A professional dancer, Lee Harper Vason is featured artist at Edgewood Cottage through Sept. 4, as part of the Blowing Rock Historical Society’s Artists in Residence series.

Lee Harper Vason loves to paint dancers, including this one whose subject is one of her professional dance mentors.

Lee Harper Vason’s family members have close relatives with farms in rural Georgia, so she has an affection for barns — and painting them.

Dance is never far away from Lee Harper Vason’s consciousness, even while exhibiting at Edgewood Cottage through Sept. 4 as one of the featured artists in Blowing Rock Historical Society’s Artists in Residence series.

Lee Harper Vason treasure the view from the terrace at the family’s Gideon Ridge home, which has been in the family for several generations.

Did we mention that Lee Harper Vason loves dance AND art? She is a featured artist through Sept. 4 at Edgewood Cottage for the Artists in Residence series hosted by the Blowing Rock Historical Society.

Sunsets hold a special place in the heart of artist Lee Harper Vason, who always can find different colors. She is featured artist through Sept. 4 at Edgewood Cottage in the Artists in Residence series.

A professional dancer, Lee Harper Vason is featured artist at Edgewood Cottage through Sept. 4, as part of the Blowing Rock Historical Society’s Artists in Residence series.

BLOWING ROCK — Look at Lee Harper Vason’s paintings while talking with the artist and you quickly learn that she has a hard time separating her two artistic passions: painting and dance. And catch your breath once in awhile even if it is her doing the talking — because you must race to keep up.

Vason is a featured artist through Sept. 4 at Edgewood Cottage, for the Artists in Residence series hosted and produced by the Blowing Rock Historical Society.

“This is my fifth year here,” said Vason, on site at Edgewood, on Aug. 29. “It is tiring to be here for seven days straight from about 9:30 in the morning until 5:30 in the afternoon, but I love it. Edgewood Cottage is an oasis of sorts. When I arrived here at 9:15 this morning, Main Street was empty. There was no one around. It is magical, with all the flowers and all the rain we have had. Main Street at that time of morning is what it used to look like when I was growing up here. Especially after Labor Day back then, virtually nobody was here.”

Lee Harper Vason loves to paint dancers, including this one whose subject is one of her professional dance mentors.

Asked what else she remembered from her childhood in Blowing Rock, Vason didn’t hesitate.

“Well, I go to church at St. Mary’s now, but I grew up in Rumple church. Those are great, wonderful memories,” she said. “I have been watching the renovations at Rumple House with keen interest. Before it was Rumple House, it was the home of Sarah Schenck. I look at that house with all the gingerbread detail and remember her. Sarah was a very prim and proper ‘Southern belle’. She was an institution in Blowing Rock. Us Harper sisters, we used to visit Sarah quite often. She had white hair and she wore white powder and a certain perfume that was very strong. So, I look at that house even today and think of Sarah Schenck and her perfume. She was royalty, in a way.”

In Blowing Rock, Vason is known as one of the four Harper sisters, all very accomplished women who spent most of their summers growing up traipsing in and around downtown Blowing Rock. The Harper house remains out on Gideon Ridge, and still in the family.

“My ancestor, George Washington Finley Harper, rode horseback to Blowing Rock from Lenoir, back in the 1700s. Members of my family have been summering in Blowing Rock for more than three centuries,” Vason said.

Trained as a professional dancer, after graduating from high school in Hickory Vason was accepted into New York City’s famed The Julliard School. She studied at Julliard for two years before following a professor to his startup of the North Carolina School of the Arts, where she obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in dance. Early in her professional career, she was accepted into the previously all-black Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Although she was at Edgewood Cottage for her art, Vason was bubbling with excitement over something else, too.

Dance is never far away from Lee Harper Vason’s consciousness, even while exhibiting at Edgewood Cottage through Sept. 4 as one of the featured artists in Blowing Rock Historical Society’s Artists in Residence series.

“Something really exciting is happening,” said Vason, “and it is all connected back to my time with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. In two weeks, I am going to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

“But first I need to tell you the sequence of life events that led up to this moment in time. In 1971, I was lucky enough to have performed in the opening of the Kennedy Center. Jackie Kennedy Onassis commissioned Leonard Bernstein to write a piece in memory of her late first husband, President John F. Kennedy. She wanted it for the grand opening of the National Center for the Arts, the Kennedy Center. Bernstein called the piece, ‘Mass,’ and there were all these celebrity performers. Bernstein, of course, was the composer and he was also the conductor. My mentor, Alvin Ailey, the African American choreographer and his interracial dance company that I was in were part of the production, too. There were 500 performers in that 1971 production. The U.S. Congress came, all of these stars came. We were on the cover of the New York Times, Life, Time and Newsweek magazines. It was a big deal and I just happened to be in it. It was a lucky star for me. I loved it and loved performing in it. Leonard Bernstein was an incredible teacher. He loved working with young people.”

Did we mention that Lee Harper Vason loves dance AND art? She is a featured artist through Sept. 4 at Edgewood Cottage for the Artists in Residence series hosted by the Blowing Rock Historical Society.

Now if that wasn’t enough of something to revel in, Vason continued describing “Chapter Two” of her life-changing experience in being involved with Bernstein’s “Mass.”

“I was very fortunate to have been in that production and I had a nice part in it,” Vason recalled. “Then, in 1974, I was invited by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Robert Shaw, to choreograph a revived production of ‘Mass.’ Apparently, someone in New York recommended me!”

The story gets better with even a local connection.

“At the time, I was the artist-in-residence at Appalachian State University. They had hired me to start a dance program. That was in 1974. So I had gone straight from New York City, to Boone. Of course, with my family we had always come up to Blowing Rock in the summer, but I had never lived in the High Country during the wintertime. But I just loved it. I got to know Doc Watson. Bill Dunlap was chair of the art department. There was Ed Pilkington, the actor, who is now professor emeritus at App State.”

And then, there was opportunity come a-knockin’.

“So, I was teaching at App State and I get this call to say that I had been recommended to choreograph a revival of ‘Mass’ for the Atlanta Symphony. My initial reaction was, ‘Whoa! I was just one of the dancers in this huge production! Who recommended me to do this?’,” Vason was asking anyone within earshot.

“Well, it turned out it was the dean of the New York University School of the Arts who recommended me,” Vason said she discovered. “As I always did back then, I called my parents and told them about this opportunity that had landed in my lap. I told them it was too overwhelming, and I didn’t think I could manage it. But my father said, ‘Lee, you can do this.’

Lee Harper Vason’s family members have close relatives with farms in rural Georgia, so she has an affection for barns — and painting them.

“Now, my father was the kind of father that pushed us four girls to do things we didn’t think we could do,” said Vason, before adding, “When we walked to church on Sunday mornings in Hickory, he walked right behind us and stepped on our heels if we didn’t walk fast enough! He always pushed us. Like when I was at Julliard, I wanted to come home after the first year. It was a scary place. But he said, ‘No, you have made your bed and now you are going to have to lie in it. Quit complaining!’ I am glad I did stay, but it was because of my father.”

“I accepted the job in Atlanta and started working on the choreography. There is a lot of dance in the Bernstein ‘Mass.’ I started working on the choreography with my students at Appalachian and I had a core dance group that I took with me to Atlanta. I had auditions for the other spots, but those six from Appalachian became part of about 25 dancers. The piece was very successful, with lots of dancers and actors in it. We performed it for two weeks straight and it was so popular they reprised it the next year for another two weeks, which was unheard of for the Atlanta Symphony. After that, I choreographed another production for a high school of the performing arts and did the same choreography for another production at Duke University, two years later.’

Lee Harper Vason treasure the view from the terrace at the family’s Gideon Ridge home, which has been in the family for several generations.

Asked whether she worked from any video or film of the original Bernstein production at the Lincoln Center for her Atlanta choreography, Vason had a quick explanation.

“There was no video of the original Kennedy Center production, so I had to recreate it all. And if you are a choreographer, you don’t want to copy someone else’s work. This was all my own. I had a lot of ideas in my head and I did this solo. Looking back, it was kind of intimidating. I was out there on a limb, doing my own stuff,” said Vason.

Doing her own “stuff” and making a name for herself as a dancer and choreographer, Vason recently attracted some heady attention.

“This year, I was approached by the Leonard Bernstein family,” said Vason. “They heard I had done the production in Atlanta and that I had been in the original production at the Kennedy Center. So, they asked if I would share my archives with them. What a huge compliment! Leonard Bernstein was the greatest composer of my generation. So, I provided them with my artifacts, pictures, newspaper articles and stuff, and then... I had made sure we captured that Atlanta production on video. It was old video, reel to reel because this was still in the mid-1970s, but I had it converted to DVD. It is just an absolute treasure to have it and I gave it to them.”

And now, the invitations just keep coming.

“So, my choreography is with the Bernstein family and then the Kennedy Center reached out to ask me if I knew about the 51st anniversary of the Bernstein ‘Mass.’ They said it was happening at the Kennedy Center and that the music critic at The Washington Post, Michael Brodeur, is doing a feature article on members of the original cast — and my name came up,” Vason said.

“It is such an honor. Last week, I had over an hour interview with the music critic of The Washington Post and then I got invited by the Kennedy Center to come to the performance, on September 15. And then I got invited by the Bernstein family to visit them, too!

“The Post‘s critic, Brodeur, told me I had shared with him things about how the production evolved that nobody else talked about. The performers actually created the ending, and it was magical,” Vason recalled. “No one else had shared that with him.”

Sunsets hold a special place in the heart of artist Lee Harper Vason, who always can find different colors. She is featured artist through Sept. 4 at Edgewood Cottage in the Artists in Residence series.

With those exciting revelations out of the way, the dancer morphed into artist.

“I have been doing a lot of painting in the last year and have exhibited at several shows. I teach art, as well as dance, often from my studio in Atlanta. One of the great positive things that came out of COVID was the discovery that we could connect with people virtually. Zoom, for instance, allows me to connect with people I haven’t connected with for years. I have dancers in Washington, D.C., New York, Los Angeles, Palm Beach and other places. It is great to get to see them once a week. I have board meetings now on Zoom and I don’t think we will ever go back to in-person meetings!” said Vason.

It is hard to imagine this smiling lady bubbling with energy and positivity filing a lawsuit against anyone, but it turns out that Vason and her family have become environmental and conservation activists, of a sort.

“I have another art exhibit going on right now in Madison, Georgia. My husband is from Madison. The school he went to is now called the Madison-Morgan Cultural Center and they have a new art show that opened this past Saturday. It is called ‘Farm’ and they invited six artists to do paintings, sculptures or other media about farms in the area. I personally chose four different farms and contributed six paintings,” Vason explained.

Beyond art, though, this show has a cause.

“We are fighting a big development the Governor of Georgia has pushed to bring: Rivian, the electric car company. The state purchased about 2,500 acres of pristine, rural farmland close to us. It is now going to be home to the Rivian company and we are fighting that. We are trying to protect the farmland for as long as we can. Our daughter is an environmental life coach and Pilates instructor in New York City, but of course she has ties to Madison, as we all do, through relatives. We are all involved in saying ‘no to Rivian.’”

“We now have two law firms representing us, suing the state of Georgia and trying to protect our incredible farmland,” Vason continued. “Madison is about an hour and 15 minutes southeast of Atlanta, toward Augusta. It is one of the few towns in Georgia that Sherman did not burn in the Civil War, because he had friends in both Madison and Washington, Ga. So those two towns have many of those original antebellum homes still standing. My husband grew up in one that was built in the early 1800s. It used to be the stagecoach stop between Charleston and New Orleans. Madison had the railway going through it at one point, before Atlanta developed. But that home was in my husband’s family for generations. They used to grow cotton, but now it is a tree farm. The Rivian development would take up 2,500 acres on the outskirts of Madison. It is sad because the farming industry down there is doing very well. Morgan and Walton counties have the largest number of dairy farms in the state of Georgia, I am told.”

What is different about her painting in the last year?

“I used to do a lot of palette knife, but now I am using the brush more,” Vason noted. “People say I paint in so many different styles, but I say, ‘no, not really.’ It is like with music. I am a choreographer and when I choreograph, I do it to different kinds of music, from Bach and Beethoven, to Bernstein. I like different kinds of music, just as I like different kinds of artistic media. I love to paint dancers, I love to paint landscapes, and I love to paint still life. I never get bored. I always find something new and interesting. Sunsets, the colors are always different and interesting. I look across the street and see St. Mary’s and all those gorgeous flowers. And, of course, the building itself.

“And I take pictures all the time, wherever we are. I do a lot of my painting from photographs,” she added. “I will do plein air, but it is a challenge for me to haul all of that stuff around. Plus, I am very busy. I still teach dance, every day. And when not doing that, you are liable to find us hiking. When not doing either of those things, I am usually painting. Up here, I paint in my kitchen. I paint in my garage in Atlanta. I paint in my studio in Atlanta. I carry all my paints in what used to be my father’s fishing tackle box. It is perfect and portable!

“I am doing what I love to do. And this week, I am blessed to be in this gorgeous place, the Edgewood Cottage. It is very inspirational,” Lee Harper Vason said, with an air of finality.

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