Six years ago, playwright, author and lifelong artist Jan Maher joined forces with fellow artists Vanessa Query and the late Lucinda Kidder to fill what they saw as a gap in Greenfield: a space for artists of all mediums, skill levels and identities to come together and create. To preface this idea, Maher referenced a famous line from renowned author and 1993 Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
“It’s kind of that idea that nobody else was doing a truly multi-arts [center] — humanities, arts, all the arts except maybe dance because you can’t dance on a carpet like this,” Maher said, sitting inside the center that realized the vision of the three women: The Local Access to Valley Arts (LAVA) Center. “Anything anybody can think of to do creatively can happen in here — we wanted this space to be that space.”
Now, six years and 151 local film screenings, 47 art shows, 35 musical performances and “jam sessions” and countless community workshops and conversations later, Maher is stepping back to enjoy the fruits of her labor at LAVA as an artist, not an administrator.
“I’m trying to move into the mode of what we’ve invited everybody else to do, which is somebody who comes here and [takes] advantage of what [they] can do creatively,” Maher said.
Although Maher, 80, will continue to serve on the Board of Directors, the LAVA team is looking for someone committed to LAVA’s mission with the expertise in bookkeeping, accounting, program planning and public relations to maintain it.
“Basically, we need to find someone to replace me,” explained Maher, the current development director at LAVA. “There’s space for people with vision to join and be part of what LAVA is in the future.”
With a laugh, she added, “I would especially lay down a red carpet for people who love the art and know how to read a financial statement.”
While Maher’s career has included many jobs in accounting and bookkeeping — what she described as her “unfortunate alternative talent” — her passion for the arts moved her to help start LAVA. This lifelong interest began with visual arts and later reintroduced itself to Maher in eighth grade, when she watched “West Side Story” on a family trip from her hometown in central Indiana.
At her seat in the Broadway theater, something clicked.
“Oh, that’s what I want to do with my life,” Maher remembered thinking. “That was an incredibly important moment for me.”
After acting in high school productions, she studied theater “tangentially” at the New School for Social Research.
“My degree in humanities really got me into graduate school, but it was my work in theater that was the core,” Maher reflected. “It was the fire in my belly.”
Maher later earned a doctorate focusing on “transformation at all levels, from the brain to the cosmos,” a common theme throughout her art and classes she later taught as an educator.
“In theater, it’s about those moments that things change, that you have a new understanding of the world as a result of the theatrical experience,” Maher said. “That, to me, is the core thrill when somebody goes, ‘Oh, aha!'”
While teaching classes like “Humans and Nature,” “Your Brain: an Owner’s Manual” and “Seeing and Perception” at the now-defunct Burlington College, Maher taught students accustomed to test bubble sheets to embrace the “Aha!” moments and shift their perspectives.
As a social studies teacher and artist in residence at several K-12 districts, she kicked off her classes by asking students to journal or draw for 10 minutes.
“There’s just increasing mountains of evidence that the arts are the way that people can process trauma, they’re the way that people can express novel ideas — that AI doesn’t do — and in that process, there’s something that allows us to organize ourselves neurologically and gather ourselves together,” Maher said.
In retirement, she plans on returning to another art form that allows her to “express novel ideas” — writing novels.
Her first two novels, “Heaven, Indiana” and “Earth As It Is” are inspired by stories Maher overheard from neighbors in her hometown and a commitment to “making the ordinary extraordinary, the extraordinary ordinary.”
The hair salon, or “bulletin board spot” at the heart of “Earth As It Is” grew from memories of Maher’s aunt, a hairdresser. According to Maher, her aunt’s at-home salon chair sits in the Indiana State Museum.
“My novels are not based on my life, they’re based in my experience,” she said.
While her passion for theater ignited in her teens, Maher’s literary calling began to surface much earlier.
After her first novel, an old neighbor asked her, “Was it you or your sister who had imaginary playmates?”
“I said, ‘Well, we both did, but I still do,'” Maher recalled, chuckling.
With more time, Maher hopes to finish her third novel, set in the same world as the first two, a project that “has been circulating in [her] brain” for about four years.
“As a writer, you need the time when that’s where your head is,” Maher said. “You’re living in this imaginary world with imaginary characters.”
Through her work at LAVA, including writing and directing theater projects, Maher has aimed to inspire a similar feeling to what struck her at “West Side Story,” but with another layer: “This is what I want to do, this is what I can do, this is what I’ve always thought of doing but I didn’t think I could do,” Maher described.
“People come to a space like [LAVA] for a variety of reasons — to express themselves, to appreciate other people’s creative expressions,” she said. “But they all find something they need and want here, and I just love being a part of making that happen.”
