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Coffee With: Carol Kaplan of the Farmington Valley Arts Center
By Carl Wiser
Staff Writer
Tucked away in a historic sandstone building near Whole Foods in Avon is the Farmington Valley Arts Center, where 21 artists work in 17 studios. One of them is Carol Kaplan, who has been the executive director since 2018.
During her tenure, she’s worked to bring in more visitors, who can take a class, browse the two galleries, and attend events like the popular Little Night Studio workshops.
The Arts Center, open since 1974, almost met its demise after the 2008 recession when it closed the galleries and shut down their summer camps, but these days it’s expanding - plans are in the works to take over a nearby building for their thriving ceramics program.
Kaplan discovered the Farmington Valley Arts Center when she took a class in decorative wall painting. “I always have been a maker since I was young,” she says. “Sewing was probably my intro. Painting furniture, which I still do. It was a family of six kids. We didn’t have a lot of spare money so we made our own clothes. There’d be some decrepit-looking table on the side of the road. I would grab it, throw it in the family van, sand it down, paint it, put it my bedroom.”
Kaplan grew up in Longmeadow, Mass. and landed in West Hartford when her husband Steve enrolled at the UConn School of Law in 1978. That’s where they raised three kids while Carol worked as a florist. In 1990, she opened a gift gallery on Park Road in West Hartford called Vis a Vis, which sold hand-painted furniture and consignment art. It closed a few years later, but Carol stayed active as a volunteer in her kids’ elementary school art programs. She decided to teach art in schools, so in 1999 she became a 47-year-old freshman at CCSU.
“It has a great art education program,” she says. “There were other students who were my age. I was hanging out with 22-year-olds, 50-year-olds, and all the people in between. We had a shared common interest. That’s what’s great about art: You become this cohort and you all hang out. It became this community. It was fantastic.”
As part of the program, she did student-teaching at Farmington High School, which led to a job as an art teacher at Union Elementary School in Unionville when she graduated in 2002.
“It was great. The principal was my same age. I went in as a step one but with a lot of life experience, and I had classroom management skills because I had children and I had done volunteer work.”
Carol made it a point to learn the names of all her students - about 300 of them. And she would look for a “hook,” or connection with each kid.
“You have so many different personalities, so many levels. You have the kid in the class who can draw the house and the tree beautifully, and then you have the kid who can’t. But when you do a play that year, or you do some sort of a design project, like a paper-folding relief sculpture, all of a sudden that kid is successful and he’s the star of the show. Art is not just being able to draw a tree beautifully.”
“I was pleasantly surprised at how much I loved teaching the little ones,” she adds. “What I love about art, the kids would walk into my classroom and they’re leaving what might be the harder things in their home classroom behind. Seeing them thrive in that space, that was huge.”
Kaplan transferred to East Farms Elementary School in Farmington in 2005, and in 2008 she started renting a studio at Farmington Valley Arts Center, just in time for the recession. She stuck it out until 2010; by that time she was working toward her master’s degree at Wesleyan.
“It’s a great program,” she says. “I had to take science and math and history courses as part of the degree. I had to take a lab science, but because it’s Wesleyan, it was an amazing course. This guy would come from Oregon every summer and teach a wildlife class... on the Connecticut River in a kayak!”
Kaplan earned her master’s in 2012 but didn’t use it. Her father was battling Alzheimer’s disease so she retired to help her mother care for him at their home in Upstate New York.
“I would go up once or twice every week,” she says. “My mother was worn to the bone. He passed away in early June of that year. My mother unexpectedly died of a stroke nine months later.”
Kaplan returned to the Farmington Valley Arts Center in 2014 to reignite her studio practice and be part of a creative community. With some money her mom - an educator and a potter - gifted her, Carol set up a dedicated youth classroom at the center.
“Fast forward to 2024 where we have four classrooms and are currently working on renovating a new larger space to accommodate our growing ceramics program, due to open in early 2025. We will also be creating a printmaking and mixed media classroom in one of the spaces that will be vacated by the ceramics program.”
She took the reins as executive director in 2018. Her duties include overseeing all the education programs, hiring and getting grants, as well as some dirty jobs. “I also replace toilet paper rolls and unclog toilets.”
There were only about 10 classes going when Kaplan started in that role, but now there are over 65.
“We have so many different kinds of offerings,” she says. “We have painters for people who are hobbyists, and they have their crew of people that have been taking classes together for years. It’s all different entry points. It could be somebody who wants to learn about printmaking or collage. It’s community at the core. We have six-year-olds - that’s the starting age - and we have someone who’s 96 taking a painting class.”
Carol lives in Farmington with her husband Steve, a practicing lawyer who teaches construction law at CCSU. They have six grandchildren. We met at Dom’s Coffee, right near the Farmington Valley Arts Center, to get to know her better with these “Coffee With” questions.
Other than making art, what do you like to do when you’re not working?
Spend time with my grandkids, reading, movies, family stuff. I have a big family. My six siblings and I still Zoom weekly coming out of the pandemic, and we get together for all sorts of things. We’re a big sports family. We root for the Celtics and UConn basketball.
What’s something you’d like to learn?
Working in this international community, I’m surrounded by people who speak more than one language. Learning a second language would be at the top of the list.
What are some places you like to go in the area?
I love to see our artists out of the studio in an exhibit. I went out to Norfolk yesterday to see one at the Norfolk Hub. I’m going to pop over to the Simsbury Library because one of our artists has a show there. It’s an important part of who I am, but it’s also part of me knowing my community.
Who are some of the artists who have inspired you?
Jasper Johns. Rauschenberg. Any of the assemblage artists - I’m just a sucker for mixed media.
Fiber artists. I just stumbled upon somebody who is extraordinarily talented, Clara Nartey. She’s a fiber portrait artist.
Of what you’ve been able to accomplish here, what are you most proud of?
Working with our community to build a stronger, more vibrant and sustainable Arts Center.
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See the Farmington Valley Arts Center class schedule and event calendar at hartsfvac.org.
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