Arts

Arts

An Insider's Look at Vassar's Outsider Art

Vassar College has been collecting art since its founding in 1864, and the school's Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center now has nearly 18,000 works, including the Warburg Collection of Old Master Prints and Matthew Vassar's collection of Hudson River School paintings. The holdings also include

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Arts

Academy Award-Nominated Shorts at TSL

Unless you attend a lot of film festivals, it's unlikely you've seen the ten short films nominated for Oscars. Time and Space Limited offers remedy: the five animated and five live-action films will be screened there this week.  As A.O. Scott of the New York

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Arts

"Selected Shorts" Returns to the Mahaiwe

The theme song alone (Roger Kelloway's Come to the Meadow) is enough to trigger endorphins, even before anyone has uttered a word.  Then comes the voice of host Isaiah Sheffer announcing another NPR broadcast of PRI's Selected Shorts, and instantly, fans of the show (and they

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Arts

Toulouse-Lautrec and His Paris at the Clark

Robert Sterling Clark, who always went by his middle name, was the grandson of Edward Clark, business partner of I.M. Singer, the inventor of the lockstitch sewing machine.  The elder Clark, a lawyer, handled the business side of the Singer Manufacturing Company, but he was inventive too—after settling

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Arts

Williams College Queer Film Festival

"There are a ton of great queer films out there," says Justin Adkins, Queer Life Coordinator at Williams College.  "And very few make it to Northern Berkshire County."  That shortcoming is about to be remedied, and anyone whose response to this news is, "How nice

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Arts

Seeing Through Glass: 1 Composer, 2 Events

Philip Glass is one of the most inventive, admired, and controversial composers of our time.  On Thursday, January 15, MASS MoCA will screen Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts, a documentary by the filmmaker Scott Hicks that explores the contemporary composer's creative process and offers candid

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Arts

At Shakespeare & Company, Call on Lizzie Aspenlieder for A Good Time

A one-woman show is challenging on many levels for an actress, but Elizabeth Aspenlieder has the added burden of performing in Shakespeare & Company's first full-fledged winter season in its new Elayne P, Bernstein Theater in Lenox. "I'm the guinea pig," Aspenlieder says cheerfully

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Arts

The First Breeze of Summer

The main stages may be dark, but this is a busy time for our regional theaters which must announce their summer seasons so they can start casting their plays and musicals. The  Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge will start its 2009 summer season in late spring and it will continue

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Arts

Photographer Annie Leibovitz Signs New Book

The difference between great photographers and the rest of us is that for them life occurs in slow motion and without a distracting sound tract, affording them plenty of mental space and time to appraise a scene, consider camera angles, change lenses, and adjust f-stops, while the rest of us

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Arts

The True Meaning of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"

In Charles Dickens's day, his novel A Christmas Carol was credited with reviving enthusiasm for a holiday, that, incredibly, had fallen out of favor with the public and appeared to be on the wane.  Needless to say, modern marketing will never permit such heresy again.   Nonetheless, Dickens'

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Arts

A Serious Conversation About "Scrapbooks: An American History" with Jessica Helfand

When I met Jessica Helfand five or six years ago, I was dumbstruck when she told me that one of the joys of having moved full-time to Falls Village from New York City was having more time to work. (I thought country life was all about recreation, but I'

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Arts

"This Wonderful Life" at Barrington Stage Company

Could there be a better moment for a Christmas play about a despairing banker who considers suicide because his savings-and-loan is about to go under and, with help from an angel, rediscovers the meaning of life?  Timing is everything in theater as in life, and Barrington Stage Company (BSC) has

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