If there is a straight line in the state of Vermont I have never seen it. Vermont is, by seasonal turns, a green or white landscape of hills and mountains, hollows, valleys, and gorges, all bucking and turning and curvilinear in the extreme. Vermont is also, perhaps because it is located upriver from New York, […]
Welcome to the September 2008 edition of “Jud’s New England Journal,” the rather curious monthly musings of Judson Hale, editor-in-chief of Yankee Magazine, published since 1935 in Dublin, New Hampshire. On the Road Again With The Old Farmer’s Almanac “What’s the winter going to be like?” is the usual first question. But my most vivid […]
A look at the facts and figures for the Great Hurricane of 1938, the most powerful and deadliest hurricane in recent New England history. 19.4 feet: Connecticut River’s height above flood stage at Hartford 25 feet: high-tide peak from New London (CT) to Cape Cod (MA)Get Our FREE Yankee Best New England Vacations Guide! Email(Required) […]
When we first corresponded with the owner, we weren’t sure whether to visit this property. The owner is well-known artist and sculptor Kendra Ferguson, whose work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Harvard’s Fogg Museum, and others. When she told […]
Peter Ralston is telling me about a boy he once knew. In 1957, when the boy is seven years old, he moves to an old gray stone house in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
In the frozen grips of a fierce storm on Mt. Katahdin, each man’s choice was his own. On Thursday evening, January 31, 1974, a fierce winter storm cut a swath of destruction across northern New England. It tore roofs off of mobile homes and tossed them into nearby trees, and sent tree limbs crashing into […]
Biennial art exhibitions, whether by invitation only or juried shows open to all, have become waypoints on the contemporary art landscape, providing artists and audiences alike a chance every couple of years to see what’s new, what’s happening, who’s hot, who’s arrived. As big, brawling, messy, and imperfect as they are, biennials are welcome events, […]
It should probably come as no surprise that I am a book lover. Every room in my house has shelves of books and stacks of various volumes, new and old, appear here and there since the bookshelves have long since run out of space. I am not unaware of the debate concerning the demise of […]
Bombay-born, London-based sculptor Anish Kapoor is frequently called a magician or an illusionist because of the way his art plays with perception, capturing reflected environments in highly polished surfaces, distorting them like funhouse mirrors, inferring unseen volumes and negative spaces with works built into floor and walls, performing sleight-of-form acts with huge objects that function […]
Last week I was contacted by the Abbeville Press’s Abbeville Manual of Style to do an on-line interview about contemporary art in Maine and New England. In answer to the question “Do you have a favorite artist or favorite work of art?”, I wrote that “As a Maine native and chauvinist, I am most drawn […]
On Friday I drove out to the end of Cape Cod to attend a memorial service for an old friend, Arturo Vivante who wrote beautiful short stories, some of them for this magazine. I had planned to visit with him this past April. We had picked a date but when I called a week ahead […]
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in the Cheever-esque village of Ridgefield, CT, is one of the rare non-collecting art institutions in New England. Like the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Real Art Ways in Hartford, and Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, the Aldrich Museum exists to support new art, a place where […]
