Tom McKone
MONTPELIER — With Plexiglas protecting them from taco sauce, the colorful, painted tabletops at Julio’s Cantina on State Street in Montpelier have entertained diners for decades. These playful works, designed to look good from all sides of the table, represent one phase in the career of a multi-talented artist whose latest exhibit has just gone up at the Vermont Supreme Court Gallery: “Animal, Mineral: Paintings by Heidi Broner.”
The Calais artist painted Julio’s tabletops back when she was looking for paying jobs — mostly in the arts — just to scrape by. Particularly attracted to music and theater, she was a member of the Word of Mouth Chorus, which performed with the Bread and Puppet Theater, once touring with the two groups in Europe for three months.
Broner painted props for Bread and Puppet, and for other theaters in Vermont and New York City. In New York, she created puppets, masks, and set pieces for the opera “Frida,” about Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.
Among a variety of art jobs, her Vermont work included painting a set for Phish, which she said wasn’t very good. But it was for Phish! But no, she still insisted, it wasn’t very good.
But Broner loved theater. “It was all the arts. It was light, it was sound, it was visual, it was movement. It was everything,” she said in an interview at the Supreme Court Gallery on July 14, the day her show went up.
A turning point in her career came in 1999, when she began working in the Vermont granite industry, hand-carving detailed etchings on polished, black granite. She made enough money to buy a house, to buy art materials, and to have the freedom to work in her “own art world,” rather than stringing together “paying jobs.”
People became her main focus. She started taking what she calls “on-the-fly” photos to capture spontaneous moments she could use as a foundation for paintings. This led to a yearslong fascination with painting people at work, and to invitations to show her work at many galleries, including the Kent Museum, the Highland Center for the Arts, the T.W. Wood Museum, and the Vermont Statehouse. The works in this show span more than 20 years of her career, from 2003 to 2026, and include many work paintings.
“My older paintings are focused on people — their stance, their gesture, their posture,” she said. “I wanted to paint people doing something. I find that more expressive than anything posed.”
Broner said she and her husband, Mason Singer (a former board member for The Bridge), are self-publishing a book of her paintings of people at work. Designed by Singer and aptly titled, “Work,” the book is at the printer and will be available at the exhibit opening on August 7.
Retiring from her 23-year career in the granite industry gave her more time and another level of freedom. For years, on annual, week-long trips to the Maine coast, she wanted to paint rocks, and in 2025, she started to do that.
“Stone contains far more time,” she writes in her artist statement. “The many millions of years that formed it and changed it are there in something that can be seen and touched. I have a stone that I found in which one of the creatures fossilized in it was extinct when another in that same stone was alive. They are both there — time contained in something that I can hold in my hand.”
Mary Admasian, Mary Admasian, who along with state curator David Schutz assisted Broner in selecting the works for this exhibit, said the combination of the paintings of people working, for which Broner is well known, and her recent work with stone impressed the committee that selects artists for the gallery.
“She has such a beautiful sense of color and vibrancy,” Admasian said. “There’s so much energy, and she has such a great eye for detail and composition.”
“Animal, Mineral: Paintings by Heidi Broner” is open to the public at the Vermont Supreme Court Gallery, 111 State Street, Montpelier, weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. (except for the lunch hour), through Sept. 25, with an ArtWalk reception on Aug. 7, from 4:30 to 7:00 p.m., and artist remarks at 6 p.m.
