Art & Music

New Year’s Dance & Dinner at Ashokan Center

New Year’s Dance & Dinner at Ashokan Center

Tuesday, December 31: The 6 p.m. four-course dinner is followed at 8 p.m. by couple dancing and called dances in two rooms ’til the wee hours, with a midnight countdown and more dancing in the upstairs Zydeco Lounge. Your dance style choices include swing, Cajun, Zydeco, contras, squares, blues and waltzes, with red-hot music to propel you, supplied by Jay Ungar & Molly Mason with Swingology, Christine Balfa & Balfa Toujours, the Russet Trio and Zydegroove.

Ars Choralis New Year’s Eve concert in Kingston benefits Ulster Immigrant Defense Network

Ars Choralis New Year’s Eve concert in Kingston benefits Ulster Immigrant Defense Network

Tuesday, Dec. 31: Titled “We All Come from Somewhere,” the program celebrates the rich diversity of the American people via music from many genres, ranging from the African American spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” to Woody Guthrie’s protest song “Deportee” to “Gabriel’s Oboe” from Ennio Morricone’s sublime score to the movie The Mission.

Cox art auction is entirely online

Cox art auction is entirely online

Gallerist and auctioneer Jim Cox is hosting a totally online auction in the holiday week between Christmas and New Year’s, on Monday December 30 starting at 1 p.m. He feels the time is right for such a move, and as always is full of stories that reveal his thinking about the move.

It’s a Very Charlie Parker Christmas in Woodstock

It’s a Very Charlie Parker Christmas in Woodstock

Saturday night, Dec. 21: Alexa Tarantino headlines Seasonal Bird tribute. She’s gathering a quintet of today’s top women in jazz to perform a program titled Seasonal Bird, highlighting the iconic bebop recordings and repertoire of the holiday season. Other greats of the genre, such as Ella Fitzgerald, Dexter Gordon and Dizzy Gillespie, will also get a Santa-hatted nod.

Hamilton’s Lexi Lawson plays the Falcon in Marlboro

Hamilton’s Lexi Lawson plays the Falcon in Marlboro

Monday, Dec. 23: Musical theater star and Newburgh native Lexi Lawson presents a selection of Christmas classics at the Falcon on Monday, December 23. The Newburgh Free Academy graduate is best-known for performing in the role of Eliza in the generational box-office smash Hamilton. She has also appeared on Broadway in Rent and In the Heights and is currently featured in the Lifetime Movie Original Always and Forever Christmas.

Woodstock Art Association and Museum Centennial Catalog caps off the century

Woodstock Art Association and Museum Centennial Catalog caps off the century

Woodstock Artists Association, One Hundred Years of Community and Art includes essays by noted Woodstock scene art historians Tom Wolf and Bruce Weber, a valuable arts timeline put together by WAAM archivist Emily Jones, and 300 pages filled with the best Woodstock art of the past 100 years and longer. It’s scholarly, placing Woodstock art among the best of American 20th century achievement, and alongside the best anywhere.