Brattleboro pieces a shattering past into a vision for the future

Read the full article at VTDigger.org. Here is an excerpt:

BRATTLEBORO — Talk to longtime locals who’ve witnessed a rising number of Main Street closures and crimes and they’ll tell you the community they remember is cracking.

Mary Lacy and Corrine Yonce, armed with cement and creative eyes, instead see things as the start of a potentially surprising metamorphosis.

The 33-year-old Vermont artists, commissioned to create a wall-size mosaic in downtown’s Pliny Park, recently asked residents to donate ceramic household scraps, be they chipped plates or scratched tiles.

Children added outgrown marbles and plastic game pieces. Adults offered stray earrings, beads and buttons. Elders parted with mementos as storied as shells from the faraway shore where one family’s ancestors shipped off three generations ago.

Lacy and Yonce invited townspeople to don safety glasses and break everything to bits. Then, as signs of new life have sprung up in nearby storefronts, the artists have pieced together the shattered vestiges of the past into a kaleidoscopic vision for the future.

Residents in the Vermont town of Bethel can see Lacy’s rainbow trout swimming along a 200-foot wall at the intersection of routes 12 and 107, while Manhattanites can spot her four-story-tall pinyon jay on a Harlem building at 151st and Broadway.Fellow artist Yonce, of Winooski, has found creative inspiration in social work, first as an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer and now as a staffer at the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity.