BTW Berkshires 
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…
Imagine holding hands and spinning until the room blurs. Imagine that movement in someone’s arms, to the beat of music. Imagine the musicians sliding from one tune to the next, the melody racing over the chords. Across the country, across 200 years and more, folk dance music has stayed alive. Mill workers have played on their breaks,…
You have already taken all I have. Now you are taking my son. The words appear on a vast wall. At center stage a man faces a round microphone, as though he is speaking on the radio in 1918. He is reliving the history of Africa in World War I — a story internationally acclaimed South African…
A line curves into a ripe pear, or a petal, or a stem. Walk through earth banks planted with larch, hawthorn and sporobolus grass. Pass the stone lip of fountain with a flame at the center. Enter a doorway in a living wall of cyclamen, maidenhair fern and ivy. And here, in a restored 19th-century house,…
Get behind the scenes, get muddy, get up close to paper and paint and clay. ArtWeek is coming to the Berkshires through May 6 with dozens of events, most of them free … check out the full calendar here.
The sounds come from North Florida. A choir is singing a spiritual, a woman is speaking, crickets are droning in a cedar swamp. They are indicators of things that are changing, says New York artist Allison Janae Hamilton — insects, the migratory patterns of birds, people living with the land. She grew up in Florida…
A serpent leans its head through an opening in the stone. In its open mouth, a man’s head is floating with closed eyes, as though he is asleep. A maize god looks down from above, wearing a headdress of corn husks. At the center of a gallery at the Williams college Museum of Art, sculptures…
Carlos Rodriguez had gotten off a plane from Puerto Rico the day before. When he came from his Brooklyn studio into this quiet room in North Adams, he felt exhausted. He wanted a warm place. So he made one. Across two walls he has hung cloth with a warm golden hue. He has sewn the…
This morning, I came to hear the Mass MoCA winter season announced — art and events across the next few months, leading up to William Kentridge’s residency in May. He will come with a troupe of more than 50 performers for a two-week residency and performance of his in-progress work, The Head and The Load, and fill the…
The scene gleams out of the Renaissance — the three wise men kneel before the barefoot, tired new parents and the infant. The color, perspective and detail come out of Persian miniatures and Mughal paintings from northern India. And the artist is a British painter in the middle of World War I. On a winter…