVAA’s purpose from the beginning has been to give local artists a place to show their work. In the summers of the group’s early years, it held shows in the old Charlemont Inn, when Route 2 was a tourist highway. In the 1940s and ’50s, the group rented a space in Greenfield, and for about 30 years, DVAA held annual shows on the third floor of Wilson’s Department Store, until a basement flood forced the store to move its inventory to the third floor.
The Northfield gallery has given the group some stability, finally, said Marge Anderson, who organizes the shows at the gallery.
“What’s new is having art available year-round,” Anderson said. “Before they had the gallery space, they only showed at Wilson’s once or twice a year, and at the Unitarian Church in Bernardston a couple times a year.”
Right now, DVAA members have a summer exhibit to themselves at the Center for the Arts, with work on display through July 29. The collection includes landscape, still life, abstract and encaustic art, as well as dolls and sculpture, created by 35 artists.
A show planned for October will be focused on art and science, Anderson said.
“We hope to have some interesting art you wouldn’t think about as an art project. There’s a lot of math and science in art.”
The gallery’s exhibits alternate between shows curated by Anderson and member shows. DVAA, an all-volunteer organization overseen by a 12-member board of directors, doesn’t charge its members, but takes a commission from sales. Members get a lower commission rate, which Anderson said creates an incentive for artists to join.
The building, which formerly housed the Green Trees Gallery, also has a large workshop space in the back, where members hold lessons, demonstrations and monthly critique sessions, as well as a gift shop where members sell their work.
“We are still trying to find our way and find out what the community and the artists are interested in doing and showing and purchasing and all that,” Anderson said. “We’re trying a lot of things.”
Though leasing the Northfield space has provided a welcome home for the Center for the Arts and MoNEA, Phelps considers the organization’s room to grow when looking to the future.
“What we hope to do is have a museum someday, a dedicated museum (somewhere in Franklin County),” Phelps said, “and acquire art from the people who have collected it and been artists in the last century. We have a lot of people interested in doing that, donating their art to the organization for a permanent collection. … I think it’s important that even the paintings I have might be preserved in a museum for the area. People may not be famous now, but…”
Staff reporter Max Marcus has worked at the Greenfield Recorder since 2018. He covers Northfield, Bernardston, Leyden and Warwick. He can be reached at: mmarcus@recorder.com or 413-772-0261, ext. 261.
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