There’s a contradiction at the heart of Lars Hasselblad Torres’ leadership of AVA Gallery and Art Center.
For the past 20 years or so, Torres has led organizations that were building more or less from the ground up. He founded Local 64, a co-working space in Montpelier; served as the head of Vermont’s short-lived Office of Creative Economy; ran Generator, a makerspace in Burlington; and more recently led Artisans Asylum, a 50,000-square-foot nonprofit arts and education studio in Boston.
AVA, though, is something else. While it’s still a nonprofit that operates on a lean budget, the Lebanon art center is more solid than a startup; it was founded in 1973. The contradiction is that AVA has been growing for much of that time and needs to continue to grow in new ways to remain a vital community resource.
“One of the things that was attractive to me about AVA is that it’s a 50-year organization,” Hasselblad Torres said in an interview in one of AVA’s second-floor classrooms.
His job is to infuse some of the vigor of a startup into a “legacy organization,” he said.
Hasselblad Torres, 54, has had an unconventional journey in the arts, with emphasis on what he calls “cultural entrepreneurship,” an umbrella term that covers the arts, creativity and making a living and a life.
He grew up around the world, in Seattle, Malaysia and Senegal. His mother worked in international development, and he attended a boarding school in Ivory Coast that was similar to an American high school. After his older brother graduated, Hasselblad Torres refused to go back and finished high school as an independent study.
That made it hard to get into college, so he moved to Southern California, where his father lived, and went to San Diego City College, then moved to the University of Southern California. He completed his undergraduate degree at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vt.
His main interest as a student was in how American films and TV influenced how cultures abroad conceived of “the good life.”
His undergraduate thesis also examined an intersection of art and commerce, in the humblest of settings.
He focused on “the dump in Senegal, studying informal recuperation practices and networks and how the dump served as this sort of space for the rural poor coming to the city, or the backsliding urban poor,” Hasselblad Torres said. “It was sort of this last-ditch catch zone, if you will, for economic activity.”
Children ages 9 to 16 would apprentice for fabricators who specialized in turning a particular piece of refuse into an inexpensive product that would serve the poor, converting a diesel filter into a charcoal stove, for example.
The dump was a kind of purgatory, a meager living or dead end for some, but a way out for the entrepreneurial-minded. It shouldn’t be confused with the co-working or makerspaces Hasselblad Torres has been working at since 2012, when he founded Local 64, the Montpelier co-working space. (He was involved with the project until 2021, after which it closed down.) But the link between creativity and entrepreneurship is a connecting thread between them.
Looking at Hasselblad Torres’ resume is like watching a surfer catching a wave and riding it until it peters out. The Office of the Creative Economy ran for a year and eight months, and Hasselblad Torres departed when it was clear the state wouldn’t invest in it. Generator, the Burlington creative launchpad, moved to more spacious quarters and substantially expanded its membership under Hasselblad Torres’ leadership from 2014 to 2017.
He took some time off to take a grant-funded photographic tour of the U.S., then went to work at Artisans Asylum in 2018, where he again presided over a move to larger space. In 2022, he moved on to HatchSpace, a nonprofit woodworking school and community workshop in Brattleboro.
And in between, he applied for the AVA directorship the last time it was open, in 2021. The AVA board hired Shari Boraz, who served from November 2021 until November 2024.
AVA has an unusual profile, as a serious outpost for visual art outside a major city, that appealed to him, along with its maturity as an organization. It also was closer to where he lives, in Walpole, N.H.
“At scale, in rural New England, there aren’t that many places where you can kind of have a big canvas and really try and exercise superlative influence and support throughout the arts,” Hasselblad Torres said.
When he started work last summer, Hasselblad Torres became the fourth person to lead AVA since 2016, when longtime Executive Director Bente Torjusen retired. Paul “Trip” Anderson III departed after two-and-a-half years amid a cash crunch after the staff expanded too quickly and revenue didn’t keep pace. Heidi Reynolds served from November 2019 through June 2021.
For all of those leaders, the job has remained the same: Continue to build AVA’s community ties, expand its programming and bring in more people who are interested in making art. Hasselblad Torres is taking a broader approach than his predecessors.
“The key priorities are really around building a sustainable financial model for the organization,” he said. What worked to build AVA as it is today “is not the business model that will take us into the future,” he said.
Throughout its growth, AVA had the backing of a generous group of donors and a steady membership model. It needs to bring in new donors, and the membership model is overdue for an update.
At the same time, AVA has capabilities to build on. The Sculptural Studies Building, named for Torjusen, is as much a makerspace as it is an art studio, with TIG welding (a specialized form of welding for thin steel and metals such as aluminum and copper) and other metalworking classes.
AVA is well-known for its education programs and for art exhibitions that prize what Hood Museum of Art Director John Stomberg has called “the modern, personal expressive mode.”
But as the welding classes suggest, there are other skills AVA can teach, Hasselblad Torres said. He’d like to expand AVA’s staff and faculty to include teaching in “arts fabrication.”
“I would love to, two years from now, have a program where young people have learned fabrication skills, such that they could then apprentice to artists anywhere in the world,” he said.
AVA also has a strong 3D printing program. He’d like to see that grow, and for AVA to add other digital applications: “laser cutting, vinyl cutting, digital photography, green screen photography, lighting. … So we’ll be investing in expanded digital learning opportunities here.”
And there’s also space at AVA for coworking, he said, which is in keeping with the organization’s commitment to creativity and community.
“I really like spaces where unlike skills can meet,” he said. That might enable potters to work with 3D printers, for example.
AVA already operates programs in the community, such as its Community Arts Open Studio, or CAOS, which offers studio time to children and their parents, programs for seniors and Art Lab, for people who attend the Special Needs Support Center in Lebanon.
New partnerships will be critical to cementing AVA’s place in the Upper Valley for the long term. Dartmouth College is a logical partner, Hasselblad Torres said, not only for its programs in the arts, but also because it has an interest in fostering cultural entrepreneurship.
“How could we contribute to that if that’s an area of increase that’s of interest to them? I don’t even know,” Hasselblad Torres said. “But I guess I’d like to explore it.”