The coronavirus pandemic is putting a strain on many artists and museums and creative spaces. Last week Mass MoCA explained how they are responding. It shakes me as a writer in the Berkshires. And I’ve been thinking about all the reasons why.
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Virtual art in the Berkshires
Many Berkshire art museums, artists and galleries have artwork and collections to explore online this spring while people are staying home.
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The Berkshires navigates concerns over the corona virus (BTW column)
This rambling website is all about getting out and finding people. And now, with the concern over illness spreading daily, the prevailing wisdom is to stay home, sit quietly, wash your hands. What is responsible, when all of this is new to us?
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Thom Smith looks for giants — old growth trees
Old growth woods have never been harvested. As much as 70 percent of the Berkshires’ woods were cut down between the arrival of the first European colonists and the Civil War — but in pockets, often in hard-to-reach places, giant trees still grow.
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Nikole Hannah-Jones reflects on the 1619 Project and 400 years of history
Nikole Hannah-Jones has launched the 1619 Project in the New York Times Magazine to look clearly at slavery and the many ways black Americans have fundamentally shaped this country.
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Berkshire birders join in the global Great Backyard Bird Count
On February 14 to 17, some 32 million people around the world will join the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society in the annual Great Backyard Bird Count, and Berkshire birders will share the quest.
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Movement and light come to the Berkshires midway between winter and spring (By the Way column)
Sunday is midwinter, halfway between the first day of winter and the first day of spring, and in the Berkshires energy is stirring in performances like Vuyani Dance Company’s Cion, on college campuses and in the woods.
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Gamaliel Rodríguez draws mills, mountains and possible futures at Mass MoCA
Puerto Rican artist Gamaliel Rodríguez has drawn a landscape of mills and mountains by hand in a 60-foot-long mural along the hallway outside the Hunter Center at Mass MoCA.
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Arabesques finds inspiration in a springing line at the Clark Art Institute (By the Way)
Arabesques at the Clark Art Institute traces the influence of a curving line that feels as though it moves freely across the page, from Islamic art to 19th-century Europe.
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Contra dance is alive and growing in the Berkshires
The tradition of contra dancing stretches from coast to coast and back more than 400 years. A caller teaches a series of simple moves, and dancers join in to live music with a beat and a quick melody.
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