The center includes art galleries with permanent and rotating exhibits, the area's largest sculpture park, a performance space, and educational facilities.

The Southern Vermont Arts Center has a permanent collection and rotating special exhibitions every season.

Many noteworthy artists from the previous century are represented in the collection including Ogden Pleissner, Jay Hall Conaway, Reginald Marsh, Guy Pene du Bois, Lorenzo Hatch, Luigi Lucioni, Arthur Gibbs Burton, and Robert Strong Woodward.

[2] The center's campus, first used as a farm and woodlot by members of the Orvis family, was established as a summer country estate by William and Gertrude Divine Ritter, then of Columbus, Ohio, in 1916.

Gertrude Divine Ritter retained ownership of the estate, soon afterward remarrying, to Hugh Webster.