BRATTLEBORO, Vt. — Brattleboro Area Middle School eighth-graders in Alan Blackwell’s art class raced to put the finishing touches on their “Spirit House” for the inaugural Brattleboro Festival of Miniatures.
“It’s been about a month of working on this weird little house, and I think it looks awesome,” Blackwell said.
Festival creator Melany Kahn, a self-described mini-maximalist, has “always been smitten with tiny things, small things.” She said the town is bringing people together throughout December to celebrate small scenes, dioramas, dollhouses, model trains and Spirit Houses.
Some houses are already on display at the old Sam’s Outdoor Outfitters’ space at 74 Main Street. On Dec. 20, community members can see all of the local youths’ Spirit Houses on display from 2-6 p.m. at the Boys & Girls Club of Brattleboro, Vt., at 17 Flat St., before the homes return to Sam’s until the end of the year.
For Kahn, Spirit Houses are “an embodiment of a home infused with one’s personal spirit.” Kahn first learned about Spirit Houses from Ross Smart, who teaches a Spirit House class at the River Gallery School of Art. For the festival, Kahn recruited Mary McLoughlin at the HatchSpace to design, manufacture and fabricate a baker’s dozen of identical houses, which Kahn then distributed to 13 area schools and organizations.
“I got the idea that a school could take the same house and infuse its own spirit into the house through collaboration with the students — the classroom teacher directing it — and with the idea of each house being the exact same to start with but completely different when it’s finished,” Kahn said. “It teaches the idea that creativity and artistry can show up in a lot of different forms, that you can start with the exact same object, and it can have a million different interpretations.”
The following schools will have houses on display: Hilltop Montessori School, Putney Central School, Academy School, Dummerston School, Green Street School, Brattleboro Area Middle School, Brattleboro Union High School, Chesterfield School, Guilford Central School, Community House, Oak Grove School, the Grammar School and the Boys & Girls Club of Brattleboro.
Schools received their Spirit Houses in September and have had the entire semester to complete their homes. Blackwell’s students at Brattleboro Area Middle School and art teacher Willoughby Griffin’s classes at Oak Grove School were just two groups to participate in this creative endeavor.
Griffin said a total of 75 students in their first, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth grades contributed to the school’s house. Pupils used paints, cardboard, clay, dried moss, popsicle sticks and cardboard to decorate the interior and exterior of the building. Griffin said their art class explores nature within the arts, “so I gave them the theme of a ‘greenhouse,’ and they took it from there.”
Students worked alone or in small groups to create everything from miniature potted plants to tables to an exterior garden area for their building. Griffin said their favorite part was watching their students be excited about learning and solving problems together. They said they could feel the creative and focused energy flowing off their students while they worked.
“I hope they are taking away a positive experience working collaboratively and thinking creatively to solve problems and make the world more beautiful,” Griffin said.
Each Spirit House had an identical design: two floors with no stairs, a turret and a porch. Kahn said she encouraged the schools to infuse their own spirit and creativity into the houses.
“Really good miniatures tell stories,” she said. ”Anything that you can do big, you can do little.”
Kahn gave the educators no set rules for how the houses needed to look so they didn’t feel stuck “conforming to some set, curated idea.” Because the houses will be part of an exhibition, not a contest, Kahn said her only guiding principle was that schools have fun with their creations. She said she wanted participants to learn how to look at the same object and interpret it differently to produce 13 unique creations.
While Griffin’s students’ Spirit House drew on nature for inspiration, Blackwell said his students decided to convey the spirit of Brattleboro Area Middle School itself by transforming the entire house into an art space because “they wanted to convey the creative potential that exists in all of us as well as the school itself.” Throughout the process, Blackwell enjoyed stepping back and allowing his students to take ownership of the project. He said he hopes the community knows middle-schoolers are making “very, very cool artwork.”
“I hope my students leave this project feeling fulfilled. They worked collaboratively and on their own,” Blackwell said. “They came together to create something truly lovely, and they should be incredibly proud of themselves.”
While Kahn said the festival was her baby, she noted that the HatchSpace and the Downtown Brattleboro Alliance were key pillars in helping the Spirit House project come to life. She said festival-goers’ appetite for another Festival of Miniatures next year is huge, but she still is unsure if this will become an annual tradition. Nevertheless, she said the idea is replicable and would love to see other towns celebrate miniature creations too.
“My hope for the Spirit Houses is similar for my hope for the whole festival, which is that when folks come and take it all in, they can experience personally what happens when a community comes together around an accessible, creative, whimsical, artistic, apolitical theme and everybody leans in together,” she said.
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