Berkshire Botanical Garden
1. Berkshire Botanical Garden: Hmmm…A Caterpillar Lab is coming to the Garden, August 9 to 11, 2024, Caterpillar Lab is free with Garden Admission, Aug. 9, 10, and 11, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The Caterpillar Lab provides the opportunity for visitors to follow the ever-changing lives of these wondrous creatures. The Lab’s professional education staff will teach about caterpillar biology and help participants safely touch (and maybe even hold!) a caterpillar. Participants will witness the enormous diversity of native caterpillars as they explore the various sizes, colors and forms displayed in this exhibit. Installed concurrent with “The Lost Birds Project” exhibition and outdoor sculptures. Caterpillar Walk on Friday, Aug. 9, from 6 to 7:30 p.m.
Moth Lighting on Saturday, Aug.10, from 9 to 11 p.m.
Caterpillar Walk admission is $15/Members and $30/Nonmembers and Moth Lighting is $25/Members and $40/Nonmembers.
Be-a-Better-Gardener is a community service of Berkshire Botanical Garden, located in Stockbridge, Mass. Its mission, to provide knowledge of gardening and the environment through a diverse range of classes and programs, informs and inspires thousands of students and visitors each year. Thomas Christopher is a volunteer at Berkshire Botanical Garden and is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books. berkshirebotanical.org/growinggreener.
Stockbridge Sinfonia
2. Stockbridge Sinfonia: Tracy Wilson, Music Director, Stockbridge Sinfonia Summer Concert Series announces a Concert to Pay Tribute to Ukraine, August 3, 3pm, Lenox Memorial Middle and High School, East Street; August 10, 3pm Zion Lutheran Church, Pittsfield, and August 11, 6pm, Saint James Place, Great Barrington. The concerts are free and open to the public. Donations at the door are always welcome.
Compositions by Ukrainian composers include Troika by Prokofiev; Sailors Dance by Gliere; Melodiya by Skoryk, and the Ukrainian National Anthem. The Ukraine Anthem will be sung in Ukrainian by members of three Berkshire choruses. The choruses will begin each concert with America the Beautiful.
The first half of the concert will conclude with a piece by Pittsfield High School junior Davis Albayeros, El ltimo Baile, for strings featuring Sinfonia’s students. The second half is a performance of Beethoven Seventh Symphony.
The 50-piece community orchestra consists of students ranging in age 13 through 22, and amateur and semi-professional adults up to age 90. All players are volunteers, and the participating students earn scholarships for their involvement with the organization. Last year, over $5,000 was awarded. The Sinfonia season runs from the beginning of June through mid-August, is open to all interested classical musicians, and is conducted by Tracy Wilson. Stockbridge Sinfonia is Berkshires’ longest running community orchestra.
This summer series program is supported in part by grants from the cultural councils of Pittsfield, Lee, Stockbridge, Lenox, Great Barrington, Alford/Egremont, Richmond, and West Springfield, local agencies which are supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency. Other grants come from Berkshire Bank, Greylock Foundation and The Feigenbaum Foundation, in addition to private individuals’ donations. The concerts are free and open to the public; however, donations at the door are always welcome. More information can be found at StockbridgeSinfonia.org.
2024 Annual Housatonic Heritage Area Walks
3. 2024 Annual Housatonic Heritage Area Walks – 5 Weekends of Free, Guided Regional Interpretive Tours
The Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area announces the 22nd annual autumn Housatonic Heritage Walks in September. 70 free, guided interpretive tours will be offered throughout Berkshire County, MA, and Litchfield County, CT.
The public is invited to participate in these family-oriented, interpretive walks, offered in partnership with our region’s historic, cultural, and outdoor recreation organizations and the National Park Service. The Heritage Walks are the ideal opportunity to experience and learn about our region’s rich and varied local history.
Historians, naturalists, and environmentalists will lead participants on explorations through historic estate gardens and town districts, behind-the-scenes cultural site tours, nature walks, trail hikes, and tours of many of the industrial-site ruins that were once thriving local industries. There will be Native-American and African American history walks & a bike tour on scenic country roads.
Detailed Heritage Walks brochures are available at libraries, post offices, and newspaper racks in major grocery stores in the region. The Walks schedule is also available at: https://housatonicheritage.org/events/heritage-walks/
To request a brochure by mail, email programs@housatonicheritage.org
Chesterwood
4. Chesterwood: Tableaux Vivants or “Living Pictures” to revive a favorite Victorian entertainment at Chesterwood, August 3, 5:30pm. Tickets are $25, Chesterwood members $20, and free for under 18. Reservations can be made at www.chesterwood.org/arts-alive-2024
Arts Alive! at Chesterwood presents a special theater performance that revives a favorite Victorian-era form of entertainment, tableaux vivants, or “living pictures” set in the historic garden and artist’s studio. Meet the actors at a complimentary reception afterwards.
Created and directed by actor Doria Bramante, the ensemble cast invites you to join “Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Chester French” in their garden and studio to play one of their favorite parlor games – the creation of “live pictures” using costumes, props and a large frame. Tableaux vivants are a form of “pantomime” whose origins go back to the very beginnings of drama. Tableaux are representations of well-known works of art and seem to have been invented by Lady Emma Hamilton late in the 18th century. Daniel Chester French’s daughter Margaret reminisced, “My father made a large frame (still stored away on the ceiling of the studio cellar) and stretched a layer of mosquito netting across the front to give a softer appearance to the picture. Then he would drape various members of the family and friends with yards of lovely materials, pose them behind the frame, which was clearly lighted by kerosene lamps and supporting reflectors, and lo! a charming living-picture would result.”
Contact Margaret Cherin, Senior Site Manager, E mcherin@chesterwood.org
P 413-298-2034 M 413-446-9741 for more information.
Book Launch Event, August 8, 5:30pm
Monument Man will be available for purchase at a book signing event with the author at Chesterwood on August 8th at 5:30 p.m. following a short Lincoln-themed program narrated by Harold Holzer and actor Rufus Collins. The program “Mr. French takes on Mr. Lincoln” will explore the themes of democracy, freedom, sacrifice, and French’s gift for capturing all these attributes in art. General admission $25, Chesterwood Members $20, under 18 free, includes complimentary refreshments at the book signing following the program. Reservations at www.chesterwood.org
Monument Man: The Life and Art of Daniel Chester French. Daniel Chester French (1850–1931) is the sculptor of some of America’s best-known public monuments, including the iconic statue of Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial, John Harvard in Harvard Yard, The Minute Man in Concord, Massachusetts, and the Alma Mater at Columbia University.
Harold Holzer’s authoritative, lavishly illustrated, biography combines rich personal details from French’s life with a nuanced study of his artistic evolution. This paperback edition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) includes a thoughtful new foreword by Thayer Tolles, Marica F. Vilcek Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which she considers the scholarly inquiries and complicated layers surrounding French’s public monuments in the five tumultuous years that have passed since the first hardcover edition was published in 2019.
Praise for Monument Man
Monument Man is a winner of the New England Society Book Award. Ron Chernow has praised the author as “one of the foremost living authorities on Abraham Lincoln, Harold Holzer has long straddled the crossroads of history and art with his own inimitable brand of scholarship.” Chernow also says that the book, “will surely rank as the authoritative life of a man whose creations in stone and bronze have become inseparable parts of our historical memory.” The Wall Street Journal adds, “It is a thing as rare as it is welcome—an authoritative book about a visual artist that is both well written and jargon free, and that seamlessly addresses a professional audience as well as the general reader… He has mastered an enormous amount of research and from it drawn entertaining anecdotal accounts regarding family, friends and competitors, commissions, and sculptural procedures. He gives by far the best available account of an artist who, in his public art, contributed greatly to American sculpture, political iconography and national memory.”
