LI Teacher’s Commissioned Portraits To Grace Fairbanks Museum

It may be Elly Barksdale’s first year teaching art at Lyndon Institute, but she is no stranger to the school. The Class of 2000 graduate’s father, John, was a beloved English teacher at LI throughout her childhood and, after returning to Kingdom as an adult, she spent several years working for LI as a dorm parent. 

Now, like so many of us here at LI, she also joins the ranks of alumni-turned-faculty. However, she is not only a teacher of the arts but a practitioner, as well, and in the final stages of completing a sextet of portraits commissioned by the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium in St. Johnsbury.

Barksdale credits her start in the arts in part to her experiences as a student at LI working with both art teacher Barb Follett and design instructor Ellen Levitt. 

“Ellen and Barb made a nice team. Between them, they captured the attention of a lot of different kinds of students. The instruction I had was thorough, informed, and ongoing. In fact, coming back to visit after graduation was pretty normal. Ellen often had extra paper and supplies for me to use in my work.”

Barksdale said that it took a while to form her plans for college. “By senior year, I had settled on majoring in art, but I wasn’t sure at first where I wanted to go. I just knew I wanted a liberal arts program rather than going to a pure art school.”

Barksdale settled on Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. “They had just completed a brand new arts center, which was great.”

Though Barksdale’s recent gallery collections have focused on painting as a medium, Barksdale cited her work with art professor and sculpture Lee Burns as a highlight during her time at Smith. 

“I really consider myself a sculptor who paints,” she said. “I work mostly in clay. I love the accessibility of the medium.”

After graduating from Smith, Barksdale moved back to the Northeast Kingdom and took on her first teaching job, working as an art instructor at the now-closed King George School in Sutton. 

“I was recruited by Robin Wimbiscus. It was a year-round position, which was very intense. I spent two years there.”

Motherhood became a new calling, as did another form of nurturing when Barksdale got hired to manage an organic garden on an estate owned by a family from the Boston area. 

“It’s kind of like art in its own way,” she said of crafting sustainable gardens. “But there was a steep learning curve. Though I had grown up in a family that maintains extensive gardens, I wasn’t the most active gardener as a child. Still, I was able to draw from that and figure things out.”

Eventually, Barksdale left gardening and began turning attention back to her art. She completed a collection of paintings, many of which focused on portraits of horses, which received showings at The Satellite Gallery, NVRH’s gallery space, and Parker Pie. She also returned to her teaching roots, taking a job as art teacher at Riverside School in Lyndon before coming full circle and making her way back to LI.

Her portrait work evolved during these years. 

“It was the heart of COVID in November 2020, no one was really out and about much. I wanted to do a series of portraits of youth for the windows in what had been the Grindstone Cafe. Lois Williams, who owned the building, let me set up and use it as a studio.”

Barksdale found four subjects for her project, one of whom included Moses Rubin, a boy who both played soccer and participated in theater with her son. Moses’s mother, Anna Rubin, happened to work for the Fairbanks Museum as Director of External Relations. Remembering Barksdale’s work, Rubin reached out earlier this year when the museum received a grant for a portrait project from the Vermont Arts Council.

“There are several sculpted busts decorating the outside of the building that feature famous scientists. The museum decided it would be nice to juxtapose these statues with paintings of other scientists—ones that represent a broader, more diverse selection of men and women from different times, places, and cultures.”

Barksdale’s work consists of six portraits, representing the kind of range the museum was looking for. 

The new collection includes Jamshid al-Kashi, a Persian mathematician and astronomer who developed the law of cosines among other things, as well as Marie Curie and George Washington Carver, both well-known scientific pioneers. Also included is Dr. Chien-Shiung Wu, who helped develop understanding of the atom in her work at Columbia in the 1940s and 50s where she also worked on the Manhattan project. The group is rounded out by astronaut Mae Jemison, the first African American woman to travel in space, and Maria Merian, a 17th century German and one of the earliest naturalists to document insects directly.

Where possible, the portraits are based on photographs. “I actually find it easier than using live models. With photographs, the machine has done the work of capturing the person,” she said. In the case of the 14th al-Kashi, there really aren’t any reliable portraits to work from, so Barksdale tapped her good friend and fellow LI alum Graham Keegan to serve as the model. 

Each portrait has a different backdrop color—together forming a vivid rainbow of blue, red, yellow, orange, purple, and green. “I thought using these colors would speak nicely to the theme of diversity and inclusion,” said Barksdale. She’s also incorporated an Easter egg (a little clue to the subject’s life or work) into each portrait as a playful extra—an image of an atom tucked into the background of Wu’s portrait, a radioactive symbol on Curie’s broach, and so on. 

Though still works-in-progress, they are clearly nearing completion. “How do you know when a portrait is finished?” I asked Barksdale.

“Something inside tells you when to stop,” she said. “These are almost done.”

Once completed, the portraits will be photographed by Rubin’s husband, digital photographer Craig Harrison, then reproduced on 54”x72” prints, which will appear in the sealed-up window casings at the museum, with the original paintings to be displayed inside the museum.

Barksdale anticipates the collection will be on display at Fairbanks toward the end of this summer.