Three Women, Three Galleries

Three Women, Three Galleries

by Steve Noble

Ann Coleman, Catherine Dianich and Adria Schozer took different roads with unlikely twists and turns to arrive in Vermont and open their own art galleries. Although each has followed her own vision and put her own unique stamp on three of the jewels in Southern Vermont’s arts scene, their stories, together, reflect the independent, resilient, creative and community-minded spirit of the people in the special state they all call home.

Ann Coleman

Life has always been about balance for Ann Coleman, who first moved to Vermont in 1978 to combine her twin passions for art and athletics into a life of painting and teaching skiing at Mount Snow in West Dover.

On Aug. 28, 2011, Tropical Storm Irene taught Coleman new lessons in balance, showing her just how far the scales could fall in one direction and then tilt back the other way.

On Aug. 28, 2011, Ann Coleman lost everything she had been working toward for a long time. The flooding that ripped through downtown Wilmington swept her art gallery away, leaving in its place a vacant lot. The building she and her husband Joe Specht had bought two years ago, where Coleman had run her gallery, the building she had spent the better part of a year completely renovating into a dream space, was gone, along with all the artwork in it — hers and that of several other local artists and artisans. A $400,000 investment wiped out in a matter of minutes. Pieces of her building and fragments of the work in it were found up to five miles downstream in the days afterward. Other pieces of it are still out there, somewhere.

But in the sad aftermath of Irene, something happened which tilted the scales back — a whole town pulled together. With much of downtown Wilmington severely damaged, friends and neighbors came from all over to help clean up, muck out and get a little Vermont town back on its feet. Coleman was one of them.

“I came downtown everyday to help my neighbors. …All I wanted to do was to be there and be helping,” said Coleman, who was not alone. Wilmington became a symbol, not only of the devastation Vermont suffered, but in the grassroots way Vermonters helped each other. ABC News came to Wilmington and caught some of that vibe, interviewing Coleman, about whom they said, “her spirit and strength are lifting the entire town.”

Many of Wilmington’s businesses and retail shops got back on their feet within a month, and the neighborliness so in evidence in Irene’s aftermath gave Coleman a chance to keep going. Her friend Lilias Hart, owner of Quaigh Designs just up the street, carved out a little upstairs gallery space for Coleman to show and sell her work. It helped a lot. “Wilmington, Vermont: Autumn,” a painting Coleman did shortly after 9/11 of her town, bathed in autumn’s glory and American flags, caught the eye of visitors to the new gallery space and to her website, many of whom have bought prints of it, in part because it depicts Dot’s Restaurant, a legendary local landmark devastated by the storm.

Coleman still has the original “Wilmington, Vermont: Autumn” painting. The local dentist who bought the original painting returned it to her after he realized she had lost so much in the storm — another act of kindness inspired by Irene. The originals of most of her other works were lost.

No one would blame Coleman for giving up on the gallery and finding a new way to strike the balance in her life. After all, she had spent nearly a year working on renovating the building. Designed by LineSync, the renovations involved completely gutting the interior, adding cathedral ceilings, changing the placement1of every window to catch better light and installing new electric and new plumbing, all designed to turn a former Chamber of Commerce headquarters into a first-rate gallery, slated to open in November 2011. Coleman’s husband had put the first coat of paint in the exterior of the building two days before the storm hit. Irene took it all away.

But Coleman remains bullish on Vermont, on Wilmington and on the idea of running a gallery there.

“I certainly want to rebuild, and I feel like that’s best way to recoup my investment,” said Coleman.

The road is long — Coleman still needs to raise money to rebuild, and she still has loans to repay on the renovations. She had used her savings to buy the gallery in the first place, so she didn’t need and didn’t have flood insurance. Her story, of resilience in the face of adversity and determination over a long road back, mirrors that of her town.

“It does feel like we have a long ways to go. We have a lot of holes here. The short-term support has been fantastic,” she said. “This town really does need to pull together in the long run. …We’ve got some serious marketing to do.”

But Vermont is worth marketing.

“Everybody envies those of us that live in Vermont. There’s this mystique to living in Vermont,” she said. “Everyone wants a piece of it to take home.”

That impetus to take a piece of Vermont home is what got Coleman into the gallery business in the first place. Coleman showed a passion and aptitude for painting when she was very young. She was an Art major at Skidmore College who spent a delightful art-filled junior year in Salzburg, Austria. After she graduated, she continued to combine art-making with various enterprises that paid the bills. After settling in Vermont, she continued to spend a lot of time shuttling up the East Coast, from Florida to Maine, selling her watercolors and pastels at art shows.

Eventually, she tired of traveling all the time, and focused her energies on painting scenes of Vermont for people to take home and on starting a gallery, which initially envisioned as a kind of co-op, with many artists on board contributing money and sweat equity to keep it going. Gradually, the gallery in a rented space on Wilmington’s Main Street, became hers alone to run, although she continued to showcase the work of other artists and artisans — three jewelers, a furniture-maker, a fiber artist and two other painters — in addition to her own. Her standard for selecting artists — “a certain level of quality.”

She found running a gallery very much to her liking.

“I do like the people part. I liked meeting the public,” she said. “I liked the location. You get so many people who come through town.”

Of course, life as a gallery owner in Vermont is not without its ups and downs.

“One of the challenges is that it’s probably about a seven-month season. You’ve got a lot of downtime,” she said. “We do have to work pretty hard to be able to stay here. …Somehow, we make it work.”

For now, Coleman is making it work in her upstairs space at Quaigh Designs, where she welcomed visitors on a quiet Thursday afternoon right after Christmas. In spare moments, she put new labels on the bottom of framed prints of her work she was selling. The labels read: “Original Swept Away by Irene.”

For more information about Coleman’s gallery, her rebuilding efforts and videos from Irene, visithttp://www.artistanncoleman.com.