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The Hayfield Art Gallery is the creation of EveNSteve, the husband and wife team of author Eve O. Schaub and artist Stephen Schaub.
It was in May of 2020 that EveNSteve installed their first hayfield artwork entitled "My Heart is Very Big" on the land across the street from their home and art studio, as "a gift to our friends, neighbors, and community." Over time, the installation grew to encompass five monumental outdoor artworks in the field.
"Art helps us to make sense of the world," Eve says. "We both felt strongly that during times of uncertainty we needed art more than ever."
The concept has grown to encompass annual exhibitions that remain in place for a calendar year. The artworks usually take the form of monumental film photographs taken by Stephen which are hand-painted with text written by Eve, and then attached to outdoor scaffolding to withstand the Vermont elements as best they can. They include one that reaches thirteen feet in height and another that is thirty-four feet long.
“What began as a temporary solution to reach viewers during quarantine has evolved,” Stephen explains. “Now it is an exciting and creative way to reach new audiences. It brings our art out of the gallery and into everyday life.”
The initial exhibit, Monuments to Now, was composed of five monumental works that responded to the events of 2020, including the varied emotions of a worldwide pandemic, and a reckoning with profound racial injustice.
The Dollhouse Family and the Black Strawberry was the show installed for 2021. It asked viewers to consider the relationship of play to art as well as the normalization of pandemic life via themes of confinement, transformation and revelation.
The 2022 exhibit was entitled An Echo of Affection; and took as its subject the covered bridges of Vermont as sacred spaces, and the peculiar mythologies of place.
Why We Look Through Windows, in 2023, dealt with how we relate to the world in the aftermath of extraordinary events. Themes included extroversion and introversion, rebirth, and the complex relationship between curiosity and fear.
In 2024, the exhibit No Ones Home: The Secret of the Golden Scarf relayed a fairy tale that referenced cultural strategies for controlling chaos through storytelling. A female figure morphs throughout, becoming at times an old woman, a young girl, or mythological figures.
Why We Turned Our Hayfield into an Art Protest
My husband and I are artists, and for the last five years we’ve been putting up a free outdoor art exhibit in the hayfield across the street from our house in Pawlet, as a way to express gratitude to our community. This spring, like other years, we were formulating a plan for a new show, but as the news of 2025 kept rolling in, we felt an urgency to address the rapidly shifting landscape in the world of the arts. We wanted to create a space to pose and contemplate what is happening.
Consequently, this year, instead of a mixed media display of photographs with hand painted text, we have a thirty-two-foot artwork in the hayfield that simply reads “WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DEFUND THE ARTS?” The other four scaffoldings that normally exhibit artworks are all painted black.
The arts help us make sense of the world. In fact, during the pandemic, this is why we felt so strongly— as art venues and public spaces were closing, shows and events all being cancelled one after another— that we needed to find alternative venues for people to experience art. This is how the Hayfield Art Gallery was born.
At first, we literally had no idea what we were doing: would the artwork last? Would the frameworks hold up over time? Would people just hate it? What if, after investing all the time and expense, we ourselves deemed it a failure, which of course happens in art all the time?
We built one artwork: a black and white photograph of a woman in an orchard, twelve feet long and painted into it words prompted by our COVID experience: “My heart is very big. Sometimes I wonder if it is big enough.”
Thankfully not only did we like it, but our neighbors did too. Horns honked and hands waved as cars drove down our road. People learned about our project and came from far and wide to see it, some getting out of their cars and walking the field. During a very dark time, we had found a way to create some light.
We kept going, adding additional scaffoldings, becoming more ambitious. We had a conversation with our town Zoning Administrator to explain why this free outdoor art display did not violate Vermont’s billboard ban. The town ultimately agreed with our argument and the artworks remained, ultimately becoming a revolving annual exhibition open to all.
The days of the pandemic are now, thankfully, behind us. During that time, we all found reason to turn to the creative arts to help make sense of the world, to find hope, distraction, solace. Movies, songs, podcasts, books, poetry, art of all kinds took on a renewed significance.
The recent efforts to defund the arts represent a different kind of dark time. The current administration is proposing to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts. Drastic NEA cuts have already affected Vermont institutions as varied as the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, the Flynn Theater and the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont.
It’s important to note that the NEA is one of the largest arts funders in the U.S., yet it is also one of the smallest federal agencies. It does a tremendous amount of good with very little.
Last year each taxpayer paid less than one dollar to support the NEA, and its entire budget represented .003 percent of the federal budget. The NEA brings concerts, readings, performances and arts education to the entire country, including underserved, impoverished and rural communities, all for less than the cost of a cup of coffee.
Our show for 2025 sincerely asks the question: What happens when we defund the arts? But it also asks it rhetorically, because the surrounding blank canvases represent one answer: when you defund the arts you are left with darkness.
Since opening, the Hayfield Art Gallery has been the subject of news stories on NBC Boston News at Ten, New England Cable News, WTEN Albany ABC, WCAX Burlington CBS, and articles in Seven Days, the Rutland Herald, and the Times Argus.
