Artists' Association names new executive director
BY MARLI GUZZETTA INDEPENDENT ARTS EDITOR
The Artists' Association of Nantucket announced last week that it has hired Bruce Buxton, recent Interim Director of the Klingenstein Center at Columbia University, to be its new Executive Director, beginning October 1.

COURTESY BRUCE BUXTON Buxton: "Nantucket's visual arts are unusual and significant and reflect a community that has made a tradition of honoring imagination."

Founded in 1945 by island artists, the Artists' Association of Nantucket sponsors exhibitions, hosts lectures and also offers workshops and facilities to encourage and support the artists who live here. In recent years, the AAN secured gallery space on Washington Street and also completed construction of a new workshop, outfitted with everything from pottery wheels to a state-of-the-art Mac computer lab. It has also recently strengthened its efforts to find a standing home for its permanent collection of 20th century Nantucket art.

As executive director, Buxton will oversee the Joyce and Seward Johnson Gallery, the year-round Arts Education Program and the permanent collection.

"It was one of those circuitous things. I heard about the job indirectly and expressed an interest, then it went from there," said Buxton, who was working with the Nantucket New School at the time he first heard about the position.

Buxton, 64, has a long history of coupling the arts with community interests, placing a special emphasis on education. He has served as a past president the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum in Vermont, past secretary of the Vermont Academy of Arts and Sciences, a founding member of Falmouth's Arts on the Hill and a founder of the Small Independent Schools Art League. Buxton is also Headmaster Emeritus of Falmouth Academy on Cape Cod, which he co-founded.

"The AAN is very fortunate to have found a person so experienced in fostering art education and with such tremendous management and development skills," said Penny Scheerer, president of the AAN's Board of Directors.

"I am excited by the mission and by the level of dedication I find on the board and on the staff," Buxton said of the AAN. "I plan to bring my experience in not-for-profit management and my enthusiasm for the arts to an organization that, thanks to its history and energy, is clearly positioned to make an even greater contribution to the cultural life of Nantucket."

Buxton said he plans to travel to Nantucket to meet with the AAN artists and trustees before moving here permanently from the Cape with his wife, Patrice, in October.

His immediate plans are to "learn as much as I can about the Artists' Association and the other cultural organizations on the island as quickly as possible."

"Nantucket's visual arts are unusual and significant and reflect a community that has made a tradition of honoring imagination," said Buxton, a selfdescribed "frustrated poet" who enjoys working with "imaginative and talented people."

"My wife, Patrice, is as delighted as I am to think we may become part of

this community," he said. I