My mother used to call me a “leaf thief.” That had to do with my love of African violets such that I would ask friends if I could steal a leaf from any of their exotic violets that I coveted. I would “root” the leaf and eventually, I had a window sill of friends in […]
I got my comeuppance this week in Chautauqua, New York. There by chance at an educational institute, I attended a lecture by the artist Stanley Lewis. I expected he would talk about landscape painting because, after all, that’s his métier. Instead, he talked about horses as in the friezes at the Greek Parthenon. Those horses […]
Is Westchester a “bedroom community”? I struggled with this question when I first came to Westchester from Boston some twenty years ago. Naysayers told me I was coming to a bedroom community. Obviously, a bedroom community is where you sleep…that’s all. What would I do at night or on weekends? The search committee at ArtsWestchester, […]
Jealousy, racism, deception and betrayal. Sounds like a recipe for the latest HBO series…sort of like The Borgias…only steamier. No, it’s not that at all. It’s The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, written perhaps in 1603, and now given a new spin at a 90-minute performance at the new amphitheater at the Hudson River Museum […]
What I like about Independence Day is that it reminds me of my own independence. That may sound silly, but with all the hoopla, I can pretend that it’s not just about my country, but about me too, someone who lives here and enjoys all of the freedoms denied to others in other places. For […]
Warren Buffet had it right when he committed to giving away more than half his money to charity. “If you’re in the luckiest one percent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 percent.” And, indeed, 86% of the $316 billion giving reported in 2012, is by […]
In a new exhibition at the Neuberger Museum of Art, four major contemporary Latin American artists – Enrique Chagoya, Demián Flores, Rubén Ortiz-Torres, and Nadín Ospina – are exploring and redefining their relationship to the pre-Columbian past of their countries of origin. The art of the Aztecs, Incas and Mayans is a formidable cultural heritage. […]
Colombian artist Federico Uribe is obsessed with objects… not just some objects, but many… books, sneakers, shoes, shoelaces, cartons, to name a few. His work is currently on view at the Hudson River Museum in an installation called Fantasy River which nearly rivals the museum’s famous Ruckus Manhattan by Red Grooms. There’s a certain irony […]
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