Love and Practice
Curated by Harlan Mack
Featuring Artist Staff at Vermont Studio Center
Join us for the exhibit reception on Saturday, July 19 from 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm.
Love and Practice presents a selection of works in conversation with artists’ retired studio garments. Softened by years of use, these items of clothing once functioned as silent collaborators in the act of making. They absorbed the marks and traces of time, process, presence, and love for the practice. These garments offered comfort, protection, and routine in the private space of creative labor. Now, no longer needed for their original utility, they return as advocates of the artists' connection to their practice and as participants from a new vantage point.
The exhibition features work by artist-staff members of the Vermont Studio Center, each of whom balances their creative practice with the day-to-day work of supporting a vibrant residency community. These dual roles bring a unique intimacy and rhythm to their studio lives, where artmaking and creative placemaking coalesce. The garments on view have accompanied their wearers through countless hours of making, mentoring, repairing, and sustaining the environment in which artists live and work.
The exhibition highlights what remains in the fibers of what we wear while we work. It considers how materials take on meaning over time, not only through use, but through their relationship to practice, ritual, and the body. Each artist has selected or created work that speaks to their own retired studio clothing. These contributions suggest personal and material memory and open a conversation about intimacy, repetition, and transformation.
By centering the studio garment, Love and Practice proposes that care, labor, and devotion may become embedded in objects over time. These clothes, though no longer functional, seem to retain rhythm, beauty, and symbolic weight. The accompanying artworks approach them not as artifacts of the past but as charged presences. They are textiles that may hold stories, shape space, and support new modes of expression.