BTW Berkshires 
Last time I saw the fairgrounds, two glass-blowers were shaping a pumpkin on a metal rod and pulling the molten glass like taffy to give it a stem. A fiber artist brought panels as large as oil paintings in silken thread, and my parents found a table of wooden books — boxes carved like grimoires…
A young man is singing in a low and carrying voice. He holds long phrases on a breath. He is chanting a Hawaiian oli, and the words are his. Nālamakū Ahsing is a Williams student, class of ’21, and he wrote these verses calling to the people who came before him to speak. He opens…
Low strings advance to a beat like incoming thunder. A lithe figure in red strikes the ground with an itshoba, a wooden rod whisking the tail of a cow or an ox. Myrtha, the queen of the Wilis, flexes firm shoulders and extends a bare foot. Myrtha appears in the 19th-century French ballet Giselle, but on…
George Rickey’s metal forms caught the light and shifted in the wind. By that summer, he had shown them worldwide from Osaka to Berlin. In 1978, Maxwell Davidson met George Rickey for the first time at Rickey’s studio in East Chatham, N.Y. Davidson had opened his New York gallery 10 years before, and that summer, Rickey…
Berkshire naturalist Thom Smith strolls through the Mount’s grounds and gardens. As the summer season wanes, outdoor sculpture in leaf season takes on a new light, and The Mount in Lenox continues to draw people in even before they reach the mansion. Take a relaxing stroll along one of the Berkshires’ loveliest of driveways toward what…
Surfaces shimmer like water at sunrise. The paintings are layered in color, in oils and Venetian plaster or encaustic pigments in hot beeswax. Patricia Hogan and Marcelene I. Mosca share their work, abstraction spilling into landscape, cityscape and motion, in Two Perspectives, a new exhibit at the Good Purpose Gallery of CIP (the College Internship Program),…
The world is remembering Leonard Bernstein this summer. Aug. 25, 2018, would have been his 100th birthday, and on Saturday night the world will come to the Berkshires to remember him. Because in many ways he began here. He came as a student to the first class of what was then the Berkshire Music Center…
In a studio at night, two women are holding each other. The room smells of paint and turpentine and smoke and sweat. An artist trying to build a career and raise a daughter comes to a bar after her first big opening and meets a woman who has always lived on the edge, on the streets,…
If you won’t have many opportunities to kayak in Southern Vermont this summer, why not choose a rare body of water? The 200-acre Sadawga Lake is said to be named for Chief Sadawga, the last American Indian to camp on its shore, and rumor has it he could swim under its floating bog-like island. Yes, a…
Rosa Bonheur had won international fame for her scenes of horse fairs and ploughing oxen. She went to abattoirs and open markets to study animals, and she dissected them to learn their anatomy, like Leonardo Da Vinci learning the chambers of the human heart. But she had to get a letter of permission from the…