Artist Sarah Ellen Smith Showcases All the Ingredients Needed to Create a Thriving New Art Center

By: Grace Ann Alfiero, MFA

Architect Jonathan Taylor and Artist Sarah Ellen Smith at Thousand Island Art Center’s first floor front gallery space.

Clayton, NY – One block from the St. Lawrence River in the North Country of New York, a gleaming new art center has emerged as the permanent home of one of the nation’s most distinctive textile collections and as a central gathering place for a community of established and emerging creatives. For artist Sarah Ellen Smith, helping bring the new Thousand Islands Arts Center to life has been both an extension of her artistic practice and a labor of love.

Known for her luminous landscape paintings capturing the bucolic beauty of the St. Lawrence River and for detailed, sometimes whimsical mosaics fashioned from vintage pottery, fine china and found objects, Smith spent more than four years volunteering as a member of the Arts Center’s Board of Directors and serving on committees devoted to creating its new home. The result is much more than a new building. It is a model for how a community arts organization can honor its past while designing ambitiously for its future.

Sixty Years of Art and Craft in Clayton

The Thousand Islands Arts Center’s roots stretch back six decades. Its history began as part of a community movement to preserve and celebrate the cultural heritage of Clayton and the Thousand Islands region. The organization that became the Arts Center opened as the Thousand Islands Craft School in 1966, initially serving just 44 students. Over the ensuing decades, it developed into an independent arts organization offering instruction across numerous artistic disciplines while becoming an important repository for American handweaving.

Its evolution is particularly significant because weaving was not simply another discipline taught at the school—it became central to the institution's identity. Emily Kent Post, the Craft School’s first dean and herself a weaver, encouraged the development of a handweaving collection. An important early foundation was the acquisition of materials associated with Berta Frey, an influential 20th-century weaver, teacher and author who was among the original founders of the Handweavers Guild of America.

The institution evolved accordingly. It became the Thousand Islands Craft School and Textile Museum, later adopted the name American Handweaving Museum and Thousand Islands Craft School, and eventually became the Thousand Islands Arts Center ~ Home of the Handweaving Museum. In 1990, it received its state museum charter, formally recognizing its responsibility to collect, preserve and interpret its textile holdings.

Today, its collection encompasses approximately 20,000 accessioned objects and textiles, creating an extraordinary record of historic and modern American handweaving. The new facility provides that collection with something it has long deserved: a purpose-built, climate-controlled permanent home.

That history makes the opening of the new building especially meaningful. What began with 44 students in 1966 has entered its seventh decade in a 13,000-square-foot cultural center designed to accommodate artists, students, exhibitions and an irreplaceable piece of American craft history.

Weaving an American Story

Handweaving occupies a fascinating place in the American story. Long before textiles could be purchased inexpensively from factories or department stores, weaving was an essential component of domestic and community life. In Colonial America, woven textiles provided households with necessities ranging from clothing to blankets and bedcoverings. In New England, some of America's earliest woven coverlets were created by women who shared labor, equipment and raw materials, producing textiles both for their households and for local sale.

By the late 18th and 19th centuries, weaving was changing alongside the nation itself. Immigrant weavers brought sophisticated European textile knowledge to America, while professional weavers established workshops and small weaving businesses throughout New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and the expanding American interior. The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History notes that woven coverlets became particularly popular in American homes from roughly the 1750s through the 1870s.

New York holds an important place in that history. The Smithsonian collection includes a Figured and Fancy coverlet made on Long Island and dated 1817, among the earliest surviving examples of its type. New York and New Jersey weaving traditions were also influenced by Scottish and Scots-Irish immigrant weavers whose skills contributed both to early textile manufacturing and independent weaving enterprises.

Industrialization eventually transformed textile production. Yet handweaving never disappeared. Instead, it evolved from necessity and commerce into a means of preserving tradition, exercising craftsmanship and pursuing artistic expression. The Colonial Revival and American handicraft movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries renewed interest in traditional weaving, and contemporary artists continue to reinterpret historic patterns and techniques today.

That continuum—from utilitarian object to historic artifact to contemporary art form—is precisely what makes the Thousand Islands Arts Center's collection so compelling. And it is fitting that a museum dedicated to weaving should itself have been created through the interweaving of so many individual contributions.

Building a New Home

Jonathan Taylor, owner of the local architectural firm Taylored Architecture, PLLC worked alongside Smith, the Arts Center’s expansion committee and past executive Director Leslie Rowland to make design decisions for every detail of the new center. Years of consensus decision making, planning, fundraising and community support ultimately transformed an ambitious idea into the new facility at 321 James Street.

For Smith, the process required many of the same qualities demanded by her own artwork: patience, close observation, attention to detail, and an understanding of how individual elements contribute to a larger composition.

The finished center is stunning, checking the boxes of a beautifully efficient example of universal design. Wide-open spaces encourage movement and gathering. A generous first-floor gallery benefits from natural light pouring through majestic two-story storefront windows, while accessible classrooms and restrooms make the building welcoming to visitors and artists with a wide range of needs.

The 13,000-square-foot facility fits comfortably among its downtown Clayton neighbors yet, because of its efficient design and soaring interior spaces, feels considerably larger inside than it appears from the sidewalk. The new building more than doubles the Arts Center's gallery space, triples its classroom capacity and establishes a permanent home for its textile collection.

Inside, clean lines and abundant light lead visitors toward the first-floor exhibition space, where the experience of weaving becomes participatory rather than simply observational. An interactive display invites visitors to try their own hands at weaving colorful ribbon and fabric while learning about the intricacies of transforming individual strands into a unified textile.

It is an apt metaphor for the entire project.

Sarah Ellen Smith Leaves Her Artistic Mark

Smith’s fingerprints are visible throughout the building in ways both large and delightfully unexpected. In the restrooms, for example, she designed and constructed eight one-of-a-kind mosaic mirrors incorporating themes appropriate to each space. The women’s restroom features an image inspired by Sandro Botticelli’s 15th-century masterpiece The Birth of Venus, famously depicting Venus emerging from the sea—a particularly playful choice for an arts center located only steps from the St. Lawrence River.  Smith notes that over 50 community members contributed pieces to the mosaic mirrors as well as stones from along the rivers’ edge.

The children’s restroom takes an entirely different approach. Puppies, teddy bears and colorful, recognizable images from children's books and fables emerge from the mosaic, turning an otherwise utilitarian fixture into a small work of public art.

The installations capture something essential about Smith’s artistic sensibility. She can recognize the potential in overlooked objects and ordinary spaces and reassemble them into something surprising, engaging and new. That same instinct can be seen in the Arts Center itself.

A School of Fish Becomes a Portrait of a Community

Perhaps nothing communicates the spirit of the new center better than its second exhibition in the front gallery. Hundreds of fish-shaped wooden panels were distributed throughout the community to artists, local businesses, organizations and schoolchildren, each invited to decorate a fish however they wished.

Individually, the fish are charming, eccentric and entirely distinct. Together, they become something more powerful: a portrait of a creative community. The installation reflects the individuality that makes an arts community thrive while simultaneously illustrating the principle that the whole can become far greater than the sum of its parts. Some of the fish were offered for sale, contributing to the Arts Center’s fundraising efforts and adding yet another layer of community participation.

There is no single big fish in this pond. Instead, there are hundreds of them.

That idea may ultimately explain why Smith's contribution to the Thousand Islands Arts Center extends beyond the mosaics she created or the committees on which she served. She understands that successful arts organizations are themselves collaborative works of art.

They require artists, teachers, architects, donors, volunteers, board members, children, businesses, collectors, historians and audiences. Each contributes something different. Each strand matters. For an artist whose own mosaic work involves taking individual fragments—pieces that might appear unrelated or even discarded—and arranging them until they form something beautiful and cohesive, there is an undeniable poetry in Smith having devoted years to helping create this institution.

The Thousand Islands Arts Center has essentially done the same thing. It has taken a 60-year history, an extraordinary collection of American handweaving, generations of artists and craftspeople, contemporary architecture, arts education, philanthropy and the creativity of an entire North Country community and woven them together into something new.

Standing inside the completed center, surrounded by artwork, textiles, classrooms and evidence of the thousands of hands that helped make it possible, Sarah Ellen Smith can see the finished composition.

And like one of her mosaics—or one of the historic textiles now carefully preserved inside the building—it demonstrates what can happen when many individual pieces are thoughtfully joined together.