In Kim Senklip Harvey’s awardwinning comedy, two sisters and a close friend take a journey into power and find strength in their Native identities in their own ways.
Read articleLife in these hills goes back thousands of years in wide spirals of stories. Here we honor human stories, from the Mohican people who live and return here today to Elizabeth Freeman and W.E.B. DuBois, people who have come from many parts of the world to work here in the mills, and to live in the cities and the hills today, and many more.
Walk across time in hiking boots (Sept 29 newsletter)
Abigail Haynes-Lennox is directing us — a soprano in the extended company of Roomful of Teeth, up here on a mountain leading a damp and sweaty bunch of hikers in Shaker hymns.
Read articleClimbing Holy Hill revives a Shaker pilgrimage
Two music ensembles, Our Native Daughters and Roomfull of Teeth, and artist Allison Smith transform a walk in the woods into an experience of art and music in Climbing Holy Hill at Hancock Shaker Village.
Read articleMohican storytellers curate their past and future at Berkshire Museum
The canoe floats at the center of the room, a long tapering organic shape ribbed like a whale, and above it the shape of a wave crosses a banner in a web of blue lines, like a three-dimensional digital model, or a weaving.
Read articleBaby animals return to the Shaker farm
Bill Mangiardi holds a lamb a few days old. She has a twin brother, and their mother has not been feeding them equally, so Mangiardi offers her a bottle of warm milk from a generous nanny goat. ...
Read articleGlenn Kaino invokes protest in light and shadow
Los Angeles musician Deon Jones is singing U2’s Bloody Sunday in a ring of light. A protest in Derry, Northern Ireland, comes together with a protest Selma, Alabama, as international artist Glenn Kaino brings his new work to Mass MoCA.
Read articleCarrie Mae Weems holds her eye on the pandemic
Carrie Mae Weems is internationally known for her work in audio, digital images, video, and above all in photography. She has created Resist Covid: Take 6, a new public work, with messages for surviving in this hard time.
Read articleW.E.B. DuBois strengthens the soul of a community (February 17 newsletter)
This morning I remembered a day in July in a garden along the Housatonic River. A woman was singing in a strong, rich alto, leading a spiritual in the W.E.B. Dubois memorial garden, and we were thinking about how he felt about the town where he was born.
Read articleBlack in the Berkshires: Revealing the past enlarges the future
Frances Jones-Sneed has walked along the Housatonic River, finding and telling the stories of black men and women in the Berkshires who have reshaped this country since this country began.
Read articleWill Amado Syldor-Severino speaks to silence
Will Amado Syldor-Severino, a senior fellow with Americorps Massachusetts Promise, is holding his three-week-old son, Abi, on a winter day, as he talks about diversity, his work with local teens and painful issues too often left unsaid.
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