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.
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ArtWeek Berkshires is here in full colors (Sept 15 newsletter)
Murals and wood-fired ceramics, Japanese Shiburi tie-dyed cloth, graphic novels and living walls — the county is filling up this week with events and shows and painters out in the open, in ArtWeek Berkshires.
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Olsen Farm feeds the community
Kristen Tool and her husband, Chris Wheeler, keep six hives near a massive apple tree that has lived here, like his family, for a hundred years. They are building contemporary ways to support their family farm — and food systems and food security in the Berkshires at the same time.
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Mohican 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.
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Artists form and perform Rites of Passage
Women have come from around the country to perform here tonight — in Rites of Passage, musicians, visual artists, writers, healers are creating a ritual and a refuge, and I’m waiting to walk in.
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Exploring Cummington and the hilltowns in summer
It’s quiet up here. Sometimes I’ll come up to the ridge to get away for awhile, out the back roads … and find unexpected and creative places.
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Wing and a Prayer wildflowers glow in high summer
I’m up at Amy Pulley’s native plant nursery on the ridge in Cummington, and it’s transformed in July into a sea of meadow flowers …
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Strawberry fields forever (June 16 newsletter)
We’re standing in the straw between the rows, and my sister is holding her six-week-old daughter and showing her two-and-a-half-year-old son how to feel under the leaves for ripe berries …
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Baby 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. …
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Native seeds and pollinators are stirring at Wing and a Prayer
Each kind is a different shape, a fiber surrounded in soft down, or a golden-brown fleck, or a sleek husk. It’s warm in the hoop house on a sunny April afternoon at Amy Pulley’s native plant nursery in Cummington.
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