This year, Rokeby Museum announced the launch of a new partnership with Kasini House designed to engage contemporary artists as interpreters of the museum’s unique history. Ric Kasini Kadour, Curator and Project Director of Contemporary Art at Rokeby Museum, invited the artist team of Dan Snow Stoneworks (Elin and Dan) to a series of workshops and discussions designed to foster the integration of history and contemporary art into an artist’s practice. We joined ten other artists from around the U.S. and Canada at the museum last month for four days of thought-provoking research and an exercise in project development.

Once a Quaker family farm, today Rokeby Museum is a National Historic Landmark that connects visitors with the human experience of the Underground Railroad, and with the lives of the ardent abolitionists and talented artists, writers, and naturalists who lived on and farmed Rokeby for nearly 200 years.

Ric expressed a hope that the Lab would develop an aspect of our art practice that specifically engages with historic sites (or other non-art venues such as National or State Parks). The proposals will be published in a catalog that will be sent to 100 curators and historic sites across North America. 

Artist proposals, formulated in the lab, will be presented to the Rokeby community and the Vermont Curators Group, with a select number being accepted for installation in 2020. Rokeby will specifically be looking for works that connect Rokeby history to current social, economic, and environmental issues, and that when exhibited throughout the grounds and historic buildings will activate spaces in new, distinct and purposeful ways.

The proposal that we came up with ties the 19th century farmers of the Rokeby land to the indigenous people in the area at that time, and before. Rowland Evans Robinson wrote of a boyhood memory he had of going to the pools below a falls on Lewis Creek with his father. The inhabitants of the Abinaki encampments that lined both banks trapped fish and wove baskets that the senior Robinson purchased. 

If “Stone Weirs” were to be selected for installation, it would invite Rokeby visitors to wander in, around and through a convoluted series of dry stone walls on the lawn adjacent to the pond. The lines of stone would dip into, and under, the surface of the pond in a manner reminiscent of the passive-trapping constructions formerly made by indigenous people on rivers and creeks in the Champlain Valley.

Our positive experience at the lab is thanks to Catherine Brooks, Museum Director, the Rokeby Museum staff and Board of Trustees, and Chris Byrne and Ric Kasini Kadour of Kasini House. Their excellent planning and presentation allowed the artist-group a very congenial and creative atmosphere for their undertakings. We look forward to seeing what project proposals everyone comes up with!

With thanks to Skyler Maggiore for the fabulous group photo.