How do we live with the river? Now that flooding seems to hit some part of Vermont every year, that’s a question many cities and towns are asking. Artist Diedra Michelle said that is one of many issues raised by “Heart of Barre: Building Community After the Floods.” After stints at Nelson’s Ace Hardware on Barre’s North Main Street and in the Statehouse in Montpelier, the multi-media celebration of community, compassion, and resilience has been installed in the building it was designed to be part of — the Aldrich Public Library.
Michelle came up with the idea of using art to capture the experiences of those affected by Barre’s 2023 flood. She invited poet and community organizer Shawna Trader to join her, and then asked Aldrich librarian Kristin Baumann if the library could be the project’s future home. Both enthusiastically said “Yes,” and so started a project that would still be in progress during Barre’s 2024 flooding.
“This is where it (the exhibit) is supposed to be,” Trader said in an interview at the opening celebration Feb. 13. “All of the stories, the heart and the emotion, and all of the work, took place right here on these streets, within a mile radius of the library, so it’s really special that it’s here.”
Baumann said the exhibit is a wonderful addition to the library, and she is pleased that “this gift to the city gets housed here.”
Since Michelle already had Baumann’s okay, she designed the project specifically for the grand stairway to the second floor that starts with two approaches that meet at the landing. On each end of the landing there is an 80-by-80-inch painting. One is a grid of 20 portraits of 23 people who were deeply involved in the flood, including people who lost their homes, community leaders, business owners, and volunteers. On the other side is “Water Heart,” Michelle’s painting of lotuses.
“Water is not our enemy, and we need it to live,” she said. “The water behind the lotuses is deep, because the lotuses need their roots to grow deep into the earth to grow well, just like we need that deep connection with community to survive things like floods.”
Going up the stairs and on the landing, there are twenty 16-by-20-inch panels with smaller images, poems, and narratives about the 23 people whose portraits Michelle painted. Each also has a QR code to audio clips of people sharing their experiences. Each participant went to Michelle’s studio to be photographed for the portrait, and for an interview with Trader for one or two hours. During the 2023 flood, Trader was executive director of the Rainbow Bridge Community Center, which became a convergence point for volunteers and supplies. In addition to coordinating that, Trader worked in the field, providing opportunities to meet many people.
“One of the most important elements is how it (the flood) changed us as individual people, but also as community members,” Trader said. “For some of the people in this project, they had never received help before in their adult lives. They had given help. Vermonters love to give a lot, but we’re reluctant to receive help.
“We’re very much rugged individualist types, but the flood has a way of breaking down the inhibitions you usually have to opening up and being vulnerable … Disasters … are an opportunity for building community.”
Trader said some good things came out of the flood. “For me, personally, I met my partner doing flood recovery work.” Since the river brought them together, they named their now-six-month-old daughter River.
