The Village Center for the Arts has worked to bring out the creativity of New Milford residents for over two decades - even those residents who least expect it.

The Village Center for the Arts is cool. There’s really no better word for the world of interesting sights and sounds that a person encounters upon entering the building, a former hardware store overlooking the Green in New Milford: it’s cool. 

“One of the things that happens when people, especially young kids, come in here for the first time is that they spend forty minutes just looking around,” says Jayson Roberts, the arts center’s founder and executive director. “They don’t know what to do. It’s overwhelming.”

He’s right. Every new glance around the studio space reveals some new curiosity, just begging for further investigation: a diorama depicting miniature artists at work in a miniature studio; the wild loops and curves of a student’s wooden sculpture; a pair of earrings whose pendants, upon further inspection, reveal themselves to be perfect tiny replicas of CoolWhip containers. Completely disregarding the workshops, studio hours, and events that the Village Center offers throughout the year, a person could spend hours just exploring the wealth of beautiful and strange creations that generations of artists have left behind in the building.

“It’s not neat and tidy,” says Roberts. “It’s comfortably messy.”

A view of part of the reference library, which extends into the back classroom (Photo: Ella Frauenhofer)

In the front room of the building, almost every shelf seems packed to overflowing with every imaginable species of art supply: paints and brushes, pencils and glues, and odds and ends of every description live in relative harmony side-by-side. 

A truly impressive reference library spans shelves that stretch from the classroom in the back of the building into the main studio. The reference library is also a lending library, with a number of books out of the building at any given time. “I don’t know which books are checked out,” Roberts admits, “or who has them.” 

Over the studio’s sink is an explosion of smears and splatters of every color paint imaginable - the second generation of the center’s “splat wall,” where students are encouraged to deposit leftover paint on their palettes at the end of classes or studio time. The original splat wall, having become so encrusted with paint that it was no longer usable, was removed during the downtime provided by COVID-19 lockdown. Roberts carved the wall into square segments that he has framed, a cross-section of the last fifteen years of the Village Center’s history.

“It’s evolving, it’s generational,” Roberts says, both of the splat wall and of the center. “It’s a long-term project.”

A plastic figure, made on one of the VCA's 3D printers (Photo: Ella Frauenhofer)

The programs offered by the Village Center for the Arts have also evolved over the years, both in response to the needs of the community and to the ideas of the artists who use the studio. 

The center offers classes and summer camps, such as their cartoon class and their video game camp, for children and teenagers, but also hosts programs for adults. In response to the interest of parents of the children in the video game camp - “the original gamers,” Roberts says - the center introduced an Adult Night as part of the camp. Parents can enjoy the elaborate video game setup which the Village Center creates every year to teach children about game design and technology. 

The acquisition of part of the downstairs space in their building has allowed Kaufman to introduce a pottery studio, which offers both instruction and rental space for artists. Roberts notes that the introduction of pottery for individuals or small groups was an innovation during the pandemic and has been very successful in bringing people back into in-person studio time. Kaufman is also an instructor with Education Without Walls and teaches art classes for students from that program.

Sharon Kaufman and a student in the VCA's new pottery workshop (Photo: Ella Frauenhofer)

One program close to Roberts’ heart is the Unexpected Artist, a free program which allows students to use the space for free in order to work on any homework project. He recalls helping students build volcanoes and Greek city-states year after year, and the unique experiences that the program fosters. “To see the interaction of sixteen- or seventeen-year-old kids that never interact in school - interacting because they have the same project, and having fun and being interested - that’s incredible.” 

One yearly project is the “mole” chemistry project, in which students are assigned an element and instructed to create a mole-shaped stuffed animal with some of the characteristics of that element. Roberts fondly recalls going to the grocery store, only for his teenaged cashier to grin at him as he was leaving and say, “I got a hundred on my mole.” 

The center also partners with the local high school to find interns and volunteers. This program helps young people to get work experience, volunteer hours, and references. “Some of them come in here and they just aren’t interested,” says Roberts, “but most of them overcome that. We change lives.”

The splat wall (Photo: Ella Frauenhofer)

The Village Center for the Arts was one of the recipients of the Northwest Connecticut Arts Council’s 2021 Litchfield Hills Creative Awards. “All of us that got the award, part of our mission is to change lives.”

All in all, that’s pretty cool.

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To learn more about the Village Center for the Arts, visit their website at https://www.villagecenterarts.org/.