 Humble beginnings: Peter Pitzele, Denny Cooper, and Stuart Bigley, circa 1976. |
It all started back in 1975, when then-Westport, Connecticut-based painter Stuart Bigley noticed a 14-acre property adjacent to his friend Peter Pitzele's house on Mountain Rest Road in New Paltz up for sale. The property's chief features were, as Bigley puts it, "a family farmhouse and a funky metal barn." Worried that a developer would purchase the land and plop down a subdivision, the two plotted instead "a utopian community for artists." In some ways that has happened, but a lot more has gone on as well.
The farmhouse would become Bigley's residence, while the barn, literally in his backyard, underwent years of renovation to serve as a combination art gallery and performance space. It is no larger than an average high school classroom—but this same classroom-size space has featured performances by Allen Ginsberg, Wavy Gravy, Richie Havens, Mose Allison, Dewey Redman, and Rory Block, among others. This smallness creates what comedian and Bard College Communications Director Mikhail Horowitz calls an "instantaneous and monstrous reciprocity," a connection between performer and audience more personal than what can be shared in an auditorium.
Bigley and Pitzele called their creation, and the ideas it would go on to embody, the Unison Arts Center. "It just came to both of us at the same time," he says. "A great name for people working together."
Pitzele first used the barn space as the Friends of the Mountain School, an alternative educational facility. The school's students included Pitzele's then five-year-old daughter. He ran it from 1976 until 1978, when it closed due to lack of funds.
In 1979, Bigley, Pitzele, and others redirected their efforts toward assisting a mutual friend, Garyan Butler, who had been put in charge of the local leg of the torch relay for the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics. Butler, his sister, and a handful of other people called the property their home during this period. Following the Olympic torch project and the dissolution of his marriage, Pitzele parted ways with Bigley, and thus with Unison. For the better part of 30 years, the Center has been the sole concern of Bigley and his wife, Helene, who entered Stuart's life, and thus Unison's, in 1980.
In its earliest days, the Center was a "mom-and-pop" operation, which Stuart insists "would have fallen apart" without Helene. In recent years, Helene has taken more of an interest in her pottery, passing many of the tasks involved in running Unison to a dedicated group of part-time staffers and a committed board of directors. The Center continues to be a vital force for community art and social change, and offers a wide array of services for the New Paltz community.
Over the past 30 years, Unison has come to offer summer children's arts camps, which have operated in some form since its inception; a sculpture garden, started five years ago; several yearly concert series, including an annual classical guitar series that features such luminaries as Sharon Isbin and the Ossad brothers; and workshops on everything from Tai Chi Chuan to bluegrass guitar to basketweaving.
The concert series and art exhibits are accomplished with the help of local colleges (both SUNY New Paltz and Ulster County Community College), local businesses, members, and the New York State Counsel on the Arts (NYSCA). Susan Scher, president of the board of birectors, worries that this official support won't be enough to take Unison to those who need it most—those who would not be impacted by the arts otherwise. She bewails the lack of young people on the board, but acknowledges, "it takes time before you realize, in a profound way, that you have to give back to your community."
Though the majority of his time goes to running the Center, Bigley remains an artist first and an arts administrator second. He claims no innate leadership skills. "A painter does not necessarily make a great arts administrator, but NYSCA has given a lot of help." Two NYSCA grants of $25,000 each, awarded in the early '90s, "professionalized the place," providing the funds necessary to add restrooms and offices to the Center. As he puts it, his skill is "taking the suggestions of others and turning them into programs."
 Behind the scenes at Unison: (top row): Luz Derosa, Slade Plantinga, Amos Newcombe, Joanne Talutto, Stuart Bigley, Kitty Brown (bottom row): Fred Mayo, Kathy Mazzetti, Susan Scher. |
Another point of pride for Bigley is Unison's continuing classical guitar series, for which he gives most of the credit to Tom Humphrey. Humphrey, a luthier from Gardiner, brought the idea for the series to Unison, and it started with a bang. In April of 2004, Unison hosted the first American performance of the Ossad family of Brazil—some eight musicians lead by the brothers Sérgio and Odair, who are widely considered the world's finest classical guitar duo. The family would go on to a critically acclaimed tour of the United States, after having made their American debut at Unison.
The sculpture garden is situated on some five acres and surrounds the Center on three sides. The brainchild of Denis Cooper, a friend and mentor to Bigley for some 40 years, it was born in a kind of "a-ha" moment.
Cooper had been visiting the space in the middle of winter, using the conference room to put together one of his own projects. Looking out the back window, he espied a rock outcropping through bare trees, and said to Stuart, "We must do something with this space." With Cooper's pledge of $2,500 a year for five years, the sculpture garden today includes several permanent and temporary pieces, including Mayday, Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse by Ellenville's Matt Pozorski, a work in welded steel that features four naked women ascending towards heaven together, riding atom bombs. The pieces fit into the landscape, some more literally than others; Jay Bedient's Gabion, named for the kind of rocks of which it is composed, mimics the undulations of the gentle hills throughout the sculpture garden.
Unison belongs to the German tradition of the kunsthalle, or a place in which art is displayed temporarily—not for the profit of its creators but for the joy of the viewer, who is more a participant than a passive ticketholder. Though both Scher and Bigley are interested in seeing Unison grow to include a real theater, with a seating capacity in the hundreds rather than the dozens, both agree the Center's charm lies in its smallness.
The "full-time hobby" of the Bigleys and a handful of others, Unison has come a long way from its humble beginnings as an anti-gentrification device dreamed up by a pair of hippie artists. Though he may never have enough time to pursue his painting, for Stuart Bigley, "Unison is an art form—a big, kinetic sculpture that I've been working on for the last 30 years."