A Holy Cow! of an Art Show in SoRo

Woody Jackson's Art Brightens the VT Law & Grad School Campus Gallery

Vermont’s famed cow artist, Woody Jackson, tells tales of rural life in Vermont Law and Graduate School’s Dean Shirley A. Jefferson Art Gallery.

April 30, 2026

South Royalton, Vermont—It’s exam time right now at Vermont Law and Graduate School. Not a time for fun and games. Students are buckling down. Reading and re-reading cases. Gathering in study groups. Typing outlines. Creating mnemonics. Studying diligently to achieve the grades they need to move on to the next semester, to graduate and study some more for the bar exam, or to secure that prized internship, a new job, or all of the above.

Suddenly, as if right on cue, appears Vermont artist Woody Jackson, a bespectacled man in a baseball cap and purple shirt from Cornwall, Vermont. His car trunk is filled with vibrantly-colored canvasses of impressionistic Vermont landscapes whose striking images of black and white cows have made him famous. And what does he do? He hums a tune while carrying his artwork across the campus quad to contemplatively hang piece after piece on the VLGS art gallery hooks. He quietly and surely brings color to bare white walls for students and the local community to enjoy.

Of cows and colors, Woody’s paintings of whimsy and beauty bring smiles.

This might be Vermont’s most famous artist, yet here’s a guy, just going about his day, chatting it up with students, adorning the walls with splashes of bright colors that enliven the campus with their luminous glow. He recalls his work on Vermont dairy farms raking hay and feeding calves, juxtaposed with his days in my hometown of New Haven, CT, attending Yale School of Art, with easy talk of burgers, beaches, and pizza. He’s a regular guy, having a regular day, doing an extraordinary thing.

Woody’s art appears in other hallways and alcoves around the school, so people here already have a sense of him as a well-known friend. They treat him with a level of respect bordering on celebrity status. He takes it all in stride, standing for photos with those who want a visual memento of the moment. He knows this school well, having had a brother and a sister graduate from Vermont Law School in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. This art show seems to be his gift to multiple generations of VLGS alumni, faculty, staff, and so many friends.

Hats off to Woody as he poses with VLGS staff member Courtney Potter, who is the master scheduler for art shows in the gallery. A permanent installation of a kinetic stick sculpture by artist Elizabeth Billings of Tunbridge, VT appears on the right.

This show is more than a burst of brightness, it’s a burst of Woody Jackson’s artistic and humanistic brilliance, perfectly timed to make spirits soar. Woody’s famed cows, whose images grace Ben & Jerry’s ice cream pints globally, stand amid multi-colored fields with shining windrows of greens, yellows, and reds. These cows also meander through forest-scapes with orange and blue backdrops as if set on a stage under the spotlights of a Broadway show. They may be silent, but Woody’s cows and landscapes generate conversation and animate the senses.

Fall Glow’s cows meander through a color-infused forest.

Three cheers for Woody Jackson who has come to South Royalton to display his latest exhibition and illuminate our lives. Suddenly, beginning on May Day 2026, just in time for the school’s 50th commencement exercises on May 16th, and for two months in total, there’s joy, elevated spirits, and a whole new rhythm to inspire final exam and bar studiers alike. All a student need do is climb out of their library carrel, close their laptop or textbook for a moment, and meander across campus; or, if they’re online JD students spread out across the country, read this article and enjoy Woody’s creative gifts to us all. The community is also welcome to join this visual feast.

Juris Moodence, in tassled and robed splendor, decked out in the school’s historical commencement colors of yellow and green. The artistic addition of two swans represents the school’s mascot, hailing from the second dean of Vermont Law School, Tom Debevoise’s family crest.

There’s an added attraction here. Unlike other art shows of Woody’s, he’s created a painting unique to VLGS to help celebrate its 50th Anniversary this year. It comes in the shape of, what else, a cow. This one is a commencement cow, a Jacksonesque holstein with a whimsical twist of juris prudential gravitas, yellow-and-green-robed, and topped with a purple tam sporting a yellow tassel. Aptly named “Juris Moodence” as a nod to the legal course of studies purveyed by this budding law and graduate school for over fifty years, Woody’s latest bovine creation is also a bit of a tongue-in-cheek etymological peek into the artist’s cheerful spirit. One look at JM, or “Moodence” as she’s affectionately known, and you can’t help but smile.

Moodence and her friends, will be just hanging around at VLGS until June 30th.

As you venture through the Green Mountain State during the months of May and June, come enjoy the vivid Vermont landscape and the meandering White River that flows gently past Vermont Law and Graduate School. Its art gallery is housed within the Chase Community Center, in an L-shaped hallway connected to the Julien and Virginia Cornell Library, the state’s only law library, in the center of its 13-acre campus in South Royalton. Woody’s work is surrounded by classrooms, faculty, students, staff, and the Victorian-style, small-town homes that now contain VLGS’s many pro bono legal clinics that help people in need. This civic enterprise of a law and graduate school offers free legal services to veterans, small businesses, immigrants and refugees, survivors of domestic violence, children in need of representation, our agriculture and food systems, animals of all stripes (including cows!), communities seeking clean energy alternatives, and to protect our fragile environment. These advocacy and justice-oriented clinics help people and planet from Vermont and the Upper Valley to our country and our world. The school’s motto, “Law for the Community and the World” might be re-stated for the moment as “Cows for the Community and the World.” It would be a powerful message of art, law, and their impact on us all.

Woody will be giving an Artist Talk on the VLGS campus in South Royalton on Friday, June 26, 2026 at 3:30 pm to kick off the school’s 50th Anniversary and Alumni Weekend. It’s open to the public, so make your plans now.

For today, here in South Royalton, Vermont, and for tomorrow, wherever this article might find you, Woody Jackson’s cows and his artwork resonate as a testament to the extraordinary things a small state and a small school can do. Go Swans!

For a short while longer, Dave Celone is Vice President of Alumni Relations and Development at Vermont Law and Graduate School—of which he is a proud graduate.