Lifestyle Features

Photos: Bread and Puppet Theater

Photographs from Bread and Puppet performances in Vermont

By GREG COOK | August 31, 2008

This week, thePhoenix.com art critic Greg Cook visits Glover, Vermont to report on Peter Schumann, 74, "one of America's greatest living artists," who is stepping down as the director of the long-running Bread and Puppet Theater, whose mixture of papier-mache, populist angst, and radical politics have been a staple of New England folk culture since the 1960s. Below are Cook's photographs of Schumann and his troupe in action.

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Peter Schumann on stilts. His Bread and Puppet Theater is about sustainable, communal living, about redemption and acceptance — while also being a strict hierarchy devoted to producing Schumann’s vision. In recent years, Schumann has said he wasn’t concerned about what happened to the theater after he retired or passed on — that it was papier-mâché, not built to last. But he’s now decided that he must consider the people who have helped him achieve his vision. Over the past winter, he began talks with his family and Bread and Puppet’s inner circle about maybe perpetuating the theater’s museum, archive, print shop, Vermont performance spaces, and perhaps even some sort of repertory of shows.
Photo credit: Greg Cook

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ARTICLES BY GREG COOK

CLOTHES MAKE THE MAN | May 13, 2013
What does it mean to be a man? That's the question at the heart of this smart, sumptuous exhibit — one of the best shows in the region this year.

MERRY PRANKSTERS | May 07, 2013
Parked out front of Brown University's gray modernist Granoff Center on a recent sunny morning were one of those 15-foot-tall inflatable rats that unions install in front of businesses they're protesting and a limousine sloppily painted to resemble a yellow and black school bus.

ALTERED IMAGES | April 30, 2013
Among the handsome Washington Street storefronts of AS220's renovated Mercantile Block building, with their neo-old-timey signs, is the residents' entrance to the building. It is against AS220's religion to leave any space empty that can be filled with art. So the lobby is the AS220 Resident Gallery, which occupants of the building take turns filling with their stuff.

IN THE CITY | April 23, 2013
One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Providence art scene is how the city itself has been such a rich subject. A decade ago, the city became a galvanizing topic as artists fought to protect the old mills that served as their homes and studios from demolition — with mixed success. But lately, the community's industrial architecture itself has attracted artists' attention.

THE AFTERMATH OF ATROCITY | April 16, 2013
From the ruins of the Iraq war emerges Wafaa Bilal's "The Ashes Series" and Daniel Heyman's "I Am Sorry It Is So Difficult To Start," on view at Brown University's Bell Gallery.