On Friday, October 16, at 1 p.m., the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum will fill its Art Gallery with music. Benji Aresty, an American-born songwriter who performs under the name Aresty., brings his independent project to the Athenaeum as part of the library's Music in the Art Gallery series. The concert is free, ADA accessible, and open to the public.
It is a pairing that suits the room. The Athenaeum's gallery is described as the oldest unaltered art gallery in the United States, a space built to hold paintings and, as it happens, to hold sound as well. Concerts here are intimate by design: a listener sits close enough to the performers to hear a guitar string settle, with 19th-century canvases on the walls around them.
That gallery owes its existence to Horace Fairbanks, president of the E. & T. Fairbanks Company and a governor of Vermont. Fairbanks founded the Athenaeum in 1871, financing the building and providing for its library and art collection as a gift to his community. Two years later, in 1873, he added an art gallery to the main building. The Athenaeum today describes itself as a private, nonprofit public library and art gallery, a legacy of the Fairbanks family.
The gallery's design was shaped by a single, enormous purchase. Fairbanks acquired Albert Bierstadt's "The Domes of the Yosemite," a colossal painting, and the room was built around it. The panorama dominates the back wall to this day and remains the centerpiece of the collection. It is widely regarded as a masterpiece of 19th-century American art, and it has drawn visitors to this corner of northeastern Vermont from around the country and the world.
The painting has had a dramatic life of its own. In recent years, visitors noticed that the immense canvas seemed to sag in summer and tighten in winter. Then, about three years before a 2016 restoration campaign, it stopped tightening. Athenaeum director Bob Joly called in professional conservators, who found that the nearly 150-year-old canvas had weakened and torn near the top of its frame. It had drooped so badly that Bierstadt's signature, characteristically painted in bold red, was no longer visible. A 1950s-era coat of varnish had also turned gray, dulling the colors. "We were told, 'You're going to come in some Monday morning and find it on the floor,'" Joly recalled. The Athenaeum launched a fundraising campaign and sent the painting to Artcare Conservation of Miami for treatment, and later celebrated its return.
Into that room steps Aresty. The project is led by Benji Aresty, whose songwriting the Athenaeum describes as deeply personal, often born from grief, love, transformation, and spiritual inquiry. His music spans folk, blues, soul, and cinematic rock, grounded in live instrumentation and emotional storytelling. The Athenaeum's announcement quotes the project's own framing: a voice that has "lived many lives" and lyrics that "cut straight to the heart," songs that feel like "soul medicine -- raw, real, and meant to move you."
The material is meant to do more than entertain. According to the project's description, Aresty. aims to use music as a tool for emotional and social awakening, with a vision that reaches beyond performance toward building community and, in its words, being a bridge between cultures. "Aresty. isn't just about sound -- it's about soul," the announcement reads. Listeners who favor Ray LaMontagne, The Head and the Heart, John Mayer, or Michael Franti are likely to find something familiar in the sound.
Aresty's own writing leans toward plain-spoken, socially conscious themes. His song "Unconditional Loving," which the Athenaeum links for listeners, asks why we care about the color of someone's hair or skin and what we believe, and concludes that "unconditional lovin' is the only kind of love we need." The project's Bandcamp page describes an ethos of authenticity over polish and connection over noise, with songs written to feel lived-in -- reflecting growth, struggle, joy, and the quiet lessons people carry. "This is music made slowly, intentionally, and with heart," the page reads.
The Music in the Art Gallery series is a recurring fixture at the Athenaeum, held on the third Friday of each month and devoted to showcasing what the library calls impressive and diverse musical talent from Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. The fall run opened in September with Toussaint St. Negritude, and Aresty's October 16 appearance is followed by Linda Warnaar on November 20 and, on December 18, the Kingdom Mountain Dulcimers with poet Reeve Lindbergh.
For anyone who has never been inside the Athenaeum, the concert is a low-stakes reason to visit one of Vermont's more unusual cultural buildings -- a working public library, a small museum, and a performance space under one roof, all of it given to the town by a 19th-century industrialist who wanted his community to have art and books. The music starts at 1 p.m. Admission is free, and the gallery is ADA accessible.