By Avery Delisle

MONTPELIER — Rain-soaked streets came alive this past Friday as community members joined Art Walk to turn the city into a tapestry of renewal. 

Organized by the nonprofit Montpelier Alive, Art Walk encourages people to grab a map, sprawl through the city center and stop and see artists and makers from across the state. It’s an opportunity for local business owners and the public to connect.  

The walk happens the first Friday of every other month. This time around the event had a theme: renewal. Organizers wanted to capture the community’s perseverance following catastrophic flooding over the summer, and the event, dubbed “Renewal Project,” sought to transform hardship into art, creative expression in the face of adversity. 

On top of art at vendors’ locations, 15 different projects were featured on the windows of flood-shuttered stores on Langdon, State and Main streets.

One of those projects was “First We Watched the Waters Rise,” an interactive poetry project started by creative Kim Ward, on the window of Delish on State Street. Viewers were given a prompt — “first we watched the waters rise, then…” — and asked to write their own stanza to follow, which they could leave in a folder. 

Ward thinks poetry was the only way some people could respond and help with the flooding, she wrote on her blog. But writing hasn’t been the only way people showed love for their community; visitors last week could see photographs, light shows, quilts and more throughout the walk. 

For business owners like Mary Margaret Groberg, renewal is centered around reopening. Groberg owns Notion Fabric and Craft, an arts and craft store. After the flood, Groberg had to shut her doors temporarily due to the damage. In September she reopened across the street from her original location. 

Groberg said that opening was a relief and offered a sense of normalcy she is glad to have back. 

“For a while, the big question was, have people forgotten our business, will they even want to come back if we reopen?” she explained. “And the answer was no, they haven’t.” 

And others echo that statement. In between checking out customers and chatting with those walking around, Wendy Wenger, who has worked at Artisans Hand Craft Gallery for five years, explained just what it means for her to see the community come together. 

“Montpelier is such a family community. Everybody knows everybody. And every time a business reopens, it’s a celebration for us,” Wenger said. 

For every door walked through, it seemed like there was a person there to greet them by name on the other side, for every handshake, a shared story. 

“You connect through community,” said Amy Dalton, a Waitsfield jeweler who showed her art at Artisans Hand Craft Gallery for Art Walk. She runs Ojalá Designs, where she hand makes each piece of jewelry. After living in Anchorage, Alaska, Dalton said the small town community is what made her fall in love with Vermont. 

“Seeing others’ creativity spurs your own and makes you better,” Dalton said. 

That’s one reason why Katie O’Rourke, who owns a studio above the Drawing Board, said she loves Art Walk.

“Being an artist can be so isolating,” said O’Rourke, “but being able to meet the community and see what people are doing is so special.” 

She had hung canvases of varying sizes and colors on the wall and laid across the table to show what she has been working on. Flyers for her art classes and events were right next to her art. 

“It’s really funny talking to people because even though we’re so small, not everybody knows about my art classes or what’s going on in the community,” O’Rourke said. “And when people come up and look at the studio, they get to see what we do.”

The next Art Walk is scheduled for Feb. 2, 2024, and until New Year’s Day,, you can see all the Renewal Project art in shop windows downtown. Montpelier Alive also plans to host events each weekend throughout the holiday season such as hot cocoa crawls, horse-drawn carriage rides and holiday fairs. More info can be found on the group’s community calendar. 

Avery Delisle reported this story on assignment from the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus. The Community News Service is a program in which University of Vermont students work with professional editors to provide content for local news outlets at no cost.