Arcadia’s Art House is a dream realized
Once upon a time, the Art House at Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary was just a fairy tale.
In 2013, Jan Ruby-Crystal, an alumna of the Pratt Institute in New York, moved to Northampton to marry her childhood sweetheart. But her moving truck contained only art supplies.
“What’s wrong with you lady, you got no furniture?” the Brooklyn-based mover couldn’t help asking as he carried an array of small boxes, labeled “pencils” and “art books,” into the van.
“Well, you see,” said Ruby-Crystal, “I’m just going to open an art studio somewhere.”
He laughed all the way to Massachusetts.
Ruby-Crystal, who has a generous sense of humor, is a professor emerita from Shippensburg University who has also taught art in New York, Ohio and Northampton at the Smith College Campus School. She smiled with a twinkle in her eye.
Soon she contacted Pratt to see if they could connect her with an employer, and while their network didn’t extend as far as western Massachusetts, they offered her a free meditation class with Rhonda Schaller. In an online course that she repeated seven times, she was asked to envision something she’d never seen. This is what she wrote at as a result:
“Envision a structure of beauty surrounded by nature, birds, water, mountains in the distance and air that is clean and fresh. It is wooden and large, airy with many windows and spaces to create. A porch, partially screened, invites outdoor expansion. Art materials are neatly placed and organized in cabinets for each type of activity … art groups, guilds, creative groups of all kinds will meet there and call it home.”
Meanwhile, in the middle of the forest, Jonah Keane, who now manages all Connecticut River Valley Wildlife Sanctuaries for Mass Audubon, had just arrived at Arcadia in Easthampton with his own vision. Noting the long history in the Valley between art and nature, he told a friend about his desire to connect with local artists. His friend had the perfect candidate: his new neighbor, Jan Ruby-Crystal.
Keane called her immediately “How soon can you get here?” he asked.
“Five minutes,” she said.
As Ruby-Crystal zipped into the lot in her Toyota Prius, Keane stood at Arcadia’s entrance hopefully waving building keys.
He had two places to show his new Art House Director, but she only wanted to see one, a tiny cottage called the Norman Studio. Not much is known about the original cabin, which Ruby-Crystal estimates is 15 by 17 feet wide. According to Massachusetts Audubon Society Records, Arcadia was its first major sanctuary in western Massachusetts, acquired in 1944. Keane recently received photos from former director Ed Mason’s granddaughter that date back to 1949, in which the cottage is in pristine condition, a sturdy little house nestled among pine trees that looks, well, magical.
But it had long been abandoned when Ruby-Crystal first laid eyes on it. It was infested with mice, “there were holes in the wall where animals had walked in and out,” and its centerpiece was an ugly pot-bellied stove. Nonetheless, she gazed out the two dusty windows and saw the stately trees that had captivated her mind’s eye. She seized the keys.
It was the beginning of a love story, really. Almost singlehandedly, and in time that was entirely volunteered, Ruby-Crystal transformed a shack into a home. She had a vision, and she had a mission: “I wanted to offer art classes and to join art, science and nature as much as I possibly could, and to celebrate it, in a happy way, not a divisionary way where people say, ‘Oh, that’s not art,’ or ‘That’s not science’ … I see them all like a pyramid and one doesn’t exist without the other.”
It took years – the Art House opened in 2017 – and, of course, her boxes of art supplies, which were neatly organized in donated cabinets and augmented with her new creations, like a kid’s book featuring two squirrels, Artie and Caddie, who guide young artists along the Tulip Tree Trail (destination: Art House) to help them explore concepts like color and texture. She also put together a three-inch binder of possible art projects, and can recall with precision which children, or adults, have tried them out over the years. This is particularly remarkable considering that an average of 200 people per season visit the Art House, a number that does not include the 250 that visit during the Arcadia Folk Festival and the 400 that interact with Ruby-Crystal during summer camp.
For those who suggest that her investment of time and energy doesn’t match what she gets in return, she refers to the couple who wanted to learn to draw a tree with two birds in it for their wedding invitation. “I wouldn’t let them go,” she tells them proudly. “We sat here all day: It was raining, practically snowing, and they were able to go home with something printed.” Or she remembers seeing a child smile, or a parent saying that they’ve never seen their kid so interested before, so captivated by her unearthly energy. “I think that’s what my payment has been.”
In the early days, kids and adults worked mostly at picnic tables. When bugs began to be an issue, Ruby-Crystal meditated on a way to build the screened-in porch she had once envisioned.
One afternoon, after taking her Toyota into the shop and having to leave it for the day, the man who drove her home turned out to be the head of the board of trustees at Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School. When she told him about the “troublesome” bugs, he immediately offered to help.
“The next thing I knew, they were out here with the students building this lovely screened-in porch as an end-of-the-year project,” she says. And in 2019, the Art House nearly doubled in size.
Over the years Ruby-Crystal has had help from loyal volunteers (there are about 20 this season), and two of her peers, Ellen Augarten and Ann Chiara, have recently stepped up as her co-directors. “We’re all a bunch of nymphs,” admits Ruby-Crystal, a description on-point for our fanciful tale.
When asked what he thinks would have happened if Ruby-Crystal wasn’t a part of this story, Keane gets quiet for a moment, then says, “I can say quite confidently I don’t think anything like it would have come along without her. She’s unique, she’s an especially talented art educator, she’s so warm and accepting and welcoming of everybody. She really created this program because of who she is. There are other great artists out there, but I’m not sure they’d put in this amount of effort to see this dream come true.”
The Art House is open on Saturdays and Sundays through the fall from 1 to 4 p.m. Sign up here for upcoming summer activities like meditative drawing, nature journaling and basket making. There will also be a four-part series on Sundays in September. Visits are free but donations are welcome. Melissa Karen Sances can be reached at [email protected].
Daily Hampshire Gazette
