Sessions

Conversations with the artists behind our exhibitions

Sometimes we ask the questions — sometimes artists are in conversation with each other. These sessions are real talk about the work and the artists creating it.

Jackie Carpenter, Renée Jett, Marian Lyndgaard

August 2nd, 2026 — Recorded August 2, 2026. Artists Jackie Carpenter, Renée Jett, and Marian Lyndgaard have a casual conversation about their art practices and participation in the group exhibition at UNDERSTORY titled "Darkness". Instead of a curator-led interview, three of the Darkness artists — Marian Lyndgaard, Jackie Carpenter, and Renée Jett — sat down together, the way they do most weeks, to talk about the show they built together. The three met at Vermont College of Fine Art and have kept meeting weekly ever since. They trace how the exhibition's theme grew out of a shared reading of bell hooks, and how each of them found their own way into it: Jackie through the history of women healers and the body as a site of "dark" knowledge; Renée through how mythology and fear of darkness get used to control people, especially around race; and Marian through prairie restoration, root systems, and quilted fabric buried in the ground. Along the way, they talk honestly about self-doubt, why art matters, and what it means to make work in community rather than alone.

Marian Lyndgaard & Susan Snipes

August 1st, 2026 — Recorded August 1, 2026. In this UNDERSTORY Session, gallery director Susan Snipes talks with artist Marian Lyndgaard about Entangled Communications, a piece made especially for Darkness. Marian works with fabric — heirloom scraps passed down through her family alongside discarded remnants — filled with batting, Poly-Fil, and in some pieces, soil. Some sections were buried directly in the prairie restoration site near her home in Minnesota, in the same spaces where she pulls invasive species and plants new seeds. Marian talks about the parallel she sees between quilting and prairie restoration — both rooted in care, both quietly essential systems working underground — and what it means to give old, half-forgotten fabric a second, active life.