About NEVA museum.

What is New England Visionary Artists Museum?
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In Northampton, Massachusetts, USA, the museum conserves the work of and educates on the life of creatives who have been served by the Anchor House of Artists and presents the life view of creative workers through their products and labors.

The mission...to serve the legacies of artists who dedicated their lives to producing images derived from the wellspring of inner vision.

The collection includes artifacts from the lives and works of artists who touched the Anchor House of Artists since its founding in 1997, the works by living artists with a special visionary focus, and more.

THE CONVERSATION ROOM: Artwork can take lives of their own only because they are an extension of our humanity. Like humans when artifacts are set in proximity to each other, they reflect each others appearances. They commnuicate. This is when artworks are themselves authentic, which is a word much debated for its meaning, but accept it to mean here made by hand.

Our understanding of art today is global and separated, as most works of the hand are, from a general appreciation of what they are: the traces of human lives that strive to bring inner visions into form. There is a universal shift in seeing creative work growing from the transitory and instantaneous affect of the Internet. What were stable canons of art tradition are now the subject of memes and rifts for new image makers. Though artifacts do remain and their histories are important, their value is diminished to the level of how their appearance, form, and content can be used to build new artifact.

​The value accorded to artifice and manufacture have changed, too. Since smart technology generates perfect imposters for the actual labors of human hands, the latter has become more a matter of revered regard and the former the subject of adornment; who needs to acquire the real thing when the exact reproduction will serve at a fraction of the cost.

Actual work of the hands though is not to be dismissed. The survival of human relationship is under assault from a machination of our collective technological genius. We have arrived at a place where we have essentially left the activity of the human hand to the realm of an anachronism.

In this place here and now though, we set that work of the hand near each other to explore what is human relationship and how it can continue. The exhibit is a rotation of work in the collection by various artists.

an abundance of stories to tell in the collection.

Featured legacies:

Genevieve Mae Burnett (1945-2015)

Mary Dunn (1956-2008)

Deborah Sklar (1964-2014)

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the life of the artist matters.

-LET THE ARTIST SPEAK-