World’s Longest-Running Domino Art Event Returns to Brattleboro Museum

Virtual viewing option available

Thrill seeker wanted. Be that person who correctly guesses the number of dominoes, and you could be the one to set things in irreversible motion.

The Brattleboro Museum and Art Center is a favorite of mine for the breadth of its offerings and the imaginative ways it brings in and builds community. Recently, Artful has covered superb exhibitions like Keith Haring’s Subway Drawings and installations from Afghan artists Art Lords. And now: a recurrent exhibition of domino art that could astonish you in person or screen-side.

“Forty-eight hours of painstaking set-up. Tens of thousands of pieces arranged with mathematical precision. And just one light tap to set roughly 900 square feet of domino art in motion.”

The Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC)’s annual crowd favorite—the Domino Toppling Extravaganza—returns on Sunday, October 8, at 5:30 p.m. The colorful spectacle is now in its 16th year which, according to BMAC, makes it the longest-running domino event in the world. This year it will take place before a live audience at 28 Vernon Street, next door to the museum—more space, more spectators—and will be livestreamed on Facebook.

According to BMAC: “Internationally renowned domino toppler and YouTube superstar Lily Hevesh and a team of artists—including Brady Dolan, Nathan Heck, and Chris Wright—will arrive on Friday, October 6, to begin their installation process. Hevesh has been called the “queen” of domino art by Inc. Magazine and “the brightest star in the domino universe” by the Washington Post. . . Her work has been highlighted on NBC, FOX News, Nickelodeon, CNN, and CBS, and she was featured in the award-winning 2021 documentary “Lily Topples the World.”

Despite those global accomplishments, Brattleboro’s domino event holds a special place in Hevesh’s very full event calendar. ‘This is unique because we get to do anything we want, and this is one of the riskiest because we’re making it up on the spot,” she told VT Digger before the 2022 toppling. “We don’t have a lot of time to test everything. We just fill the floor.’”

Last year, Hevesh and her fellow artists used 26,000 dominoes to fill the floor of the museum’s Wolf Kahn & Emily Mason Gallery. This year, for the first time, the installation will take place next door to the museum, in the former Marlboro College Graduate School building. According to BMAC’s director Danny Lichtenfeld, the expanded space is “going to work beautifully and might even allow for more dominoes than usual.”

Doors open to spectators at 5 p.m. on October 8, and the toppling begins at 5:30 p.m. Watch live online for free via Facebook Live starting at 5:15 p.m. As an added thrill, a member of the in-person audience can win the chance to start the whole chain reaction by guessing the correct number of dominoes used in the building process.

Admission to the in-person event, sponsored by the Latchis Hotel and Theatre, is free for children 8 and under, $3 for BMAC members, and $5 for all others. Tickets are available in advance or at the door, but because space is limited, advance purchase is advised. No backpacks, no strollers are allowed on the floor. Buy tickets at brattleboromuseum.org or call 802-257-0124 x101.

(Photos and some text (edited) courtesy of Brattleboro Museum and Art Center. Photos from the 15th Annual Domino Toppling Extravaganza at Brattleboro Museum & Art Center Credit: Joshua Farr)

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And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word.