Waterbury studios & the hesterly black
studios for creatives
Located on the second floor above The Phoenix, Waterbury Studios is a community of rental studios for private art practice which serve as a brick and mortar home for creative small businesses. Four rotating art shows per year are exhibited in the small adjoining gallery and Commonspace salon space. Year rental leases include all utilities, 24 hour keyed access to a private studio and use of the Commonspace Salon, which has a kitchenette with a fridge, coffee-maker, tea kettle, microwave and cabinets with utensils. A dropsink equipped with a sediment catch is accessible via the all gender restroom. Comcast Business internet is included with rent. All studios are unfurnished and ready for your interior design aesthetic. Open studios events coincide with the quarterly gallery show openings but participation is not required for studio tenants.
Currently there are no vacancies and all studios are rented. Contact Joseph to set up a viewing or be put on the waiting list. Find details about each individual studio and their pricing here.
the Hesterly Black: discovering visionary modern art
The Hesterly Black is the small gallery at the center of the Waterbury Studios community. The Hesterly Black is curated by Joseph Pensak of The Phoenix and features solo shows of visionary contemporary work by artists with a penchant for the uncanny. The curation leans toward artists who are not only creating striking new work but a larger imagined world for the work to inhabit. The gallery is named in honor of Hesterly Fearing Black, a long-time resident of Stowe, Vermont who lived her 90 years on this earth with ferocity and visionary courage. The Phoenix and Waterbury Studios are co-owned by Hesterly’s granddaughter, Anna Black.
Read Hesterly Black’s obituary, written by her daughter Hesterly “Lee Lee” Black Goodson, in the Stowe Reporter here.
CURRENTLY ON EXHIBIT at
THE HESTERLY BLACK
ATHENA TASIOPOULOS: SAUNTER
FEBRUARY 2ND-APRIL 26TH, 2024
INQUIRE AT THE PHOENIX FOR A
PRIVATE VIEWING DURING
THE PHOENIX’S OPEN HOURS
Curator’s Statement
The environmentalist John Muir, whose life vocation as a writer and activist called us back to an intimate and regular connection with our habitat—our physical, natural environment—disdained the word “hike” in favor of the more evocative “saunter”: “in the middle ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going they would reply, 'A la sainte terre', 'To the Holy Land.' And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them.”
Athena Tasiopoulos’ encaustic pictures on wood panel, paper, and hunks of found wood provide us with a map for sacred walks through imagined ancient/modern landscapes. Her process begins with carefully chosen colored paper collaged over the surface of her chosen canvas. These colors are lusciously muted by the encaustic process that follows (the Greek word enkaustikos means “to heat or burn in”), in which she employs a heating apparatus to melt down a combination of natural bees wax and dammar resin (crystallized tree sap). The Greek painter Pausius (early 4th century A.D.) is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the method of encaustic painting, and one can find uses of encaustic wax on Egyptian burial masks. Athena’s fusing of this ancient method with her modern approach to form gives her work a timeless and sublime richness. Let your own imagination and emotions rise as you enter and amble through the work. And as you leave, remember you are standing on sacred ground, wherever you are.
—Joseph Pensak
past gallery shows
at the hesterly black
STEVE BUDINGTON: CALL SHORE
ON EXHIBIT OCTOBER 6TH-DECEMBER 29TH, 2023
SHOP THE FULL SHOW
STEVE BUDINGTON, northeast, oil and enamel on canvas and wood panels, acrylic on partial frame w/man overboard flag colors, 2022-23, $4000 ADD TO CART
CURATOR’S STATEMENT
“I want all of the rich historical colorations to be manifest in talking about our finitude.” The philosopher Cornel West speaks these words in the back of a taxi cab being driven around Manhattan for Astra Taylor’s “philosophy-in-the-street” documentary Examined Life. As the yellow checkered cab weaves it way past a U-Haul truck unloading yet to be clothed mannequins for a window display, West goes on to distinguish between the too abstract concept of “death” favored by Martin Heidegger in favor of John Donne’s “corpses.” “That’s what Bluesmen do. That’s what Jazz men do. They start with catastrophe, the wreckage of history, the funk of life!” West intones, jaw up, eyes smiling-wide, perched erect on the edge of the back seat.
Steve Budington’s paintings sit similarly on the wall: angular, elbows-out shapes and colors draw and discomfit the eye, while the no less stunning folds of nautical warning flags—a visual theme in most of these works—hold and hide the peril lurking here; our finitude and the catastrophe inherent in our late modern verge-of-apocalypse-feeling world. But to focus only on the peril is to miss the hope that equally rears its head here—these works, our land, the thrill of existing at all, all of it is so goddamned beautiful. And so we are left to wonder alongside these paintings, without answers, warning flag in hand, vigilantly searching the wild horizon for a bobbing light coming from the shore.
—Joseph Pensak
