Liza Myers returns to Sudbury and the Brandon Artists Guild

Written by Steven Jupiter for the Brandon Reporter

“It feels good to be back,” she said.  

Myers and her husband, Jim, had been in New Mexico for eight years, caring for Myers’s ailing uncle on top of some of her own recent health challenges.  A founding member of the Brandon Artists Guild (BAG), a longtime resident of Sudbury, and a fixture as the art teacher at Lothrop Elementary, Myers has returned to a community where she has deep ties and enduring friendships.  

As if any proof were needed, she was enthusiastically greeted by three different couples who happened to stroll by as she sat outside the BAG on a recent Sunday morning.  Having moved to Sudbury with Jim in 1988 and taught art at Lothrop for 19 years, she’s known this community for decades and it was happy to have her back.

Her path to Vermont was not a straight line.  Born in Maryland, she spent her childhood in constant motion, as her father sought to use his skills as an engineer to improve conditions in Latin America.

“He wanted to make the world a better place through technology,” Myers said.  

The family lived in Mexico, Colombia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Nicaragua.  She attended a Quaker school in Pennsylvania and then began university in Colombia.  After a semester, she transferred to the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico.  She left school for a bit to elope with her first husband, Bruce, and live out in the desert near Taos, which began a lifelong love affair with the American Southwest.

During that time—in the mid 1970s—she’d hitchhike to classes at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where she studied art and biology.  She was soon offered a job teaching art in Paraguay and off she went, setting up a ceramic studio to teach pottery.

“I’m still in touch with those kids,” said Myers.

After three years in Paraguay, she was back at UNM, where she finished her degree with honors.  After another year in Paraguay, she got a fellowship in ceramic sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.  She taught art at a number of schools in Maryland, got divorced, and moved to Vermont in 1984 because her brother had a place in Shelburne.

Her first job in Vermont was teaching art in West Rutland.  She lived in Hydeville, a tiny hamlet at the southern end of Lake Bomoseen.  After 2 years, she left Vermont for a job at the Purnell School in New Jersey.  Two weeks before she left for New Jersey, though, she met her husband of 30 years.  They were apart for only one year, though, as she came back to Vermont in 1988 and they built a house in Sudbury that they still live in.

They settled in and became fixtures in the community.  Liza began a 19-year tenure teaching art at Lothrop - “I influenced a generation of Pittsford kids” - and started making the connections that would eventually lead to the creation of the BAG in 2002-03.

“The Guild was really Warren’s project,” Myers said, referring to esteemed artist Warren Kimble, who’s been based in Brandon for decades. “There were a lot of other people who helped, but Warren got us together.  His perseverance kept it going.”

Brandon went through a stage in the latter half of the 20th century in which it was seen by surrounding communities as a little rough around the edges.  But by the early aughts, Brandon was experiencing one of its periodic “renaissances” in which folks seem to realize all the upsides to the town and begin reinvesting in the place.  

One of the BAG’s earliest triumphs was the famed Pig Parade in 2003, a fundraiser for the nascent organization in which artists painted, paraded, and auctioned off 30 sculptures of pigs.  Myers’s own pig, a winged beast named “Esperanza,” fetched $3,500.  The auction brought in enough money for the BAG to buy and renovate the building it still occupies on Center Street.  

“The kids at Lothrop made pig masks and marched in the parade,” Myers laughed.  

Myers’s pig was fairly typical of her work, a mixture of realism and fantasy that Myers calls “Visionary Realism,” which seems to have much in common with the Magical Realism of Latin America, where she’s spent so much time.  Her paintings capture something spiritual about nature, and while her scenes are rendered with great realism and attention to detail, they are clearly meant to depict visions rather than reality.

“There’s a very spiritual component to the natural world,” said Myers.  “It’s replenishing, rejuvenating. I love the itty bitty details…the edges of a petal.”

Ravens are a favorite motif.  

“They’re mysterious,” she said of the black-feathered creatures, as she explained the difference between crows and ravens.  “Birds connect us all.  Their migratory paths link all parts of the world, and when something disrupts the birds in one place, it has consequences somewhere else.”

In addition to all of her visual endeavors, Myers is also a musician.  She has been in a band called Sleeping Dogs (“Taconic rockabilly”) for years and composed several ecologically themed musicals for kids back in the 1990s.  She sang a few excerpts in a sweet, clear voice, including a short burst of rap.

Meanwhile, Myers’s home in Sudbury is undergoing renovation and her studio isn’t yet functional, but she’ll be back to making art soon.  She has to.  It’s simply what she does.

“I don’t sleep if I don’t make art.”