Our Story
Twenty five years ago, a small but dedicated group of community members believed that a significant investment in a community art center would contribute to the vitality, quality of life, and growth of Morrisville and the surrounding Lamoille Valley.
River Arts is a nonprofit community art center located in the historic Peoples Academy schoolhouse in downtown Morrisville, Vermont. River Arts formed in 1999 as the result of a community-planning forum that envisioned an intergenerational community arts center. Prior to the founding of River Arts, there were no arts programs available to most residents of Lamoille County.
River Arts began operating from a donated space in downtown Morrisville offering outreach arts programs. In 2005, with help from Preservation Trust of Vermont, River Arts purchased the original “Poor People’s Academy,” a high school founded in 1847 to educate the children of local farmers. In 2006, River Arts launched a capital campaign to raise funds to create the River Arts Center in the historic space. Renovation was completed in 2008, and in 2010, we met our capital campaign goal of raising $988,000 through community and private foundation support.
Today, River Arts’ original vision is alive and well. Over 5500 guests walk through our doors annually to visit the art galleries, participate in a class, make pottery in the clay studio, attend a concert, or send their kids to summer camp. We are proud to build on a rich heritage, and evolve to best serve the community for generations to come.
The River Arts, the organization and the board of trustees, is committed to anti-racism and to the work that this stance demands. We acknowledge that our core mission, Arts for Everyone, cannot hold true unless we take stock and evaluate the ways in which we have not provided equal access to everyone. We recognize that without conscious work on our part, we can potentially cause harm and promote the continued marginalization of the BIPOC members of our community. Anti-racism is not a switch that we can simply switch on, this is a long process that we are engaging in with open hearts.
As we begin 2022, we have planned a listening campaign to help us map out goals for the next twelve months to make our organization more equitable. These goals will be transparent and made public, not to receive any undeserved accolades for doing work we should have done a long time ago, but to hopefully act as a model for other organizations in our communities to enter into this work with us. Our mission is one that we will always stand by but we want it to hold more truth in the future than it has in the past: Arts for Everyone.
River Arts acknowledges that our organization is on Abenaki land. We recognize the indigenous culture and people that existed in N’dakinna (Homeland) long before Europeans arrived in North America. We commit to policies and practices of cultural equity to benefit current and future generations.
