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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Clemens Kalischer captures half a century of change on film
At the Old Bennington Weavers textile mill, looms hold fabrics for an artist and fashion designer, Tzaims Luksus, known for his graphics on silk. In Brattleboro, artisans at the family-run Anderson Pipe Organ Company are shaping pipes by hand from sheet metal. Crafters go about their work and grey-haired men […]
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Susan Merrill makes summer last
Susan Merrill and her husband, Carl Sprague, are sitting under the grape vines on the terrace outside their old white house, with two corgis underfoot. Susan’s grandfather lived in this house; it has been in the family almost 100 years. They have spent this summer quietly here, seeing friends and […]
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Andy Warhol meets Norman Rockwell in the Berkshires
James Warhola remembers his Uncle Andy in his uncle’s first New York apartment, sketching high-heeled shoes for an advertisement in the New York Times. He would ink the drawing and blot it, a technique he would use later in his artwork. When his uncle first painted a Campbell’s soup can, […]
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