greg and i took a trip to the berkshires this weekend. the motivation was to see our friend deychen, who has been in williamstown for a theatre internship. however, i've been wanting to visit the williamstown theatre festival for awhile now, so i was happy to buy tickets to see the august 10th performance of ghosts, by henrik ibsen. above is a photo of the very pretty and very quiet taconic parkway. we were on the road early saturday morning.
we had such a beautiful drive upstate and passed so many farms and red barns. when i was little and traveling with my mom and dad cross-country (new york to california), my dad would always pull over to the side of the road to take pictures of red barns for my mom, which she would then frame and hang on their bedroom wall.
arriving in williamstown . .
our first stop was the clark museum (check-in for our airbnb wasn't until 2 pm). the museum was created by robert sterling clark, who wanted a safe haven for his large art collection. he and his wife settled on willliamstown because of his family's close ties there to williams college. a charter was signed in 1950 and the museum opened officially in 1955. i found the interior bright and inviting, but the exterior too stark and linear. one aspect of the museum that we didn't take advantage of during this trip was its many nature trails.
they were having a renior exhibit . .
and an exhibit of janet cardiff's forty part motet, which had been at the cloisters several years ago! i was excited and happy to experience it again. morgana, chanda and i always reminisce about how much we enjoyed this exhibit. (it was at the cloisters in 2013. you can see the two posts i wrote about it
here and
here. i can't believe it was six years ago.)
the exhibit room looked out over a pond . .
the clark museum has many rooms connected by long corridors . .
we next visited ida ten eyck o'keefe, escaping georgia's shadow. ida was the younger sister of georgia o'keefe and she painted from the 1920's to the 1940's.
her work was beautiful, and this was my favorite: star gazing in texas, an oil painting done in 1938. i love how it's almost like a black and white photograph, and how she added foil stars to the frame.
there was a series of lighthouse paintings of the highland light in cape cod. i would loved to have taken a photo of all of them, but it wasn't permitted. she did seven canvases from 1931 - 32.
toadstool from 1932.
still life with fruit, an early piece from 1926.
ida was trained as a teacher and a nurse and held many temporary jobs to support herself throughout her lifetime. she also wrote books for elementary school children such as the one above: forest indians.
greg, waiting for me in the museum's library while i finished looking at the ida ten eyck exhibit.
i couldn't resist taking a few photos of paintings with women knitting that i saw: above is the knitting lesson . .
and young girl guarding her sheep, both by jean-françois millet, 1860.
and last, but not least, winslow homer's summer squall, 1904. there were many american painters included in their main collection that i really enjoy seeing.
our snack at the local health food store that we stopped at before checking in to the airbnb . .
walking into town to meet our friend deychen for dinner . .
dinner at the local thai restaurant . .
and ice cream for dessert . .
chapter two books, a non-profit used bookstore, staffed by volunteers whose proceeds benefit the public library. i found the best book for my sister: katherine kirkpatrick's nonfiction story about anne hutchinson's daughter, susanna hutchinson, who was kidnapped by the lenape indians in 1643 and lived with them for four years before returning to her family in boston. the area she had been living in before she was kidnapped was here in the city, in the bronx, which is also why i find her story so interesting, and why i think my sister will also (besides the fact that she loves reading about this subject).
pics from our walk to the theatre:
henrik ibsen is one of my favorite playwrights and while i enjoyed seeing the production, i found the arc of the emotional action too flat. i missed hearing the nuances of the characters' different relationships in their voices.
walking home to the airbnb . .
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sunday morning:
our airbnb room . . i was able to find a really nice room in a victorian home within walking distance to the town center and to the theatre festival.
(greg looks like he is wearing ears! it's actually a heart shaped mirror hanging on the wall, framed by feathers!)
robert massie's
peter the great . . we attended the signing for the last book he wrote,
catherine the great, in november of 2011. i thought i had a photo of that night, but i just checked, and could only find a reference to that evening
here, at a nutcracker demonstration.
i
've read
all the light we cannot see, and thought it was very good.
anthony doerr is now a favorite author of mine. i've read his short stories also,
the shell collector, and his memoir of living in rome for a year with his family,
four seasons in rome.
8:33 am! time for breakfast . .
checking out and heading to the car . .
passing the theatre on our way to breakfast . .
we sat out here last night and had peppermint tea and coffee before the play started . .
breakfast at the chef's hat, a local diner recommended to us by the airbnb hostess.
we enjoyed watching the workers taking care of their out of town customers and their neighbors. people would walk in and stand around waiting for a hostess (who never materialized) until finally taking an empty table on their own. in the photo above a waitress is looking for her toast which she had placed on the counter and which somehow walked away. no one seemed to know what happened to it.
omelettes, toast and home fries . . and coffee.
greg's back has actually been giving him a difficult time. it went out on him earlier in the week, and he's had to be careful walking, lying down, getting up . . etc.
here we are in the parking lot at one of the highlights of this trip: mass moca! massachusetts museum of contemporary art in north adams, a fifteen minute drive from williamstown.
i have never been here and expected a modern steel and glass building. instead we found a huge complex converted from a printing factory along the hoosic river.
it was massive!!!
mass moca is affiliated with the whitney museum here in our neighborhood and since we're whitney members, we didn't have to pay a separate admission price. we were happy about that . . and a bit smug!
we headed first to the sol lewitt exhibit which takes up three floors in one separate building. my sister saw this exhibit several years ago and raved about it to me. it is rather amazing!
we first had to pass through the tonal walkway, created by julianne swartz, to get to the exhibit.
i love audio exhibits, as long as they're not painful to listen to (and this wasn't, it was very interesting and enjoyable).
information about the tonal walkway . .
reaching the other side . .
sol lewitt . .
information about sol lewitt . .
lewitt began by executing his drawings himself in 1968, but soon began writing instructions that others could follow.
this current exhibit opened on november 16, 2008, and runs until 2033. the 105 works span his career from 1968 to 2007, and were installed by a team of draftsmen between april and september of 2008. before lewitt died in april of 2007, he worked with the museum and an architecture firm in designing the gallery space and deciding on the placement of all the drawings.
looking out to the museum cafe . .
up on the third floor now, which shows his latest works . .
a description of the next two pieces in the two photos below . .
"vertical lines, not straight, not touching, covering the wall evenly."
"ten thousand lines about 10 inches (25 cm) long, covering the wall evenly." (do you think there are exactly ten thousand lines here?!)
yes! these are all small, rolled up pieces of tissue paper, inserted into holes that have been drilled out to hold them!
i would love to have seen the drafters creating this one! (photo below.)
it's possible they showed the drafters working on this in the movie downstairs . . however, we didn't watch it. i suppose we'll just have to return one day before 2033 to see it.
and on and on . . there was just so much! the windows greg is walking towards face east . .
from whence you can see the cafe, again, but now from the third floor.
the view through the curtained windows at the other end, looking west, reminded me of an edward hopper painting:
i finally had to take a break and was happy to find a cozy alcove in the stairwell . .
the couple above was looking at the exhibit in the next building, mind of the mound: critical mass, by trenton doyle hancock . . i'll let you look that one up if you like! it didn't really speak to me and i didn't take the time to figure it out . .
greg came to join me . .
greg is comparing the execution of lewitt's art to his work with computer network design. there are several teams that work on different aspects of high and low level designs, and then there are the engineers that do the actual physical work.
he's saying he would like to see the different designs that show how to specifically execute the artwork, but they're probably secret.
the view of where we're sitting from across the way . .
i'm not sure if this is part of the doyle hancock exhibit, or something entirely different . .
alright, that's enough tv!
this was one of my favorite rooms. it houses a piece titled cosmic latte by spencer finch and i would have loved to see it at night.
i think i would like to see other works by spencer finch. i like how he combines symbolism with art and the universe.
some of the glass in the windows must be original to the building as they have a waviness to them.
paintings by chrissie hynde, whose music with the pretenders i listened to all through my first two years of college.
coffee break at
tunnel city coffee outside the museum, but really still inside the museum . .
while we were sitting there, greg noticed that the trees directly across from us were hanging upside down. this worried me. the trees were growing down, but the leaves were growing upwards. i tried to imagine how the roots felt, and was reminded of scott kelly's account of his year on the space station dealing with gravity in his book, endurance: my year in space.
my mocha and cookie . .
view of the tonal tunnel, which i could hear humming and vibrating while i worked. i'm sitting in the area you could see from the windows in the sol lewitt exhbit.
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at 3 pm it was time to get on the road home:
we had dinner at the hawthorne valley farm store in ghent, new york. it's one of my favorite rest stops and they have a good hot food bar. i had soup and beans and greg had a white fish cake and a lentil stew . . and a hot dog!
i couldn't resist getting a strawberry rhubarb pie and chanda enjoyed it with us when we reached home.
