Executive Director

Hello,

I walked up the stairs into the River Gallery and met Ric and Barbara for the first time in 1976 when I was just seven years old. With Pachelbel’s Canon playing in the background and a vibrant bouquet of freshly picked flowers waiting to be painted, I felt seen as an artist for the very first time. My experiences at RGS as a student and a teacher (although I know Ric never liked that word) have traversed the Putney Road and two Main Street locations, witnessed and embraced Sequencing Painting as an incredibly useful approach to making, and seen the school survive and thrive over the past four decades. My inner life as an artist and educator is cut from the very same spiritual cloth that RGS was founded upon, a belief that creativity is a birthright that every person deserves to explore.

My career has been shaped equally by my art-making practice, my commitment to teaching and to arts administration. After college I moved to New York City, attended the New York Studio School and earned a graduate degree in Art Education at Teachers College Columbia University. Soon, I inadvertently found myself involved in art administration as well as teaching because so many institutions struggled with my fierce conviction that the arts are a necessity and that creative expression is sometimes a life-line, especially in underserved areas. In 2009, I founded and opened a community based non-profit art organization, Urban River Arts, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Through individual and group activities, in partnership with museums and cultural organizations all over NYC, our curriculum engaged people of all ages from diverse backgrounds and was primarily centered around facilitating large-scale, interactive art installations inspired by Tibetan Sand Mandalas. I then held teaching and administrative positions at Berkeley Carroll (BCS), an independent Pre-K through twelfth grade school in Brooklyn, for over a decade. I moved to the Hudson Valley four years ago to teach and subsequently help lead High Meadow, a small, progressive school, focused on collaborative, inquiry-based learning.

Throughout my life I have been drawing, painting, and making hand-built ceramic sculptures. I also have an interest in community based installations that engage people of all ages and backgrounds to participate in the process of making collaborative artworks. My practice as an artist is directly informed by teaching art, as well as looking at and talking about works of art; each informs the other. I see art making as an opportunity to connect deeply with my own creative life force. I will have a few pieces in the upcoming faculty show at RGS, which opens on Friday, September 1st, my very first day on the job!

In the same way a good teacher helps students to authentically become the best versions of themselves, I see leadership as a parallel endeavor on a larger scale, helping a whole community to realize its potential. Moving back to Brattleboro, getting to know all of you, and leading the school into its fiftieth year (and beyond!) feels like the opportunity of a lifetime. Joining RGS to cultivate the vision Ric and Barbara built, of fostering an inclusive art-making community for everyone who wants to explore creative expression through the visual arts, is coming full circle for me.

For more information about me and to see images of my artwork please visit my website.
I look forward to meeting and getting to know everyone!

Kimberly