Best known as the lead singer, violinist, banjo-player and co-founder of the Grammy Award-winning old-time music band the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Rhiannon Giddens has been exploring other waters.
Among my many fusion favorites was one – precisely one – local band. They weren’t from here, they didn’t form here and they’re not here anymore; but for a period in the early ’80s, they camped out in Coochie’s in New Paltz
Here’s to you, Kingston. We should be proud right now.
Ever more ceremonial and ritualized, Uptown Kingston is now adding a Mardi Gras celebration to its yearly calendar of chaos.
The ceramic arts have been fostered in Woodstock since the Byrdcliffe and Maverick art colonies were formed in the early years of the 20th century. This weekend brings the opportunity to compare historic and contemporary ceramic arts as fostered in the two art colonies, on display in two separate-but-related exhibits, one in New Paltz and the other in Woodstock.
Ball’s latest Alligator Records CD is the critically acclaimed The Tattooed Lady and the Alligator Man.
The Dorsky Museum at SUNY-New Paltz was recently praised by Huffington Post for hewing close to its mission to serve both the college campus and the artistic culture of the mid-Hudson region, “the Cradle of American Art,” calling it “unlike any other regional museum.”
Though public record is mute, word has come our way that the head of Lincoln was carved by one Ugo Lavaggi, whose grandson, Robert Lavaggi, sells organic vegetables (in season) at the top of Wittenberg hill, and who was more than pleased to speak to us about his grandfather two Sundays ago, on that very snowy Lincoln’s birthday.
Recent years have seen the return of printmaking to art’s forefront. And now is the time for ceramics brightest hour, at least in Woodstock and the rest of the Hudson Valley.
Benjamin Wigfall, a retired professor of art at SUNY New Paltz and former owner of the Watermark Cargo Gallery in Kingston, died on Thursday, Feb. 9, at age 86.