BTW Berkshires 
I haven’t caught the time exactly right in years — but on Friday the whole hillside was in bloom. The azaleas are open in Pittsfield State Forest, where the Taconic Crest Trail crosses the ridge above berry pond. You can walk through, but I drove up in the afternoon. You pass wind up the hill, and…
The French lilac are blooming in wide arcs in the gardens at The Mount, at the end of the lime walk. Standing in the circle of bushes, I watched two swallowtail butterflies touch down for a drink. In the woods yellow iris still show in marshy places, and around the grounds artwork has come in…
On Sunday, on opening day, I walked through sunlit halls and wide open gallery spaces in Mass MoCA’s new Building 6, taking a look at the new exhibits, from Robert Rauschenberg to Louise Bourgeois. In Gunnar Schonbeck’s No Experience Necessesary a whole family was coordinating to bang four clangers at once. In Thumbs Up for the Mothership,…
The tapered wooden shapes are forms for making leather shoes. They are set here in the form of a woman’s body. Women need to feel safe, says the man leading a group to look at the work, and his voice carries across the gallery. When women came out to march in protests in the 1960s,…
Wooden boxes as smooth as leather-bound books, glass melted and pulled into vines, embroidered landscapes as fine as paintings — Memorial Day weekend brings the Paradise City Arts Festival to Northampton. In the photo at the top, Cake n’ Chit-Chat, Dwight Baird walks the backstreets of Havana, Cuba. This is one in a series of paintings with old…
A low reed lifts in a minor fourth. A chamber musician calls in the tone of a blues riff. When he came to America in 1892, Czech composer Antonín Dvořák found beauty in Spirituals and field songs, Gaelic fiddle or an Oglala or Lakota melody from the plains. He came to direct New York’s National…
Bound, it begins. Wasn’t night what lingered where sweat left salt, where breath touch-expired? Bound is the title of the first poem, and the poem touches two of its meanings: I was shut tight. I was going somewhere and quickly … The book opens with confinement and insistent motion, and it closes with a movement…