The Phoenix

10/28/2026

This Thursday, October 29th
6-7:30pm FREE
Register at link in bio
The Phoenix, hosted by Vermont Humanities

SUMMERLAND: CHARITY AND SYLVIA
Listening Party

Join Matt LaRocca from the Vermont Symphony Orchestra for a listening party of a new work for orchestra and vocalists composed by Brazilian-American composer Clarice Assad.

The piece, called “Summerland,” is based on the Weybridge couple Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, taking inspiration from their story and weaving their letters to one another into the music.

We’ll listen to the recording from the VSO’s September concert, dive into the score, discuss how real life events can inspire new art, and take an inside look into the commission and composition process.

10/20/2026

SOUL FOOD salon style group show
Opens Friday, November 6th, 6-8pm
at The Phoenix in Waterbury Village, Vermont

Call to artists ///////

The Phoenix will be hosting a salon style two month mega show entitled SOUL FOOD, celebrating the power of art to keep our souls alive. Email work to joseph(at)thephoenixvt.com or even better, use the link in bio to upload available pieces for selection by curator Joseph Pensak.

Deadline is Friday, October 30th at midnight. Joseph will hang the show salon style in order to fit in as many artists as possible while respecting the space each artist’s work needs. 50/50 artist/gallery commission on all sales. You’ll hear back from Joseph via email on Saturday evening, October 31st if your work has been chosen for the show. Feel free to submit multiple pieces!

DATES FOR YOUR CALENDAR

DROP OFF WORK on Sunday or Monday, November 1st and 2nd.
INSTALLATION Sunday Nov 1 through Friday, Nov 6th
OPENING PARTY/RECEPTION with live music on Friday, November 6th.
DEINSTALLATION and pick up of work on Saturday, January 2nd.

Limitations/restrictions: ALL media are welcome, but given our space is used for lots of public gatherings and music events, one restriction we’ve made for ourselves is no work on pedestals. But we have and will exhibit sculptural work (or other pieces often placed on pedestals) on our gallery walls using floating shelves or other mounting techniques. We are also very much open to hanging work suspended from the ceiling and we have lots of experience with suspending work in our large street level window among other places in the gallery space.

10/19/2026

CALL TO ARTISTS

We are sad to announce that because of concerns for the safety of her work around the recent attempts by our landlord to force us out of our space before our lease is up in 2028, Mary Lynn Burke has requested to pick up all of her work from her solo show SENSTIVE SEEDS this Wednesday, October 21st. We will be adding this loss of potential sales to our list of damages in our lawsuit against Whitehill Invention Five, LLC, Radio Vermont Group Acquisition, LLC, and Mark Myers Mermel. We are currently in the discovery phase of this lawsuit for breach of contract, reputational damage and several other categories of damages and very much hope to have a court date scheduled by the end of 2026.

First, the good news: because our case is so easily provable—we have our signed lease stating our rent amounts and copies of every rent check paid in full and deposited by Myers Mermel—plus the statewide support of SO many artists, curators, directors of arts institutions, musicians, local Waterbury businesses and community members, we are grounded in the truth and in our good faith efforts to simply create a commonspace for the arts in Waterbury Village. We will come through this stronger and, as always, committed to amplifying artists and musicians at The Phoenix, Waterbury Studios and TREEHOUSE. We are living in truly insane times.

In other good news, all the artists in our upcoming January through March 2027 show are fully aware/all in for their show. Here are those deets:

The painter and sculptural artist (and avid snowboarder and surfer—she runs a surf shop in the summer and Fall in Block Island, RI and creates in her space at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson the rest of the year) Katherine Clarke Langlands will be the guest curator and featured artist in this group show featuring new work by NY and Taos, NM based paper-maker and sound artist bianca gabrielle goyette and New Jersey/Vermont artist and Parsons lecturer Arpie Gennetian.

SOUL FOOD
We are putting out a call to artists for a salon style three month mega show entitled SOUL FOOD, celebrating the power of art to keep our souls alive. Email work to [email protected].

10/13/2026

Tonight! Can’t think of a cozier night for some always rad music from TURNmusic. This one will be special.

📰✂😆 If this was in print, we'd say cut this out and put it on the fridge.
But it's 2026, so you can bookmark it!
Here's a rundown of some performing arts events locally and not too far. The first one is tonight with Joe Westerlund and Trever Hagen performing tunes from their “Grotto” album, hosted by TURNmusic at The Phoenix.
And there's more where that came from.
https://www.waterburyroundabout.org/community-archive/local-stages-music-venues-are-busy-with-october-performances

10/02/2026

We are thrilled to announce that MYRA FLYNN is coming to The Phoenix and your tix will help us cover our lost income and ongoing legal fees from our bad actor landlord Myers Mermel. , the station Mermel now owns and our next door neighbor on Stowe Street, received a staff email from Mermel denying our claims.

Myra reached out to us because she heard about our landlord’s ongoing attempt to push us out of our space (which we pay on time and in full rent for) by blocking us from renting our currently open and empty studio upstairs (despite having a tenant ready to move in). She is playing this show as a benefit so tell your friends and let’s pack it out for a night of sensual and soulful storytelling. This date will be a last minute addition to her fall tour and we couldn’t be more thrilled to host. Thank you MyraFlynn for loving and supporting our thriving arts space here in the center of Waterbury Village, Vermont.

MYRA FLYNN
Sunday, October 18th
Limited seating available so get your tickets early before it sells out. Tix will go on sale starting tomorrow at noon through Seven Days tickets and myraflynn.com. Look for the link in our bio and at thephoenixvt.com.

MYRA FLYNN’s latest album, Shadow Work, was released in the summer of 2023. Margaret Grayson of 7days describes Shadow Work as “... five songs deeply concerned with relationships of all kinds. Flynn, who splits her time between Vermont and Los Angeles, sings of mothers and daughters, romantic relationships gone wrong, and the people who get us through the hardest times.

Currently, Myra Flynn lives a bi-costal life, still holding onto her roots in Vermont part of her year while also working and living in Los Angeles under the guidance of Swift Street Management Team. She has created a jewelry line made from recycled piano parts and recently partnered with Vermont Vineyard, Shelburne Vineyard to create a namesake w**e: FLYNN. She has toured the United States countless times as well as: Whales, London, Ireland and most frequently, Australia. Her motto regarding next steps and fame tends to be: “If you’re doing it, you’ve already made it.” ❤️

09/21/2026

….cont’d from last post. The stay of eviction issued by Judge Richardson, along with the temporary restraining order against Myers Mermel, was effective in protecting the remainder of our leases (or so we thought).

The update, which will be explained in greater detail in a forthcoming article in the Waterbury Roundabout, is that now Mermel has shifted strategies. His newest effort to force us into default is aimed directly at cutting off the income we receive from renting our upstairs studios at 7 Stowe Street (Waterbury Studios). Currently there are two tenants upstairs, OSSO Studios (Greg Montgomery and Kaziah Haviland’s architecture firm) and Sirius Health, Cadence Shae’s holistic counseling practice. We have two other studios available for rent starting June 1st. We put forward a reputable massage therapist who was ready to move in June 1st. Sublease was immediately DENIED (our lease clearly states that approval of new subtenants will not be unreasonably withheld for the stated uses of “office/artist space.” So we went back to advertising the space and found a wonderful local artist and curator (clearly within the bounds of the lease) who was ready to move in September 1st (note we have lost $600/month in rent, which we use to subsidize The Phoenix’s lease, in June, July, August and now September). Shockingly for us, though we are used to this by now, approval was immediately DENIED. The reason for this denial? That we are still in default of our lease, so all of our upstairs leases are invalid. A second studio is opening up October 1st when another tenant is moving out of state, but given that this latest denial was squarely within the stated uses in the lease, we fully expect any tenant we submit will be similarly denied.

So what are we asking of you? Come buy a painting, rent our space for an upcoming event, or give to our “we can’t receive income from our rental spaces and therefore are being forced into default by the owner of our building” rent payment fund -pensak on Venmo. Otherwise we fully expect Mermel will attempt to lock us out of our spaces, claiming we have underpaid our rent (we’ll pay as much as we can).

09/21/2026

Louie and Immy would like to announce that their co-Pawrent Joseph Pensak, co-owner and curator of The Phoenix, TREEHOUSE and Waterbury Studios (AMPS, LLC) will be playing a 24 hour piano concert on the 1929 Steinway at The Phoenix to raise awareness that The Phoenix is once again trying to be forced out of its village center space by our next door neighbor on Stowe Street, WDEV. 9am-9am this Tuesday into Wednesday.

If you haven’t been keeping up, WDEV was sold by the Squier Family to Myers Mermel in September 2025. We sadly did not get an opportunity to put in an offer on our building, as much as we wanted to. After 5 and 7 Stowe Street (to clarify, 7 Stowe is Waterbury Studios, our upstairs gallery space that has four lovely studios for rent as offices and artist studios, and 5 Stowe Street is The Phoenix, which has TURNmusic and TR Risk as our lovely subtenants) sold to Whitehill Invention Five, LLC, Myers Mermel refused to deposit our on time rent checks and also cancelled our only scheduled meeting to discuss any questions he might have had about our leases, since he was becoming our new landlord. I (Joseph) continued to hand deliver our on time rent checks to the WDEV offices at 9 Stowe Street, directly to Caroline McClain, Mermel’s business partner. Each time, I emphasized that Anna Black (co-owner of AMPS and my lovely wife) and I would like to meet and discuss why he was not depositing our checks. Caroline told me each time that she would let Myers know and make sure they were deposited.

Fast forward four months to December 22nd, 2025, we received an emailed (and mailed by certified mail) eviction notice (linked pdf available to download in our insta profile) three days before Christmas.

Anna and I received no prior notice that this eviction was coming and we spent our entire holiday putting together a 200 page complaint with photos and videos of our hand delivered rent checks as exhibits. Thankfully Judge Richardson responded with a stay of eviction and a temporary restraining order against Myers Mermel, as we clearly proved that we had leases in hand…..tbc

08/29/2026

08/29/2026

Again, you need sleep on a Friday night Waterbury? I think not. You’re doom scrolling let’s be honest. What if you sweated it out instead? Your village loves you more than you know. Til 2 you sillies. One foot in front of the other. You can dooooo it. TIL 2

08/29/2026

Ya’ll didn’t believe us we goin til 2 so come on back out you sweethearts