Start your Gallery Walk at the Center! Locals and visitors alike take in thought-provoking exhibitions, enjoy wine, mingle with friends, and often meet the artists.

The mid-19th century in the United States saw the emergence of a group of progressive thinkers who advocated for a new understanding of the relationship between the individual, the divine and the natural world. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller, among others, came together in a shared belief in humanitarian causes and religious purpose. Transcendentalism, as their theological and philosophical ideas became known, embraced elements of Unitarianism and advocated for a personal knowledge of God based in a rejection of materialism in favor of a spiritual experience of nature. In the U.S., Transcendentalism’s ideals found their most famous embodiment in Thoreau’s retreat to Walden Pond (then believed to be bottomless), where he spent a year living in a small, spare cabin, focusing on the spiritual rewards of a life lived in harmony with nature. This BIG IDEA project offers the notion that Transcendentalism’s retreat from the material in favor of a spiritual or divine encounter with the natural is an idea that continues to be relevant—and one that is perhaps more useful now than ever before.