Sharon Kaufman is an artist and the executive director of the Village Center for the Arts in New Milford, Conn. Known as “Miss Sharon” to her many students over the 27 years she’s been teaching, Kaufman has created multiple art programs since she graduated from college. Born in East Brunswick, New Jersey, she moved to Danbury as a teenager, which is where she started one her first programs, as she relates here. Out of college I started a business painting children’s murals. The first one I did was at Country Kids Child Care in Brookfield. I was immediately hired by some of the parents, and never looked back. I painted murals for four years in lower Fairfield County and New York City, and while doing them, noticed the housing projects. I had been a sheltered kid and never exposed to them, but I thought they were so dreary. I had an idea to create an art program for underprivileged and at-risk kids in Danbury. I went to Joel Levitt, head of Arts and Music in the Danbury Schools. He gave me the advice that governed my future when he said, “Never promise anything that you cannot fulfill.” I’ve lived by those words, and passed them to my students. I went to the projects and set up a little table, offering free face painting, and ended up with 250 kids in the line. I chatted with them and asked them, did they like art, would they like to join me? Classes were 25 cents. The spaces and supplies were donated and all the artists were volunteers. The program was called Escape to the Arts. I did that for four to five years, but I got sick from the stress; I was working with kids who were trying to get out the gangs through the arts and needed a place that the gangs didn't know about.
While I was recuperating from my stress-induced sabbatical, a funder raised $40,000 and approached the YMCA asking if they would like to take over the administration of the program, but it wasn’t a good place for me as a maverick artist. I had already bought a house in New Milford, so I left the program. I had read about Jayson Roberts, who had started Village Center for the Arts. After a long phone conversation with him, I said to my niece, 'Boy, if that guy is single…' It took about a month before I asked him to go on a winter hike. That was Christmas day, 18 years ago. When I joined the center it was going well, but within six months I got diagnosed with breast cancer. I decided I was going to turn the experience into something wonderful, and created a fundraiser for women's health around losing my hair. A salon agreed to cut hair for Locks for Love and 13 people donated hair that day. I was the last one, and everyone held my hand as they cut off my braid. The next day, it fell out in short little clumps. So we shaved my head, and let the kids paint on it! It took about seven years to finish my surgeries. About nine years ago, we became a nonprofit organization. We wanted to do something for the community, and produced Paint the People, a completely unique, interactive paint festival. We play with the paint as well as use it as a fine art tool. We’ve held it for four years and people come from all over the world for it. But it’s an expensive thing to run, and we’re trying to raise $60,000 to put it on again. It’s so important. This festival changes lives, changes interactions. You cannot hold a cellphone on a paint obstacle course. It could change how New Milford is seen throughout the world. My philosophy for the Center for the Arts is this: we don’t do the art for the kids. If we have to touch their art, we always ask permission. These students are artists who happen to be kids. It’s been 17-and-a-half years since my cancer, and Jayson, the guy I found on the phone 18 years ago, was there with me for everything. We go to Burning Man every year, and we’re going to get married there next year. I feel like my world is so happy, rich and full.
