Claremont ascending on a path lined with local art and food

By BILL CHAISSON
The group public painting event that took place through most of last Saturday on the Santagate Bridge got me thinking about the future of Claremont. Although some of the artists lived locally, many of them did not; they had been invited from other parts of New Hampshire and Vermont to help beautify downtown Claremont and they were glad to do it. Most of them had either come up with designs just before they arrived or had fished an old design from another medium out of the archive and redeployed it as a mural. These are creative people, in other words, people you ask to make something beautiful and intriguing and they say, “Hmm. OK, how big and in what medium?.” What if there were hundreds of people like this living in Claremont. It could happen. And frankly, it often does.

Over the years I have lived in a lot of different places, 24 to be exact. When I became an adult and started moving to where I wanted to be, I often ended up in college towns because I was pursuing an education. However, many people gravitate toward college towns because they are fun and there is usually plenty of work there, especially in the service economy.

One of the aspects of college towns that makes them fun is the arts. The performing arts are the obvious ones because you need an audience to make them happen, so that gives a whole crowd of people a job to do, so to speak. You have an army of young people employed in the service industry who, when they get off their shift, are looking for something to do. Some of them are actually performers, but most are audience members. Enthusiastic and repeat audience members.

But the visual arts are important too. Visual artist don’t need an audience while they are creating — many of them really hate to be watched — but they do need clients and patrons. They need a population around them to appreciate their art — to show to the public, where it can be admired — and to buy it. Not incidentally, a fair number of performing artists are also visual artists and vice versa. Sometimes creativity is just creativity. Furthermore, many of those audience members for the performing arts begin to actually appreciate the creative process if they go to enough performances and stay sober enough to be aware of what is really going on around them. Once they become aware of what the creative process entails, not a few of them begin to pay attention to the visual arts. They become, here’s an old-fashioned word, aesthetes. They begin to realize that art makes your life better just because it is there, around you. So, these people become clients of the visual artists.

This is a common phenomenon in college towns because the university or college supplies at least some of the artists and some of the audience. But college towns are generally expensive places to live and neither art nor the service economy is particularly well paid. So, artists seek out places to live where they can have a lot of room to work, but not pay a lot for it. The latest artist destination has been Detroit. Six or seven years ago you could buy a whole masonry building there for practically nothing. There was literally an exodus from Brooklyn to Detroit at that time and a friend of mine in Detroit (a musician and a native of the city) was complaining only half-humorously about all the New Yorkers moving in. Although the neighborhood around Wayne State University has apparently always been hip, no one would call Detroit a college town.

More locally, look at Brattleboro, Vermont. They have Marlboro College up the hill, but it’s tiny and hardly constitutes the reason why Brattleboro became an artist and artisan haven. In this state Portsmouth began to boom in the 1980s. I remember when I was living in Boston back then and it was already getting too expensive for artists and they were headed for one of two places: Portsmouth or Portland, Maine, neither of which are college towns.

So, Claremont: are you the next Portsmouth?

Hardwick, Vermont in the Northeast Kingdom is another place that is growing, but it is not so much art as food that is pushing it forward. There is even a book called “The Town That Food Saved” (2009) by Ben Hewitt about Hardwick. It is subtitled “How one community found vitality in local food,” which tells you a lot of the story. 

Locally-grown food is already on the upswing here, which is easily measured by the growth of the farmers’ market. Food has become an aesthetic decision. “You are what you eat” has taken on a whole new meaning. Do artists and their audience like to eat local food? Of course they do. When artists move into a community they are often looking for the “genius of place,” the spirit that animates it. When you eat locally-grown food, you are essentially eating the spirit of the place.

Claremont has a makerspace and a locavore market. Build it and they will come.

 

Bill Chaisson is the editor of the Eagle Times and is neither a performing nor a visual artist.