Jane Beck – Guardian of Vermont’s Folk Art TraditionsPhotos By Jan Doerler 
Director Jane Beck with “Bird,” found object sculpture, 1980 by Chris Lebaron, Fairfax
EML: Jane, how did you decide to be a folklorist? Go back to the roots of your profession — which is an unusual one — and then a little bit about how you received your training. JB: Oh, my gosh, that’s a long answer! I was in a class at Middlebury College and Doc Cook gave a 30-minute off-the-cuff lecture on Navajo mythology…. I went straight out of the class and, I don’t remember now how I did it, but I applied to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for a job. EML: Wow — talk about college changing lives! JB: They kept saying you had to be a quarter Indian, though, so I did an independent honors project on the Indian my senior year and read a lot of cultural anthropology. Then, the program at Penn that gave a PhD in folklore had just opened up… EML: Yes, that was very innovative at the time, wasn’t it? JB: It was, and I went down to see if I could get in although, I didn’t want my PhD—all I wanted to do was write, from a folkloristic point of view, for a magazine like American Heritage. How I thought I’d get the job…. EML: That never bothers us in our early twenties! JB: The other influence on me here was that this was during Vietnam. This is perhaps a little bit romantic but I felt that by understanding other cultures’ differences it was a way of building understanding and lowering the risk of war. That was the reason I was so interested in the field of folklore because I felt it offered you that. So I went down to Penn; I got very involved and decided to get my PhD. Two years into the program I got married so I did things like finish up my language requirements and got as many courses under my belt as I could and then I came back to Vermont and did it long-distance. I think I took my exams before Tommy—my first child—was born and finished my dissertation in 1969 before my second child was born. EML: I was going to ask you how you managed to get the PhD and have 2 babies… JB: Those were my built-in deadlines! EML: You mentioned getting married. Another question I think is relevant to your great career in Vermont is, how did you meet Horace? JB: He was on the faculty at Middlebury and he scared me to death. I remember proofreading a paper in his class and he’d asked a question. So I looked up and he pointed (he never knew people’s names) — he pointed at me… EML: oh boy… JB: …and of course I hadn’t been listening EML: uh oh… JB: …and he said “Well, so far you’ve said nothing wrong!” So that was my introduction to Horace. EML: How did you overcome that fear of a faculty member to get married?! You do have that mutual interest and caring for the same subject matter. I remember when I first met Horace he stuck out his hand and introduced himself as “an old swamp Yankee.” JB: That’s right, he always called himself “Swamp Yankee.” He was fascinated by the sea—I wasn’t quite as fascinated. I was working on my dissertation which was “The Living Dead Man” in tradition — ghostlore — I’d been interested in the supernatural world; we were in the West Indies and I was able to interview the Obeah Man, and had just finished that book when the Arts Council job came up. 
“Vermont Folklife Center” Hooked Rug, 1982 Eric Selby. EML: That leads us to how Jane became Vermont’s first state folklorist. I had been at the Arts Council about 6 or 7 years—and it was the early and very creative days of trying to build cultural organizations and present culture at the grassroots. It was really a growth period, and there were also more federal funds available through the NEA for states to do innovative things than I think there are now. I began to notice something: we were doing a very responsible job at supporting highly trained, professional artists, but I began to wonder, about the rural Vermonters that I knew and the stories that my neighbor Orin Hunt told me about getting a barrel of cider and having a kitchen “tunk” in his house and hiring the local fiddler. I began to question in a profound way what I was doing at the Arts Council — what was our definition of culture? And then, a guy from the New York State Arts Council came up for one of our annual meetings and he declared that Vermont was at the end of the cultural pipeline… I remember vehemently disagreeing, it kind of came out of my gut — it’s not about giving Vermont culture; Vermont has a culture, and what we’re not doing is recognizing it, seeing it, documenting it, preserving it, presenting it back to our own people. That’s when I realized that really what Vermont needed was its own state folklorist, someone who could identify and document and help us appreciate Vermont’s own culture. I met with “Horace the Swamp Yankee” and I told him what I was thinking and what I thought we might need and I said, “Do you know anybody who might be able to do this for us?” And he said something like, “Well yeah—I live with her!” So Jane — what’s your side of the story? JB: My side of the story is … I didn’t know what I was going to do with this degree I had or where I was going and so the Arts Council job was intriguing to me—but I didn’t know anything really about folk art. When I was hired at the Arts Council, Ellen was terrific—she left me alone. EML: You were so fortunate — I didn’t know your stuff! I just had to support you. JB: But I didn’t really know how to go about it. The way interviewing works is you can sit there and put it off — very easily. I came up with a harebrained idea to do a project on general stores. And actually it worked extremely well in that the small general stores are still the center of the small communities. You can go into the general stores and often their local artists are profiled. I remember going into the Greensboro Bend store and seeing carvings by Frank Patoine, a collage by Roland Rochette, and quilts… These general stores knew their communities and could send me to some of the artists. EML: So general stores actually became centers for informants and subjects — that was brilliant of you, Jane. JB: it was blind luck. EML: There’s the surrounding story — how Jane and I had to link arms to convince a different kind of arts council in those days that this was art and this was culture and was worth investigating. JB: Yes. We had committed to doing an exhibition and Ellen put Bill Lipke on my selection committee. At the time, Bill was on the Board of Trustees for the Arts Council, was a well known UVM art history professor with a number of well received books to his name. And he did not believe that there was any folk art in Vermont. I said “Ellen, how can you do this to me?!” I’d gone throughout Vermont and I probably had 1000 slides. 5 of us unanimously selected 175 objects (we’d been talking about an exhibit of 50 objects) and Bill Lipke was blown away. He later wrote in a letter to me: “you’ve made a believing Willy out of me!” EML: The exhibition “Always in Season” was incredibly important for Vermont, a way of really changing peoples’ minds about our culture. I happen to think it was important nationally. I think it was the first statewide exhibit of folk art and contemporary traditional artists. JB: It absolutely was. Folk art was divorced from the maker. What we were doing was looking at the artists and at what the artists made and the artists’ story. Certain themes started coming out: for example, often in families there would be 3 generations of quilters or carvers. There was also the theme of “new turnings”. If something traumatic happened, like you lost a wife, you might return to an art or a craft you had learned early on and then in older age go back into it. These new turnings were a very real theme… EML: I learned so much from you. One of the themes was making-do with materials at hand. There was something very moving to me about people who are living often very close to the margins of life, but taking things at hand to make things that were beautiful… a whole lesson in how we really can’t live without beauty and changing our environment. JB: And a great example of that was Mrs. Patoine’s Plastic Bread Bag Rug. EML: Oh, I was hoping you’d talk about that! JB: That was the piece that was either most castigated or most admired in the exhibit “Always in Season.” She had worked for Head Start and collected 525 bread bags and then braided them into this rug. The amazing thing about the rug was its beauty — her use of color… This was the case of so many of the people… We had Bob Bearor’s jig sticks that were absolutely magnificent. He made them from all different kinds of woods and they were beautiful. He wouldn’t sell them — he allowed us to use them for the exhibition — but he still has them to this day. EML: There’s something about occupations too, isn’t there? Capturing some of the images of what you did after you could no longer do it. JB: Yes. Burleigh Woodard, who used chips from the local sawmill to whittle his carvings — he had been a teamster and when he could no longer team he carved the horses and the vehicles that he had used. EML: That was my first foray into what in that day was really significant private funding. There was a wonderful head of community relations at IBM at the time named Harry Hill. We got him interested, and the day we were headed over to make our big presentation — and you know, we were going to ask for $25,000 and I just thought that was really, really being ambitious! But, it was what we needed. So, Jane and I were headed over and we were really nervous and I was driving and I backed into a car… what was the license plate, Jane? JB: It said HILL! EML: We looked at each other and we said oh, this is a really bad sign. Anyway, we made our best case — you must have had slides Jane — we showed them what it was that had been discovered — what we were just bound and determined to share with the rest of the state. And by gosh, we got the $25,000 and real enthusiasm and partnership from IBM. Years later, I had a chance to thank Harry again and he said: “you should have asked us for more!” That was a big experience and a leap for the Arts Council too in realizing that there was private sponsorship for what we were doing if it was really good and if it really meant something to the state. JB: Yes. I always felt that it was the stories as well as the slides that captured them. EML: That was the other brilliant thing that you did was to join the maker with the object. People understood not only out of what tradition this was coming but were hearing about it in the person’s own voice. JB: Not only that but the other thing I discovered was most often there was an emotional bond between the maker and the person that they gave this gift of folk art to. One thing I’ll always remember were the artists themselves coming to the openings and just being amazed. EML: Yes, that was really touching. Now Jane you went on and did many other wonderful projects for the Arts Council; I unfortunately — or fortunately — got drawn away to Washington and then there was a time I think at which you felt like the folk life program for Vermont really needed its own space — how did that happen? JB: There was the 1982 Governor’s Conference on the Future of Vermont’s Heritage which was just when the “Always in Season” exhibit opened at the Historical Society. Out of that came a resolution to start an organization that would use interviewing as its major technique, would have an archive, and would do public programming — and we decided to form the Vermont Folklife Center but it was under the wing of the Arts Council. Then Towney Anderson came to me — he was an historic preservationist and wanted to restore the Gomaliel Painter House at Middlebury College. He said, “You want your folk life center; I want to restore the Painter House – let’s write the trustees a proposal” — which we proceeded to do. It was a crazy proposal: I said I’d raise $800,000 and he said he’d raise $800,000 and we were going to restore the Painter House and put the Folklife Center in there. And — it was nuts. I’d never raised ten cents. EML: You became a fabulous fundraiser, Jane! JB: The college board of trustees restored it and offered us a space so my board then said okay, go see if you can raise some money and then I luckily was able to raise $300,000 and we jumped! EML: It was another one of those leaps of faith, wasn’t it? JB: In those days you just have your eye on the star and you just keep going. And you also, at the Arts Council, gave me another huge boon, Ellen. I had discovered a person called Daisy Turner… Daisy was a remarkable woman. At one hundred years of age, she preserved in stories the history of her family from Africa, to enslavement in Virginia, and to eventual freedom and a farm in Grafton, Vermont. EML: Ah, that’s right! That became very important work. JB: It did. But it was taking a lot of time to travel to Grafton and interview Daisy. Ellen questioned me as to whether I thought this was right. And I said “Ellen, I think her story is incredible and I think I’ve got to do this.” And you allowed me to do it, and it proved to be really an amazing story and a lot has come out of it. We’re about to do a second children’s book. First we did a video for the schools — then we got into radio because I felt radio was a cheaper way of get book. First we did a video for the schools — then we got into radio because I felt radio was a cheaper way of getting stories out and reaching the audience we wanted to reach and we won a Peabody Award (almost lowers her voice saying it). And that really sort of got us going. EML: So the Daisy Turner story kind of propelled the first programming at the new Vermont Folklife Center — that was the transition from the Arts Council to the Folklife Center. JB: That’s exactly right. And I realized early on radio was very important. We did a farm series, and I think I’m working on my ninth or tenth radio series at the moment. That became a very important part of our programming to reach a larger audience. The archive really has become the heart of the Folklife Center. We based everything on the oral interview; I think we now have about 4,000 interviews. We have about 20,000 photographs that further elucidate the interviews, often family photographs. We’re in the process of digitizing this — it’s going to take forever! — with the hope that any Vermont schoolchild can plug into it and listen to the interviews, or at least read the transcripts and hear a bit of the interviews. I think that’s why radio is so important because it’s the power of the person’s voice, the voice has a piece of the soul in it… EML: Talk a little bit about the kinds of exhibitions in your space. JB: “Always in Season” was a survey and gave me an understanding of what was out there but we’ve continued to find new artists and different ways of looking at things. We opened with “Legacy of the Lake” which was the folk arts of Lake Champlain. It included boat models, duck and fish decoys — and also some baskets, snowshoes, and camp furniture by the Obomsawin Family (an Abenaki family from Odanak, Canada) — and even Champ imagery. One marvelous little miniature duck decoy had been made in the shape of a heart — the bottom was a heart, the top were two little tiny duck decoys and it was made by a man who had been crippled by polio and turned to carving and he sent it to his sister — again, the personal nature of folk art. Another exhibit we called “From Generation to Generation” — we took 2 families, one on Lake Champlain, one in the river bottom down around Manchester and showed 5 and 6 generations of the different arts… The river bottom family was a deaf family — they turned to their needlework and their handiwork as a way to communicate. EML: I loved that one! Jane, has your overview or map of the state’s folk life traditions changed over the years? JB: I think what you see is a very real change coming in the sixties and I think with the new immigrant groups. We’re documenting them as well, and their arts are going to have an influence certainly on what Vermont is. EML: Yes, — how people are re-interpreting their traditions that are so different from ours… JB: that’s right and how living here influences them and still incorporating their traditions and continuing them. The interesting thing about what we do is seeing these new people as they come. For example, there’s a Lao family in Brattleboro; one of the family members is a musician and he has done an opera about coming to Vermont. EML: Do you think that Vermont — over all these years with your incredible leadership — has succeeded in both capturing the traditional art but showing Vermont that it does have a traditional culture, and having people appreciate it more? JB: Oh, I’d really like to think that. Over and over I’ve had comments where things we’ve done have touched a chord with people. They’ve recognized that this is part of their own tradition. Or even the Daisy Turner story would affect many other Vermonters, saying “you know we have these kinds of traditions” and I think that new people coming in are interested in what was here before. I think it anchors people if you choose a place to live you want to know what has made the landscape what it is — and it’s the people. EML: Yes, it should have a very, very profound influence on how we think about Vermont’s future. Especially, as you said, those new people and the tendency to carve up the farmland, or to maybe not understand why the buildings look the way they do, or the way wood is — is it stacked or piled? JB: Stacked. EML: (laughing). …stacked the way it is. All those visual clues that go back to the practices that built the Vermont that people love. If they understand them then my hope is that they’ll preserve them. JB: I’ve been working on this Legislative Series for radio — this was a contract with the Snelling Center to do 35 interviews with former legislators, and it’s what I’m working on right as we speak; I think it’s going to air in November, and it’s a 10-part series — and I’m struck by the tension that is here in Vermont all the time, I think, between tradition and change, the tension between tradition and creativity. EML: Jane, you are about to receive the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts…. JB: interjects — You think of all those wonderful artists who get it and I feel I’m a fraud, Ellen, I really do! EML: You stand for all of those unknown artists, the anonymous artists, and beautiful makers and tellers of tales that you’ve helped celebrate in Vermont for three decades. And aside from that, there’s your own work. If you hadn’t done it and done it so well Vermont’s heritage would be poorer, we wouldn’t know about our traditional culture — what it is that we look like, why we talk the way we do, and the stories that form our bond to each other. And if we don’t understand it then we won’t know how to preserve it. So, it’s been a long time in coming and I think it’s just the right time for you — and all that you stand for — to get this recognition. JB: You certainly gave me the opportunity — there’s no question about that. You’ve been just a great supporter and really allowed all this to happen. EML: That was a joy, that was just a great joy, to find you over the hill and then just let you go and do all your wonderful things. What a happy outcome to see you get the recognition you deserve. It’s you and all you stand for, so that’s what you’ll have to remember when you get applauded. and I will be there on the 29th to cheer you on! For more on Ellen McCulloch-Lovell, see the August 2004 archive. The 2004 Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts For info, call 802-828-3293 or visit www.vermontartscouncil.org. |