Larry Bissonette

2022 Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts

Larry Bissonnette of Williston is the 2022 recipient of the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. Bissonnette is a disability rights advocate and artist who has been painting, drawing, and taking photographs since he was a young child. His work has been exhibited regularly both locally and nationally. In 2015, he had a solo exhibition of his work, “Looking Out: The Self-Taught Art of Larry Bissonnette” at the Amy Tarrant Gallery in Burlington. His art also appears internationally, including in the collection of the Musée de l’Art Brut in Switzerland. At age 34, Bissonnette learned to communicate through typing and began combining words with his art to express his thoughts and ideas. Over the past 25 years, he has been a featured presenter at many national educational conferences and has written and spoken on the topics of autism, communication, and art. Bissonnette is also both the subject and writer of an award-winning film about his art and life, called “My Classic Life as an Artist: A Portrait of Larry Bissonnette” (2005), and starred in a feature length documentary directed by Gerardine Wurzburg about adults with autism called “Wretches and Jabberers” (2010). He also is a contributing author to “Communication Alternatives in Autism: Perspectives on Typing and Spelling for the Nonspeaking (2019),” a book edited by California Lutheran University professor Edlyn Pena.

From a five-part short video tribute series created by Willow O’Feral and Brad Heck of Haptic Pictures, honoring each of the six 2022 awards recipients of the Vermont Arts Council.