Art of Mind exists because the Shenandoah Valley has no shortage of artists, and far too few places for them to buy good materials, use real equipment, and stand in a room with other people who make things.
The nearest professional art supply store is more than an hour away in any direction. So artists here order online, guess at colors on a screen, and wait. Students start projects with whatever the craft aisle happens to carry.
Art of Mind was built to end that, and then to keep going: a shop stocked with the brands artists actually use, a maker space with the equipment most people cannot keep at home, a class schedule that runs year round, and a gallery that gives work from this region a wall worth hanging on.
Professional grade paint, paper, clay, and tools, chosen by someone who has worked with all of it.
The maker space is meant to be used. Equipment stays available, and mess is part of the arrangement.
Classes are not a sideline here. They are how a creative community actually grows.
Kristin has taught art in Loudoun County Public Schools since 2005. Almost from the start she was building programs that ran past the final bell, coordinating Arts Explosion and working in the county’s after school arts programming for close to twenty years. She earned a BFA in photography and art education from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2004, and returned to VCU for a master’s in interdisciplinary arts, concentrating on painting and sculpture, in 2011.
Her own work circles one symbol: the circumpunct, a circle with a dot at its center. It has stood for the sun, the spirit, gold, and emotional restraint at different points in history. She paints and sculpts them by hand, one after another, in ceramics, on canvas, in felt and paper. The repetition is the point.
Process and meditation are what allow me to create.
Art of Mind grew out of both halves of that life. The maker knows what good materials cost you when they are hard to get. The teacher knows what happens to a person when someone hands them the right tool and the time to use it. This is the work she has been doing for twenty-one years, without the bell schedule.
Painters and potters working out of farm outbuildings. Teachers running kilns in school basements. Students building portfolios. People picking up a brush for the first time in forty years. What this region has lacked is not talent. It is infrastructure: somewhere to buy, to learn, to work, and to show.
Wall space and shelf space for people working in the Valley and on both sides of the Blue Ridge.
Support for young artists, and for the educators keeping school art programs alive.
Classes built for people who have never taken one, with no assumption that you arrive knowing anything.
Berryville, Virginia. Open Tuesday through Sunday.