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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Winterlights festival glows on a winter night at Naumkeag — BTW column
At Winterlights, the gardens and the woods are glimmering — Naumkeag in Stockbridge has turned on 200,000 bulbs in its second monthlong festival.
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In ‘Finding Home’ artists tell stories of travel at the Norman Rockwell Museum
Artists Yuyi Morales, Frances Jetter, David Macaulay and James McMullan in a group show, Finding Home, at the Norman Rockwell Museum.
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Internationally acclaimed artist Doug Aitken launches New Horizon
It will gleam like lake water and drift in a clear sky. In late July, the internationally acclaimed artist Doug Aitken will bring a new work to the Berkshires. And it will fly. New Horizon is an abstract sculpture and a moving stage — and a hot air balloon. By […]
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Berkshire labyrinths offer a quiet journey into a new future
A curve drawn in one movement becomes a pathway on a hillside. Walk slowly on a spring morning. The cherry trees are blooming. A woodpecker drums in the wood over the hill. The path turns with each step, toward the lake in the valley, toward the wooded slope above it. […]
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Winter holidays from Hanukkah to Kwanzaa glow at the Norman Rockwell Museum
People sit knitting in rocking chairs, someone at the piano and someone playing guitar. A woman on her way to college speaks a gorgeous poem of her own. People bring books and give readings — if they are working on a play or a song, they can try it out […]
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Ecophilia exhibit blooms in the winter at Berkshire Botanical Garden
Flat stepping stones hang in the air. A small boy sits in the shadow of vast objects above him. The image looks impossible, out of scale, and out of gravity. And then the perspective shifts into place, and the image is a reflection — the stones sit at the edge […]
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Kinetic sculpture brings international artists with local ties to Chesterwood
George Rickey’s metal forms caught the light and shifted in the wind. By that summer, he had shown them worldwide from Osaka to Berlin. In 1978, Maxwell Davidson met George Rickey for the first time at Rickey’s studio in East Chatham, N.Y. Davidson had opened his New York gallery 10 years […]
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Glass art takes on intricate natural forms at Schantz Gallery
Streaked petals open like water lilies in Herman Melville’s Garden. A sperm whale dives with skin like striated ice. Barnacles cling to a shell. And they are all made of glass. Three internationally known artists — Kelly O’Dell, Raven Skyriver and Paul Stankard — sculpt plant life and sea life in […]
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Ellsworth Kelly leaves — Berkshire Botanical Garden
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, […]
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