This and That by JL

    Sitting here in my office on my ergonomic Aeron chair, I couldn’t help but wonder: How does a chair become a work of art?  Or does it ever? One criteria might be that it has a name like the Eames chair, named after its designers Charles and Ray Eames and produced by the Herman Miller company. […]

Most serious sculpture exhibitions have daunting requirements–a long list of honorariums, a vitae of prestigious exhibitions, and professional references.  One exhibition we know and love has some slightly eccentric criteria—artworks that are cow-proof, hurricane resistant and having no sharp objects that a cow, for instance, might unwittingly bump into. This exhibition takes place on an […]

    If you are a fan of artist Sol Lewitt, you will want to head to MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, where his paintings are displayed in colorful splendor in a series of huge galleries. The galleries were proposed as an economic development strategy to turn obsolete factory buildings into exhibition spaces for bold works of art. That was in the eighties, when […]

Our exhibition, “Brick by Brick,” is inspiring stories as warm and loving as any brick fireplace. Diana Costello’s grandpa, Pietro Viscogliosi, sounds like the quintessential brick mason, just like Serafino Laboranti, my former neighbor in Queens and the only person I would trust to build a brick floor in my kitchen. Serafino was a master mason […]

    Many of us remember exactly where we were when John F. Kennedy was shot.  For me, the scene is emblazoned in my mind. I was in my kitchen spooning mashed banana into my toddler’s mouth. The radio soothed some Sinatra… perhaps it was The Summer Wind. From bliss, I went into panic mode […]

Can it be true that, in terms of size and production, the brick industry in the Hudson Valley was second of importance in our region to IBM? So George H. Hutton told us in his book The Great Hudson River Brick Industry. We can quibble with his hyperbole, but the truth is that in its […]

Ordinarily, one wouldn’t mention the Erie Canal, Carnegie Hall and the Croton Aqueduct in the same breath. But they do have a shared history that will be explored in a new, highly anticipated exhibition called Brick by Brick, which will be presented by ArtsWestchester at its stately White Plains gallery through January 2019. The exhibition tells […]

Just when I think that collaboration is one of the hardest ways to work in the arts world, I become encouraged anew by what I see happening among artists in Westchester. What makes collaboration so difficult is that its success depends upon a shared vision. This shared vision may be hard to achieve, but it […]