Astute readers of the new Vermont Mozart Festival brochure may note a few gaps -- not in the programming, but in the corporate-sponsorship department. Four of the 19 concerts in the 31st season, which runs from July 18 to August 8, lack the imprimatur of a big business such as Hydro Quebec or Vermont Tent Company. Corporate cash is an essential component in the festival's $750,000 budget.... Read more

"I saw the ad and thought, 'Burlington, Vermont -- wow," says Evelyn Hankins. She apparently wasn't the only one. According to Fleming Museum Director Janie Cohen, "an exceptionally strong candidate pool" responded to the university's search for a new curator of collections and exhibitions. Hankins, an assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, was Cohen's number-one choice.

Isn't it a bit of a coup to hire away a curator from one of the most famous cultural institutions in the world?... Read more

Good news for local culture vultures: The Shelburne Museum, which reopens May 1, has cut ticket prices in half for Vermont residents.

Not-so-good news for longtime museum employees: The museum has made a major change in its pension plan that will mean a drop in what some staffers were expecting to receive at retirement.... Read more

The apparent suicide of monologist Spalding Gray was a wrenching loss. According to Alison Granucci, a friend of Gray and a former Burlingtonian, the loss is made more poignant by the fact that in his final performances -- a work-in-progress presentation of Life, Interrupted at New York's P.S. 122 last December, not long before he disappeared -- Gray was beginning to reveal a side of himself that had never been seen on stage.... Read more

Is the Great White Way being rerouted through White River Junction? Not quite. But according to Northern Stage Artistic Director Brooke Ciardelli, the theater company has found itself a spot inside New York theater's "gossip loop."... Read more

Attention, Burlington foodies: The Golden Carousel Restaurant is about to open at the University of Vermont. But don't get too excited: You won't be able to eat there. You'll only be able to drool.... Read more

When Elma Skopljak was a teenager in war-torn Bosnia, she kept her spirits up by teaching herself to draw. "I just felt I had to create something," she says. A friend gave her a book of paintings, on the cover of which was an image that became her favorite: Orphan Girl at the Cemetery by the 19th-century French Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix. It's an arresting portrait of a beautiful young woman, eyes widened in either defiance or shock, with headstones faintly visible in the background. Skopljak saw in the painting a connection to her own experience of losing friends to a terrible war.... Read more

Temperatures were Vermontish in New York City last weekend, but that didn't stop intrepid Saturday night gallery-goers. Most of them seemed to be squeezed into Taxter & Spengemann, the new Chelsea gallery of former Firehouse Gallery curator Pascal Spengemann. The space is so tiny -- think small apartment -- that there was hardly room for art aficionados and the art installation, a motorized trash pile by Charlotte Becket that was, in Spengemann's words, "subtly respirating."... Read more

Two months ago, "Showroom" was a stop on the Art Hop, the September gallery walk cum block party sponsored by Burlington's South End Arts and Business Association. The installation by Susan Smereka and Jane Horner inside a former auto showroom at Flynn Avenue and Shelburne Street was "sensational," says SEABA director Lorna-Kay Peale. Floor-to-ceiling sheets of white paper covered the interior, which was visible through plate-glass windows splattered with red paint -- suggesting, says Horner, "the surface one presents to the world, and the flare of emotions."... Read more

Middlebury dance professor Peter Schmitz says the daring and specificity of Paul Matteson's talent was apparent even when he was a senior in college.

It didn't take long for the rest of the world to notice. Matteson won Dance Magazine's National Student Choreographer award, and only two years after he graduated, in 2002, he nabbed a Bessie for his body of work with the David Dorfman and Lisa Rare dance companies. To win one of the most prestigious awards in contemporary dance so soon after going pro "is sort of unheard of," says Schmitz.... Read more