Artists are painting at home. They are leading informal online workshops with materials people may have handy — how to play with a Smartphone camera or make marbled paper. Museums are creating programs and exhibits online. In North Adams, MCLA has a virtual artist in residence — Genevieve Gaignard, a nationally recognized photographer and collage artist, is turning her attention to the Berkshires.
In Covid-19 in the Berkshires we are alive with online art workshops and virtual exhibits, artist talks and programs …
This is a changing time. Concerns for health and safety are most important, and for many of us, what we can do is to stay home. But we can think of the people around us now and talk with them. And we can share ideas.
While Berkshire art museums, artists’ studios and galleries are closed, we can explore many of them online. This is a challenging time for many local artists and makers and entrepreneurs, but we can take time to see what we have close by. I’ll add to this as we go on. What art here do you remember, or do you want to see?
Art OMI
Art Omi, the OMI International Arts Center in Ghent, N.Y, is launching of Curatorial Conversations, a new series of live virtual tours led by Curatorial Assistant Kelsey Sloane.
Each session will talk about works in OMI’s galleries and outdoor sculpture park and explore the connections between them, with a conversation for questions an answers about the works.
Berkshire Museum: Art of the Hills
Berkshire Museum’s new exhibition, Art of the Hills: Narrative, curated by nationally recognized artists Amy Myers and Seung Lee, is now open online, on the virtual walls of a high-resolution 3D rendering.
Art of the Hills: Narrative celebrates the rich, creative culture of the Berkshires, bringing together 78 works by 64 emerging and established artists that live or work within 60 miles of the museum.
Berkshire Museum
The Berkshire Museum is creating daily programs with Berkshire Museum@Home,
taking a close look at their collection. They have opened their major summer show, Art of the Hills, as an online exhibit.
They explore the museum in and family programs with digital discoveries and daily doodles and activvities, and blogs and podcasts inspired by their exhibits including She Shapes History, honoring the 100th anniversary of women’s right to vote, and strong women like Ida B. Wells, a journalist, editor and activist who fought against lynching and injustice in the 19th century.
Clark Art Institute
On an early spring night, a woman stands in golden light. I remember seeing her for the first time in a Japanese ukiyo-e print, with the light swimming around her on a rainy night. And I can see her now in my living room.
The Clark Art Institute has its collection wholly online, and the museum is creating new programming, Clark Connects, with talks and stories from the curators and staff, teachers and students, and games and crafts on the projects page.
You can take a virtual tour of Lines from Life, the new exhibit of French drawings that would have opened this spring, and revisit past exhibits online. You can also look through 100 years of Japanese woodblock prints, or take a walk in imagination along the Monet’s geese.
Bronze in motion: Andrew DeVries
Berkshire artist Andrew DeVries casts his own bronze sculptures, making him rare. Metal sculptors are much more likely to create a design and work with a foundry, but he works creates his own molds and works with metal.
His people are fluid in motion, he says. They are lithe figures — dancers, acrobats, women reaching to the sky. And he has images of many of them online, so we can see them here.
Landscapes and light: Greylock Gallery
Early morning light rests on a ridge line or a mountain lake, or a weathered barn high on a hillside. At Greylock Gallery, Berkshire native Rachele Dario gathers established and emerging Berkshire artists — Curt Hanson, John MacDonald, Hale Johnson and many more.
IS183 Art School online
IS183 Art School has moved its art classes to the web. Collage, iPhone photography paper sculpture — you can take a one-time workshop with their art teachers (for a minimal fee) or tune in for a series. Or download a coloring book made by Berkshire artists.
Families can find free art projects with materials often found at home, from marbled paper to mandalas made of brightly colored spices.
Mass MoCA
If you’re missing the rainbow dazzle of three floors of Sol LeWitt paintings in reds and blues, yellows and greens, you can walk through them digitally in more than 60 bright images.
Mass MoCA does not yet have a digital collection, but you can get a sense of the scope of the artwork you will see in the galleries when they reopen.
MCLA artist studio tours
MCLA Gallery 51 announces a new online program, the G51 Virtual Artist Series: Local, regional, national, and international artists will give virtual tours of their studios and discuss their practices, live on Zoom at noon on alternating Saturdays. MCLA will also record the conversations with the artists, so you can watch them later.
The conversations will run all summer, fromartist Gladys Melina Kalichini, originally from Zambia, who will talk about her internationally known paintings, digital work, and installations, to North Adams artist Kim Faler, to Anina Major (below), a Bahamian-born artist working with topics of identity, slavery, the female body, Bahamian culture and more.
MCLA artist in residence Genevieve Gaignard
MCLA’s inaugural Artist’s Laboratory Artist in Residence, the nationally recognized photographer, installation and collage artist Genevieve Gaignard, will be in residence through August, creating work for an exhibition at Gallery 51 and working with the community in workshops, talks and other programming.
She is a nationally recognized artist living in Los Angeles, and her work focuses on photographic self-portraiture, sculpture, and installation to explore race, femininity, class, and their various intersections.
Norman Rockwell Museum
The Rockwell has created a Finding Home: Four Artists’ Journeys. You can join a free daily sketch club, listen to talks from artists and the staff, take a visual tour …
Many of the works in the museum archives are up to view, from 150 years of illustrators and from Rockwell himself. You might find Isabel Bishop’s drawings of New York in the 1930s. Or Scott Bakal imagining the story of blues musician Robert Leroy Johnson (1911-1938). Browsing the collection can lead in many directions.
Glass menagerie: Schantz Gallery
From Dale Chihuly’s wild poppies and sinuous chandaliers to Peter Bremers’ ice bergs, the Schantz gallery in Stockbridge holds a wide array of glass art — abstract and figurative, geometric and natural.
They come from artists in many countries, and in many styles. They are translucent, transparent and opaque. Some are as minute as the sepals of a crocus as and some as smooth as a diving whale.
Williams College Museum of Art
A digital ramble through the Williams College Museum of Art can bring me to work I have never seen on the walls in 20 years, and to work I remember vividly from shows years ago. A horseman gallops through a Mughal painting. The people in Zanele Muholi’s portraits look straight at me with direct and human courage.
Lalla Essaydi’s black and white photograph I remember — this woman with long dark hair kneeling in her white dress, and the writing on her clothing, on the wall and on her reaching hand. I want to read what she is saying.
