This and That by JL

“Yes, you’ve come a long way baby.” The baby in this case is the Queens Museum. It reopened last month to rave reviews, following a $69 million renovation that doubled the museum’s footprint to 105,000 square feet. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I walked in the door, remembering vividly how it all began in […]

It is probably heresy for an arts advocate to admit it,  but I had the best time last week at a rip roaring, foot-stomping Merle Haggard concert at the Tarrytown Music Hall. The truth is that I love a good ole “who dun me wrong song” and the 75-year-old legendary country singer and former prison […]

It’s official! Westchester’s loss is Long Island’s gain. Neil Watson, former director of the Katonah Museum, is heading to the Long Island Museum at Stony Brook as its new Executive  Director. But it’s still possible to see Neil’s curatorial prowess at ArtsWestchester.   Twelve artists are “Pushing the Line” in a new exhibition at the Arts […]

Going to a museum for me as a child was a stuffy experience. Trailing behind my mother, a fifth grade teacher, my brother and I saw lots of stuff on the walls and in the halls of the Metropolitan Museum. Though my mother tried to enliven the experience with tales of other worlds, it was […]

“The world didn’t know it needed pumpkin art,” Waddell Stillman confided in me at the opening of The Art of the Pumpkin, an exhibition in which 25 artists interpreted the orange fellow. Stillman is the President and CEO of Historic Hudson Valley (HHV).  He and his HHV cohorts dreamed up the Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze some years […]

Conferences are great tools for encouragement, inspiration and in some cases confirmation.  The Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA) conference this week in Philadelphia did not disappoint. Foremost in the encouragement category was the wave of support for individual artists and the creative ways in which funds are being directed to them both as masters of […]

Half way through Sarah Bracey White’s memoir, Primary Lessons, I had a strange realization.  Sarah’s mother was much like mine.  A teacher, independent, the main family provider, eager for her children to succeed, proud to a fault, uncompromising in her values, not cold, but certainly not warm and fuzzy, and silently demanding in her expectations […]