When we spoke with just-retired UVM art professor and member of the Class of 1976, Cami Davis, in the summer of 2025, she was:

• Preparing for the July premiere of the Video Animation Set Design created with Animator William Tipper for the Emergent Universe Oratorio by composer Sam Guarnaccia at Skidmore College, by Albany ProMusica, (which she notes was funded in part by two UVM retired faculty awards and a Vermont Arts Council grant).

• Looking forward to a local Vermont event to celebrate and renew people’s shared love of Earth, which she was helping organize with a committee that included Rubenstein School Senior Lecturer Amy Seidl: “Renewing Our Love of Earth, 25^th Earth Charter Anniversary, held at Shelburne Farms on September 8; 

• Excited to share two recent series of paintings: Poetic Ecologies, and Magnolia’s Desires

• Looking forward to her upcoming reunion celebrating 50 years since her graduation from UVM.

The laughter-filled conversation was full of creativity, stories, hope, remembrances, reflections on the intersection of art and ecology - and it was a University of Vermont story through and through.

Here is a lightly edited transcript of our talk.

UVM Foundation (UVMF): Thank you for making the time to talk with us. We've been so interested in your journey from UVM undergrad to faculty member and working artist - really, we are excited to hear about everything - from how you got started as a UVM undergraduate student to your wishes for your current projects. Maybe we should start with some of your favorite memories from your time on campus. When we talk to alumni we love all the details - where did you live, where did you hang out, and what were some of your favorite classes? 

Cami Davis:  Well, there was a group of us who were on the ski team (I never actually raced for UVM due to getting injured in pre-season training), and we lived together in the early days of Living/Learning. One thing I remember is that we kept the furniture from our suite outside for the last month of classes. (I don't know what we did when it rained.) We just liked living outside! We’d have campfires at night! This of course would never be allowed now. I have since noticed that furniture in the suites is chained down, and to today’s students I have to say, ‘You are welcome!’

And then all 10 of us rented a house in Colchester, a huge contemporary house that I still can't believe the guy rented to a bunch of students. (Laughs) We had a grand time with rope swings off the balcony and bonfires, we’d truck-ski on the field (“like water skiing but on the snow”) and all sorts of adventures. We would pile in a van all bundled up to go to our Music Appreciation class with Professor Pappoutsakis, because it was also the energy crisis and all the UVM buildings were super cold. We brought our thermoses of hot chocolate and Professor Pappoutsakis would blast the classical music. His enthusiasm was infectious. We loved it and we even loved the cold, which somehow just added to our sense of adventure!

And we also found ourselves on the steps on the paths behind Williams Hall and Billings and the Ira Allen Chapel, which became our semi-official meeting spot, where we’d all bring a bowl and a spoon, and someone would arrive with lots of ice cream and we’d all sit around eating, and then the next thing you know, we’d start improvising some music, percussive improvisation, which would all start because someone would hear some sounds or clicks of the spoons. The energy levels were always so high and I’m not sure where it all began – but we had so much fun.

Remembering Friends, Remembering Studies in Art

UVMF:  Looking back, who especially comes to mind? 

Cami: (Laughs) Oh, it’s hard! Everyone had a nickname. But let’s see, there was Tina Christensen, Gayle Susslin, Richard (Dick) Erdman, who pulled hilarious physical stunts all the time (editor’s note: and went on to become a prolific sculptor and UVM Athletics Hall of Famer for skiing), Elizabeth (“Bizzie”) Kellam, Steve Burkos, Mary Partridge. Alan Partridge. These were just some of the people in that house, but there were many more too.

And that was just the students. Of course, there were so many great faculty members we connected with. Besides Professor Pappoutsakis there was Professor Long, who taught World Literature. I studied Dante with Bill Stephany both on campus and on a UVM trip to Italy post-graduation. Christie Fengler-Stephany in art history. professor and artist Frank Hewitt, who is such an important influence on my painting practice to this day, along with other art department professors Ed Owre, Bill Davidson, Dan Higgins, and Bill Lipke – all of whom I ended up teaching with when I returned as faculty 12 years later.

It was such a formalist era of painting. I remember once I was on faculty joking with Dan Higgins that emotion was a dirty word when talking about art. Things have really changed. Now I would describe my work almost entirely as the form of feeling, or at least a major contributor in the integration of ideas, feelings, embodied and material (paint) responses as well as the references to plant patterns.

With retirement and with the reunion coming up, I’ve been thinking about how my undergraduate years at UVM in the 70s informed what I went on to do, all these days of skiing and learning and having fun in the mountains and woods. And really, how grateful I am, how much I believe in, the humanities and the College of Arts and Sciences as a foundation for living a meaningful and engaged life, personally and as members of civil society.

I took a lot of philosophy of art (where I met another friend who is still in my life, Tina Christensen '76, who is a wonderful designer and fine artist), Chinese philosophy, music, literature and art history, studio art, environmental studies, and geology. And physicality - like actually using our bodies - was super-important, whether it was on the ski team, hiking and working summers for the AMC (there were a number of us at UVM), or just the ways we had fun. This mattered for the development of my art besides being fun in our lives: how the body moves physically is an implied force in my present work. Additionally, my years of music training prior to and at UVM, inform the layering of ideas in a painting. like looping tracks of harmonies.

I deeply knew there were connections between all these subjects, even though at that point transdisciplinary majors weren’t offered. I mean, I had to choose – was I going to focus on visual arts or environmental studies?  But I sensed that there was a relationship between the two. and this became the burr in my side, the inquiry I’ve pursued ever since: the connection between arts and the environment, creativity and life itself. I’ve built that into everything I’ve done – and what I continue to do.

Becoming a Boundary-Defying Artist

UVMF: It looks so clearly that your career - as a working artist and as a professor – has been profoundly boundary-defying, and deeply transdisciplinary. Where did that come from?

Cami: I have always been interested in exploring my sense of presence in the living world, which means that I developed a curiosity to explore the relationships between the ecological and the cultural, the spiritual, and the philosophical. So, as an artist, that means not just considering nature as the subject, which is a very separating concept, but by considering the question what is nature? This question eventually situates humans within the rest of life seeing that we have co-evolved together. In other words, that question shifts from separation to belonging with the rest of life. Additionally, humans developed the capacity to self-reflect, and for metaphor --- something pointing towards something else — where ideas like “we are the universe reflecting on itself” can arise. So, in this sense I think we can change the saying that art imitates life to art IS life – when considering this wider viewpoint of immersed, entangled and co-evolving expression.

In 1998 I studied with Jungian James Hillman at Schumacher College Institute for Ecological Studies in the UK, We looked at ecology, psychology and art all together, and how to ecologically perceive the dynamic relationships between, people, places, and things – between, well, everything.

Those ideas were later reflected in assignments for courses cross-listed between the Department of Art & Art History and Environmental Program and eventually in the Perspectives on Making course in the Art Department. where faculty could use their research areas as the focus for assignments. I also advised senior theses on Art & Ecology with the Environmental Program until I retired.

There's one assignment I was thinking about in particular called sympoesis, which means making-with, and is built on cultural anthropologist Donna Haraway's concept that nothing is truly independently self-organizing – because “nothing is itself without everything else (a line from the Emergent Universe Oratorio libretto co-authored by myself with Sam & Paula Guarnaccia and John Cimino).

So how do you teach that in an art course? Well, our students were asked to begin their creative process with a concept, were given materials (paint, paper, cardboard, glue, anything we could find around the studio), and were required to have some recognizable imagery and some unrecognizable imagery. They were asked to work with all these relationships, conceptual, material, and the felt sense in such a way that they had to stay open to what might emerge. The process of integrating these factors initiates improvisation, iteration, experimentation, all of which encourage surprising outcomes. They created series in two dimensions, in relief and in three dimensions, and would write and talk about it.  

Loving the Earth as an Artist: Three Projects

UVMF: We’re talking just as you’ve officially retired, and it occurs to me that people sometimes think that things slow down in retirement. But your big, visionary projects are clearly continuing full force. Can you tell us about the projects you’ve been involved with this summer and fall?

Cami: One of these projects is the Poetic Ecologies series, which I talk about on the project website by saying:

I have been circling notions of presence in nature – including questions of what IS nature – within the formal language of painting for more than 40 years.

The Poetic Ecologies series start with plant patterns. They serve as both a reference to life and as the basis for improvisation. I have come to understand that improvisation itself reveals how life works; ecosystems of relationships that unfold through mutual transformations. (Andreas Weber, The Biology of Wonder)

In the case of a painting, idea, surface, mark, color, and reference generate emergent outcomes.  

I am interested in exploring frameworks, conceptually and through the painting practice that situate we humans within life. Perceiving our shared subjectivity with living organisms can open us to sensing possibilities for innovative co-existence with a living Earth. 

For the Emergent Universe Oratorio by composer Sam Guarnaccia, I created the 90-minute video animation set design with Brooklyn-based, Vermont-born animator William Tipper. The work premiered this July 2025 at Zankel Hall, Skidmore College, a performance by Albany ProMusica with conductor Jose Daniel Flores-Caraballo. It “seeks to bring the integrative and transformative power of the story of the Universe’s origin, evolution and emergence of life to our present environmental and civilizational crisis.” Albany ProMusica chose the Oratorio to open their season’s series on the climate crisis as it provides a context for understanding the issue of climate as entangled within the wider story of our present cultural crisis of understanding. The set design uses details from over 20 of my paintings, with moving elements created in partnership with William, hopefully presenting a visual suggestion of an earth and a universe that are alive, which is a concept that’s at the core of the Oratorio’s premise. It was recorded and so is available to watch. (Cami notes that the animation will be edited in post-production).

And then on September 8, there was the “Renewing Our Love of Earth, 25^th Earth Charter Anniversary” event. I was on the organizing committee along with UVM Rubenstein School’s Amy Seidl .We have been so excited to be part of bringing this hopeful message of renewal to Vermont through the day-long event at Shelburne Farms that featured speakers Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Bill McKibben, and many more, plus music by Paul Winter and Dave Haughey, Dance performance choreographed by Middlebury College professor of dance Laurel Jenkins, and featuring the Ark of Hope by artist Sally Linder, as we celebrated the importance of a global ethics movement expressed in the Charter’s values and principles, as part of the framework for the upcoming COP 30 Brazil Climate conference.  Twenty-five years ago, students in my class facilitated the community arts project Temenos Books: Images for Global Healing, Peace and Gratitude, that Sally Linder and I created to introduce the Earth Charter in schools, businesses, and organizations around Vermont. More UVM students volunteered at the first event in 2001 at the Breeding Barn. Amy Seidl and Walter Poleman brought over 300 UVM students this time! It has been an amazing experience to both remember what happened 25 years ago and experience this powerful event this time – reminding us of our capacity to come to consensus across differences of cultures and sectors to create a better world.

50^th Reunion Ahead

UVMF: Well, wow! And on top of all of this art-making and collaboration, we’re looking ahead to a milestone reunion for your undergraduate class. It seems like you have a singular perspective on UVM over the last 50 years. Can I ask - what are you looking forward to at your reunion?

Cami: I am so looking forward to seeing the pathways that everyone’s lives have taken and to reminisce about all the amazing things we did at school during our time together. And having been on campus all these years and knowing that many people haven’t been here, I’m really excited about, that they might get to see the renovation of the Francis Colburn Gallery in Williams Hall. Or Cohen Hall where we’ve had the greatest opportunities to become friends and explore collaborations across the arts disciplines including with people like Professor Deb Ellis of Film and Television Studies, or Paula Higa, professor of dance. And I am still looking forward to possible collaborations with them.

Wishes for Today’s Students

UVMF: This has been an absolutely inspirational conversation. Maybe we could finish with any thoughts or wishes you especially hold for today's students?

Cami: It probably makes sense that I stay excited about the arts, especially cross-disciplinary collaborations.

The arts are so important, they always have been, but are especially so, right now. There are multiple ways of knowing and the arts can touch deeply into our psyches and emotions. They can help frame, even discover and reveal, our stories as we try to make sense of our selves individually and collectively. This includes exposure to multiple perspectives to understand our influences, to catalyze insights, which can in turn motivate meaningful action.

We're in a time of rapid transition. What a disservice if we only include the rational to come to bear on how we want to co-shape the world, in collaboration with the rest of life. We want to understand the diversity of cultural viewpoints. We want to bring all this richness perceptually and conceptually to the task of future flourishing.

And so, for students, though it's no doubt a time of great peril, it is also a time of great possibility or promise (to use the words of the Earth Charter). Systems are crumbling all around us, but we get to identify with greater clarity not only what hasn’t worked, but what has worked and dream into even better ways of thriving as we go forward. We get to bring enormous creativity to reshaping a global society that is just for all, aligns with the web life, and ensures peace. Again, nothing is itself without everything else. Existence is relational, contexts within contexts within contexts. It can be overwhelming but it makes me committed more than ever to the notion of a liberal arts education, accessible to all, as we learn-with and apply-new understandings towards the future we desire.

Read More

Read more alumni stories (or share your own!) in Class Notes. And meet some of the other alumni whose news and life stories we've recently been honored to share: 

• A UVM Friendship Forged in Green and Gold

• Alumni Profile: Dr. Nancy Cross Dunham ’76, Sociologist, Poet, Supporter of Today’s Students 

• What You Should Know about Ira Allen: A Conversation with Kevin Graffagnino '76 

• Breaking Barriers and Giving Back: Dr. Mona Trempe’s Enduring Impact on Women in Science

• About the June 2026 Golden Reunion for Classes of 1975 & 1976