Jonathan Sa'adah

Tag: Artists

  • The Administrator’s Year: Running Vermont’s Most Radical CETA Arts Program

    The Administrator’s Year: Running Vermont’s Most Radical CETA Arts Program

    The history of American federal spending is littered with contradictions — moments when even unlikely leaders championed programs that would have lasting cultural impact. Such was the case with the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), signed into law by President Richard Nixon in December 1973, not out of any particular regard for artists, but as part of a broader effort to combat unemployment during an economic downturn.

    Even in 1978 it was obvious that Ron Hadley was going to have a career as a jazz keyboard player. Almost 50 years later, he has, but the CETA job helped him at the early part of his career with some stability and a time to focus on his own compositions.

    Yet between 1974 and 1981, CETA would prove to be a transformative lifeline for the American arts community. More than 20,000 artists received full-time employment through the program — the largest federal support initiative for creative workers since the Depression-era Works Progress Administration. What distinguished CETA from its 1930s predecessor was its fundamentally decentralized structure: rather than operating as a centralized federal program, CETA distributed funds through more than 500 local entities, allowing individual communities to shape arts employment according to local needs and priorities.

    In Vermont, the state’s Arts Council became one such recipient, directing CETA funds towards organizations across the state for arts-related projects. At its peak, the program supported about 70 (exact number unknown) Vermont artists, paying them $10 per hour as teachers, radio stations producers, arts administrators/programmers embedded in community organizations, and ensemble performers — meaningful work that sustained a generation of creative workers in a state not known for deep pockets in the arts, and helped the organizations they were employed by. It also contributed to a rural ethos where Vermont drew radical artistic organizations and artists, such as the Bread and Puppet Theater, which moved to Glover and became a fixture in the state.

    How I Became an Arts Administrator

    In February 1977, I was hired to administer a program unique in Vermont and most likely in federal CETA history. The position came my way almost by accident. When Fonda Joy Segal, the renegade CETA administrator who had conceived and pushed through the program, began interviewing candidates, I lived nearby and was the first to walk through the door. Segal, a Brooklyn-born iconoclast who had met her husband while modeling at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and later moved to Vermont to open a health food store in Woodstock, saw something in me — or perhaps simply recognized that I was willing to take on the work.

    Fonda Segal and Bill Schubert (owner of Philo Records) reviewing portfolios during the artist selection process. Ferrisburg, Vermont, January 1978.
    Fonda in the program’s “administrative office”, shared with Pentangle Arts in Woodstock, Vermont.

    She offered me the job on the spot. I accepted, grateful for the steady income and intrigued with the prospect of traveling across Vermont to meet working artists. I had no way of knowing, in that moment, that this program would be one of the most experimental and short-lived arts programs launched by the arts “establishment” of the state.

    “Vermont Images” was Segal’s brainchild, and it represented a radical departure from how CETA funds were typically deployed. While other CETA programs paid artists to teach in schools or participate in cultural organizations, Vermont Images took a different approach entirely: it provided direct financial support to seven selected artists to pursue their own creative work, without any obligation to teach, exhibit, or serve institutional needs. It was unconditional support — a rarity in the bureaucratic world of government arts funding.

    My job was to make it work. As administrator, I was responsible for periodically meeting with each of the seven artists, monitoring the program’s progress, and coordinating the logistics of what was, in many ways, an act of faith in artistic practice itself.

    A Year Traversing the State

    Over the course of the program’s single year of operation, I traveled the length and breadth of the small state of Vermont. I crossed the Green Mountains. I drove through villages and rural hamlets. I found myself in the private creative spaces of serious working artists — people who had committed themselves to their practice despite the economic precarity that typically defines artistic life.

    Mary Azarian lived (and lives) on a family hilltop farm in Vermont. Her woodcuts are widely published and have won many awards. She also publishes books through the Farmhouse Press.

    What I witnessed, from studio to studio, was the tangible impact of unconditional support. These seven artists — selected by Segal with an advising committee — represented the kind of working creatives who sustained Vermont’s cultural life but rarely received institutional recognition or steady income. For them, Vermont Images was not a stepping stone or a credential-building opportunity. It was a lifeline. The support I helped administer allowed them to continue their work, to deepen their practice, and to remain in Vermont rather than perhaps migrating to larger cultural centers where opportunities for artists were more abundant.

    I learned something during that year that bureaucrats and institutional administrators often miss: the direct correlation between financial security and artistic flourishing. I saw how steady income removed the constant anxiety that forces artists to abandon their studios for survival jobs. I understood, from conversations and studio visits, how meaningful the program’s support had been in these artists’ lives.

    Carlos Richardson used negatives taken with an 8×10 view camera in making platinum prints. He had a career as a teacher and a photographer.

    The Clash Between Vision and Institution

    But Vermont Images existed in tension with the institution that housed it. The Vermont Arts Council itself was run by Ellen McCulloch-Lovell, an establishment-oriented administrator more at home navigating institutional relations and political support than thorny artist questions. McCulloch-Lovell deserves credit for building up Vermont’s arts infrastructure and contributing substantially to the state’s cultural development. But her orientation was fundamentally different from Segal’s — and mine, by extension.

    Where McCulloch-Lovell thought in terms of institutions, infrastructure, and sustainability, Segal thought in terms of artists and creative need. Vermont Images represented that artist-centered philosophy taken to its logical conclusion: direct support, no strings attached, no institutional mediation.

    It was too free-form for the Vermont Arts Council. The program was not renewed.

    Robert Caswell was a poet and professor in Burlington Vermont. He taught at the University of Vermont in the English department and is remembered for his book Exiled from North Street. He died in 2014.

    In any case, nationally the CETA program was winding down. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he moved quickly to terminate CETA altogether, abruptly ending a decade of federal arts employment support. The remaining CETA programs in Vermont, which had continued to support artists working with cultural institutions, were shuttered. The experiment was over.

    A Glimpse of What Was Possible

    My year as administrator of Vermont Images offered a rare window into what federal arts support could look like when bureaucracy stepped back and trust stepped in. It had a modest budget and seven artists to support — not enough to transform the state’s cultural landscape, but enough to change the lives of those seven people, and myself. I had traversed Vermont’s back roads and witnessed creative practice in its most authentic form, unmediated by institutional necessity.

    The program lasted only a year. It never grew. It was deemed too unconventional to continue. But for those seven artists, and for me, it represented something exceedingly rare in American life: a government program designed not to serve the state’s interests, not to build institutions, not to create measurable outcomes — but simply to support artists in doing their work.

    That simplicity, that directness, that trust in creative practice itself — these things made Vermont Images worth remembering, even fifty years later.

    Ernestine Pannes was a cross-dispciplinary researcher and writer, and was always exceedingly hard to pigeonhole. The committee decided that her research as a sociologist met the test for artistic work and supported her project studying the Vermont town of Weston. Her work was published under the title Waters of the Lonely Way.

  • Rebels in class: The birth of Pilobolus Dance Theater

    There aren’t many arts organizations that survive fifty years, but the energetic dance group Pilobolus has surpassed the half-century mark and is still going strong. That’s not to say that getting to fifty has been easy. Part of its secret in attaining longevity has been that since birth it’s had an audacity and questioning of conventions that’s part of its DNA. The group has not been afraid of going against the rules and even reinventing itself when needed. When under stress, much like the fungus from which it took its name, Pilobolus fires out high speed spores for propagation and that’s proven to be an effective strategy for survival.

    Pilobolus in Center Theater, 1972
    Pilobolus never cared too much for what was expected of dancers. Rebellious by nature, they defined a new vocabulary and were rewarded with quick critical acclaim.

    The original hot spark that ignited Pilobolus was struck in Professor Alison Chase’s dance class at Dartmouth College. It was 1971 – Vietnam years – and the Dartmouth administration, along with parts of the student body, were still stubbornly holding on to being an all-male college. Regardless, women were beginning to be a presence on campus. In reality, a majority of the students were rebellious and seeking teachers who not only opposed the war but embraced alternative approaches. Alison Chase was young – closer in age to her students than to other professors in her department – and as a teacher she had a collective and improvisational style of teaching choreography that caught the times. Just that there was a dance class on campus was a big step for the college. When most professors at Dartmouth were stodgy academics often tacitly supporting the status quo, Chase was a young attractive female teaching testosterone saturated students in leotards – a sure recipe to create sparks if not smoke and fire. She connected them with the world of dance, and in doing so she altered their lives and they, in turn, hers.

    Alison Chase entertaining Martha Clarke’s son with a marionette. October, 1975 in-between performances at Espace Cardin in Paris.

    I too was a Dartmouth student during those years, and the original dancers were friends or schoolmates. Being aware of the campus buzz surrounding their work, I photographed one of their first public performances on a small experimental stage in the college’s art center.

    Ocellus was a dance linking bodies in fluid, sculptural sequences. Created before the women joined by Barnett, Wolken, Pendleton, and Harris it combined strength with languid beauty and was one of their early signature pieces.

    Some months later, after graduation and during the winter of 1972-1973, I caravaned with them through northern New England photographing some of their early public performances. These performances were on small stages in college towns. The truth was that having a stage on which to rehearse and communally choreograph was as valuable to them as the small fee they were being paid. This was truly the birth period of the dance group, as it built up a repertoire and expanded from the original male quartet to six, adding two women. One, not completely surprisingly, was their former teacher and the other, Martha Clarke.

    Martha Clarke and Alison Chase in Cameo (1973), their first duet after joining Piloblus.

    In looking back at these photographs I think how different they would have been if I were shooting them today. They were shot on high speed black-and-white negative film (Tri-X) that was then processed to reverse the image, yielding a positive transparency. The reversal was to get around not having a darkroom, since I was living in the woods with no electricity and only rudimentary plumbing. The grit (organic material) in the water shows up as a lot of “dust” in the photos. More light was required for the exposures than what we need now, so even though I was using a Leica camera with fast lenses (and a silent shutter), taking photos that were representative of the dances was a challenge, especially since they were shot during actual performances and I was using dim stage lighting.

    London 1973 poster

    After these pictures were taken Pilobolus traveled to Edinburgh where it was the hit of the Fringe Festival, being awarded the “Fringe First Prize”, and continued on to shows in London. At Moses Pendleton’s suggestion, a photograph of mine (a detail of a Glenwood stove) was used for their poster. Their receptions in Edinburgh and later London were big steps to their widening success. Soon after they left their base in Vermont and moved to southern Connecticut, which is still their home. In late summer of 1975 our paths crossed again when they were in Paris performing at Espace Pierre-Cardin. It was fun to see them being courted by the European arts aristocracy, as they continued gathering steam.

    A selection of these pictures appeared in the book Pilobolus A Story of Dance and Life by Robert Pranzatelli (2024, University Press of Florida), which colorfully weaves together the complicated story threads underlying the history of this pioneering and maverick dance company.