BTW Berkshires 
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…
Outdoor sculpture, community days, music for and by unstintingly confident women, and Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time,” written in a Nazi prisoner of war camp … the Berkshire Calendar June 5 to 11 is running as high as the rivers after the rain. Tonight, Eric Yves Garcia, above, will perform at Barrington Stage on June 5…
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…
In the room with the holograms, we stopped to watch the woman on the screen intently folding a creamy mat of spun silk, and then a weaver at a loom. The film accompanies a microscope bearing a slide — a glass plate, liquid silk and a poem from the point of view of a silkworm. We were wandering through the spring exhibits at Mass MoCA, where the Wonder exhibit is quietly in its last days, and new shows are opening. Nick Cave’s ‘Until’ enveloped us in sober, awe-struck quiet. And the timeline of the universe filled us with delight. Especially me. Because a couple of seconds past the Big Bang, I heard my name and turned to find Amanda Korman, my friend, my fellow Eph, my first intern and colleague at the Eagle, magically transported up the East Coast to spend a week as an artist in residence at the museum. Some days the universe expands like that.
“The blocks are cherry wood,” my mom said, looking closely at the tables set outside by the road and the woman wearing a baby in a sling. “It’s a hard, dense wood,” my dad said. She nodded, absorbed. “It would show precise marks.” The night before, we had sat at a long, handmade table at…