As it happens, Christopher Gibbs, the festival’s co-artistic director and a Bard professor, is an expert on Schubert ; in this case, SummerScape’s scholar-in-residence happens to be in-house. His fascination with the composer is rooted in his student days: “I was in graduate school writing a paper on a topic that my professor and advisor suggested I explore more,” he said in a recent phone call from Vienna, where he was traveling. “While lots of grad students write about obscure things and spend many years in a company you don’t want to keep, I got to work on one of the premiere composers of Western music, which was a complete pleasure.” The topic stuck, becoming a life-long study.

Schubert built a fantastic career in his twenties based on his lieder and simpler “partsongs,” which were widely published and performed in homes and at public theaters all over Europe, said Gibbs, who will present several of the music festival’s talks. But as a contemporary of Beethoven, who was 27 years older and the preeminent musical composer of the time, Schubert “aspired to do even greater and bigger things.” His output was astonishing: besides 600 songs, he wrote nine symphonies, 22 piano sonatas, numerous short piano pieces for two and four hands, six Masses, 35 chamber compositions, and 17 operatic works, including one full-length opera, Fierrabras, which will be performed at Bard on the final day of the festival, August 17. While most of this music, with the exception of the lieder, was never performed in his lifetime, it was discovered and orchestrated in subsequent decades by a new generation of composers. “It was as if he had lived throughout the 19th century as Berlioz, Schumann, Mendelsohn, Liszt, and Brahms became his great advocates,” said Gibbs.

Richard B. Fisher for the Performing Arts at Bard College
Photo: Peter Aaron

Who was Schubert the man? Much of his life remains a mystery, Gibbs said. The son of a schoolmaster, he lived in Vienna his entire life and was destined to be a schoolteacher until his extraordinary talent became evident. He attended “a fancy boarding school and met a lot of friends who helped promote his career,” Gibbs said. Because he didn’t travel much or live very long, there aren’t many letters, and he didn’t keep a diary. He was unmarried and there is no evidence of any great romantic love. While some scholars have speculated he was homosexual, “I’m not at all convinced of that,” said Gibbs, though “he was primarily involved in a homo-social situation,” boarding with wealthier friends and their families since he had exceedingly modest means. He contracted syphilis six years before his death and was often sickly before succumbing to typhoid fever. Nonetheless, “it was a sudden death, which surprised his friends,” Gibbs said. “After 10 days in bed, he was dead.”

The SummerScape festival, which besides the lieder includes samples of his symphonic work, chamber music, sonatas, operas, partsongs and “four-hand” piano pieces, showcases two sides of Schubert: the music by which he was known in his lifetime, including performances of pieces and types of music that are now obscure, and the composer he aspired to be, including pieces unknown to his contemporaries but familiar to classical music lovers today.

The former category—popular pieces in his day that are now unfamiliar—include the vocal chamber music Schubert wrote for two baritones and two tenors, similar to latter-day barbershop quartets, Gibbs said. While some of these “partsongs,” as they are called, consist of drinking songs and other relatively trivial subjects, others are “fantastically moving.” The partsongs will be woven into several of the Schubert programs.

Also very popular in Vienna in Schubert’s day was dance music—mainly waltzes, of course, of which Schubert wrote hundreds—and intimate music called “four-hand” pieces, played by two people sitting side by side at the piano. (Such music was almost a courtship ritual, as recounted in the novels of Jane Austen, Gibbs noted.) Some of these pieces are among Schubert’s most impressive compositions and are 40 minutes long. Rondo in A Major for piano four hands will be part of the program, “The Final Months,” on the afternoon of August 17, while a sampling of his dances, songs and partsongs will comprise the program, “The Music of Friendship,” on the afternoon of August 16.

American Symphony Orchestra

The obscure will be counterbalanced by the familiar and much loved, which besides lieder (the subject of the talk and performance, “Goethe and Music: The German Lied,” on the morning of August 10, with a selection representing Schubert, his contemporaries, and those influenced by him) includes the Unfinished Symphony No. 8 in B Minor, performed by the American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Bard College president Leon Botstein, on the evening of August 9, in the “Mythic Transformations” program. Another masterpiece, the String Quintet in C Major, which was composed the last year of Schubert’s life, will be performed as part of the first program, “The Legacy of a Life Cut Short,” the evening of August 8.

SummerScape will also present a selection of songs, arias and other works from Schubert’s contemporaries and near contemporaries, including Mozart, Gluck, Salieri, and Rossini (Program Two, “From ‘Boy’ to Master: The Path to Erlkonig” the afternoon of August 9), along with his one-act Singspiel Die Verschworenen, a short comic opera that’s “quite delightful,” according to Gibbs, paired with a rare, 1864 operetta written about Schubert—the 19th century equivalent of a film biopic—which was never published (“Schubert and Viennese Theater,” the evening of August 10). Schubert even wrote sacred music, samples of which will be performed the evening of August 16, in the program “Late Ambitions.”

Soprano Ellie Dehn as Euryanthe
Photo: Todd Norwood

Schubert’s one full-length opera, Fierrebras, which was never performed in his lifetime, will be presented in a semi-staged performance on August 17. It’s about a cross-cultural love affair set in the time of Charlemagne that bridges east and west, the Christian and Moorish worlds. Despite possible weaknesses of the drama and libretto, “the music is really fantastic, with great choruses,” Gibbs said. Because it was written in German, it likely never had a chance in 1820s Vienna, which was overtaken with Rossini mania, according to Gibbs. There had been an unfortunate precedent: the popularity of Italian opera across Europe—the best singers were Italian and even the London-based Handel composed many of his operas in Italian—was probably responsible for the lackluster reception of Carl Maria von Weber’s Euryanthe, which premiered in Vienna in 1823. “It was another blow” from which German opera didn’t recover until a decades later, with the advent of Wagner, Gibbs said.

A full production of Euryanthe will be performed at SummerScape July 25, 27, 30 and August 1 and 3. A story of chivalry, betrayal, innocence, and love imbued with the supernatural, as befits the Romantic sensibility, Euryanthe was ahead of its time, and its innovative, recurring musical motives anticipated Wagnerian technique. Hailed by NPR as “Weber’s greatest masterpiece,” the opera has not been performed in the U.S. since the Metropolitan Opera’s staging 100 years ago, in 1914, so the Bard performance is a significant event. Its setting is Victorian Gothic, as tightly corseted as the lead character, a wife who is accused of infidelity by a jealous would-be lover, according to director Kevin Newbury.

“Wagner knew the opera very well,” said Gibbs. “He was a shrewd semi-plagiarist. The plot and other aspects in Lohengrin show he’s thinking about the Weber opera.” Euryanthe also reflects “the Italian predominance” as well as Weber’s preference for instrumental music: “it’s a very orchestral opera.”

Gibbs said this year’s SummerScape should finally give Schubert his full due. “Because the melodies are so good, he’s been easy to trivialize. Beethoven dominated everyone, except Brahms and Liszt, for whom Schubert is nearly as important: they knew his music so well and arranged and edited and performed it.” That legacy highlights Schubert’s role as an innovator. “Beethoven studied with Haydn and came out of a more classical tradition,” Gibbs said. “Schubert being a generation younger does different things. His types of modulation and harmonic devices were a revelation to those later composers. His harmonic language is more experimental and unusual, pointing in new directions.”

Love in the Wars, by John Banville. Chris Stack as Achilles, and Birgit Huppuch as Penthesilea. Photo: Julieta Cervantes

SummerScape will also be presenting a play, Love in the Wars, by John Banville, which has an association with Schubert: the composer participated in a reading group, one of whose favorite authors was Heinrich von Kleist, a near contemporary—he died in 1811—living in Germany whose poems, plays and novels soon fell into obscurity and were subsequently rediscovered by Rilke, Thomas Mann, Kafka, and other early 20th century modernists. The production is the world premiere of Banville’s play, which is a version of Kleist’s Penthesilea, a romantic drama loosely based on Homer that recounts the meeting between its eponymous heroine, Queen of the Amazons, and Achilles. Love in the Wars explores the tragi-comedic nature of the passion between the leaders of the two warring factions and is one of three that Banville has adapted from Kleist’s plays. It will be performed July 10–13 and 16–20 and is directed by two-time Obie winner Ken Rus Schmoll.

Kleist, who like Schubert died young, only wrote eight major plays but is regarded as the Shakespeare of Germany, according to Gideon Lester, professor of drama at Bard and director of the college’s theater programs. His plays haven’t been produced in English because of lack of good translations, although in Banville, winner of the Man Booker prize in 2005, the German Romanticist has finally found his match: Lester noted that the two writers “both play games, they both love to pair the very serious with the very trivial, to slam tragedy and comedy into each other, to write in a high poetic style and take language from the street.” Love in the Wars recounts “the downfall of one of the world’s greatest generals in a series of fast-paced surprising themes. It’s highly theatrical. Banville’s use of language is sophisticated and surprising, which is sometimes very arch and very beautiful.”

The production is “very stylish, in the way that high fashion draws inspiration from haute couture from past centuries,” Lester said. “It’s also very elemental, with storms, wind, rain, fog and mud. It’s exciting and dangerous. The cast consists mainly of pretty young actors and they’ve got a lot to sink their teeth into.”

Rounding out the Schubert and German Romantic theme will be a film series, featuring movies with memorable use of the composer’s music—examples are Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and Roman Polanski’s Death and the Maiden—as well as films commemorating the centenary of the July Crisis in 1914 and World War I, including Grand Illusion and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. The series runs from July 3 through August 3 on Thursday and Sunday evenings. And the magical Bard Spiegeltent will liven up the summer from July 3 through August 16 with cabaret by Justin Vivian Bond, Molly Ringwald, Martha Wainwright, Joey Aria, Amanda Palmer, and other outstanding performers and divas. Don’t miss “Weimar New York,” in which downtown NYC performance artists conjure up Berlin nightlife between the wars. Late-night DJs and live music is scheduled weekend nights starting at 10 pm, and tango, salsa, and swing dancing, complete with instruction, is back by popular demand.

For a complete schedule of all SummerScape events, please visit:     http://fishercenter.bard.edu/programs/
For tickets call 845 758 7900  M-F 10 am to 5 pm or visit:
http://fishercenter.bard.edu/tickets/          
For Spiegeltent visit:  http://fishercenter.bard.edu/spiegeltent/

Accompanying the exhibition is a handsome, lushly illustrated catalog with informative essays by Leval, Peter Jones, Judith Small Nash, Tom Wolf, and Avis Berman, which provide a fascinating context for Ludins’ life, from the milieu of the Woodstock art colony in the 1930s and 1940s to a critical evaluation of his paintings to a biography, starting with his parents’ immigration from Russia and his childhood growing up in the Bronx. Ludins’ coming of age as an artist in the 1920s was a different world: there was no art market, no public art education, little recognition that art was valuable. Making art was a spiritual pursuit, rather than a path to riches or God forbid, celebrity. Ludins’ commitment to his art, which was filled with pathos and private meaning, and the active role he played in the Woodstock community might prove instructive for our own jaded times.

Ludins had shown at the Whitney Studio Club, precursor to the Whitney Museum of Art, prior to moving to Woodstock, and the connection continued when he was at the Maverick. Director Juliana Rieser Force had a house in Woodstock and periodically purchased work by local artists, helping them get through the winter. One day in 1930, Force and curator Herman More visited Ludins. He wasn’t home, so they entered through the window and took a landscape, leaving $250 on the table. (The Cezannesque landscape of the industrial Hudson River waterfront is in the show, on loan from the Whitney.) As Ludins’ work matured, he exhibited regularly in major annual national shows, including the Whitney Biennial. His painting, The Valley, won a medal at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Annual Exhibition in 1948. His two solo shows at the Passedoit Gallery in New York in the 1940s received positive reviews; influential critic Thomas Hess, who was soon to become one of the leading proponents of Abstract Expressionism, praised Ludins’ paintings in Art News “as some of the few American landscapes which achieve representation without illustration.”

The Valley 1947, oil on canvas 48 x 36 in. Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, gift of Ira Janow

The time is perhaps ripe for a reassessment—especially for those mid-career and later works that failed to find an audience. “He’s never been put to the test,” said Leval, an art historian who was director of El Museo del Barrio from 1994 to 2001. (She and her husband are Woodstock weekenders who became close friends with Ludins and Small in the early 1980s.) “I think it’s important to relook at and rethink the history of art. While Ludins was undervalued in the 1950s through the 1980s because of abstraction, now he might be more favorably compared, given new approaches to figuration over the last two decades.”

One difficulty is that his work defies categorization. Sara Pasti, executive director of the Dorsky, said Ludins’ idiosyncratic style—perhaps a legacy of his training at the Art Students League, which at the time encouraged student artists to pursue their individualism—is actually quite typical of many American artists. “He has a cartoony style, which should be appealing to contemporary audiences, who are used to looking at graphic novels.”

Ludins painted to the beat of a different drummer, eschewing the celebratory folksiness of American Scene painting that predominated in the 1930s. Like the American Scene painters, he painted narratives, but his were dark, violent, full of clashing contradictions and politically pointed, with names like Heavy Water (a reference to the Manhattan Project) and Game of War. His turbid, stormy skies, acrid colors, dramatic contrasts of dark and light, and rough application of paint, frequently applied with a palette knife, are rooted in German Expressionism, an influence he likely picked up at the League. (It’s also possible he saw the work of George Grosz and other Weimar-era artists when he worked as an assistant ship steward at age 20 and traveled to Bremerhaven, Germany.)

Heavy Water 1942, oil on canvas 24 x 36 in. Private Collection Ludins.90-111_Layout 1 12/14/11 12:46 PM Page 94

Game of War 1933, oil on canvas 36 x 40 in. Estate of Eugene Ludins

Another obvious influence is Goya and the Symbolists. In her catalog essay, Leval notes the similarity of the surreal mountain forms in Ludins’ work to the romantic promontories painted by Goya and the Swiss Symbolist Arnold Bocklin. Ludins would have been introduced to both by his League teacher, Allen Tucker, and likely seen their work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Leval writes. His crowds of little people, cavorting around a gigantic, mysterious machine or participating in or blithely witnessing the catastrophes of war, echo the nightmarish panoramas of Brueghel and Bosch.

Self-Portrait in Winter c. 1940, oil on canvas 31 x 19 in. Collection John and Elisabeth Small

Ludins clearly identified with Van Gogh, as evidenced by the marvelous Self Portrait in Winter, in which the pipe-smoking artist, rendered in vigorous brushstrokes, resembles a salt-of-the-earth workman. His early paintings of his primitive Maverick cottage (which lacked electricity and indoor plumbing and was heated by a pot-bellied stove) recall Van Gogh’s paintings of his bedroom and chair at Arles, though the social, popular Ludins had a much happier domestic life: in Maverick Studio, a dog plops down before the big stone fireplace, and the open doorway, crowned with a self portrait of Ludins, reveals a woman asleep in bed.

Maverick Studio 1931, oil on canvas 36 x 32 in. Estate of Eugene Ludins

In the early 1930s Ludins painted a riveting double portrait of himself and Small. (They had met in 1932 at a Maverick theater performance, fallen in love, and shortly after Small’s divorce from her husband, Austin Mecklem, another artist at the Maverick, eloped to New Mexico, before returning to Woodstock and buying the property on Chestnut Hill Road.) The portrait shows the seated couple with their dog, Popey, at their feet. Ludins’ head is romantically silhouetted against a stormy sky, framed by a large window, drawing board on his lap, while Small, looking exceptionally demure—in fact, she had a successful career as a sculptor, exhibiting in many shows and winning awards; two of her carved-wood sculptures are included in the exhibition—sits beneath a framed oval photo against a wallpapered wall. According to Leval, the contrast between the romantic depiction of the dashing young artist with the mane of red hair, who loved women, and the domestic portrayal of Small expresses Ludins’ ambivalence about settling down. (It worked out: the couple married in 1937 and were together until Small’s death in 1992.)

Family Portrait 1934, oil on canvas 54 x 46 in. Estate of Eugene Ludins

In 1933, Ludins had his first solo show, which included two of his allegorical landscapes. The imagery of Spring Thaw, whose centerpiece is a throne-shaped snowy promontory, its pinnacle wreathed by a Blake-like vortex of cloud, includes skaters on a frozen pond, nude bathers, a file of soldiers, military exercises observed by a white piglet, a building on fire, and, in the foreground, tiny figures raping and pillaging. Leval speculates in the catalog that the violence is a reference to the rise of Fascism in Europe. The painterly quality of the work gives it an exuberant energy, yet the forms are solid and immovable, the shifts in scale clumsy. However, it struck a note: Writing in The New Yorker, Lewis Mumford noted that the young painter “will bear watching.”

Spring Thaw 1932, oil on canvas 34 x 36 in. Estate of Eugene Ludins

Ludins was labeled a “romantic,” which qualified two of his imaginary panoramas, Rotten Foundation and Interlude, for inclusion in a show of contemporary romantic art at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943. In Interlude, tiny figures listen to a phonograph which has been set up on a cliff top overlooking an enormous protruding pipe, which stretches into the distance. Peter Jones, an artist and retired professor of art who is executor of Ludins’ estate (he did much of the scholarship for the catalog), speculated that the pipe was inspired by Ludins’ impressions of the Panama Canal, which he saw on an impromptu trip to Panama.

Rotten Foundations 1938, oil on canvas 30 x 50 in. Estate of Eugene Ludins

Interlude 1940, oil on canvas 36 x 48 in. Collection Abby and Mark Lerner

Leval notes that Ludins particularly excelled at painting snow, which perhaps accounts for the peculiar appeal of New Lands: the oddly scaled glacier upon which the tiny explorers rest or survey the arctic landscape is strangely weightless, a ghost mountain that serves as a mirror for the stony crags. Guerrillas, one of the most successful landscapes, is a Brueghel-like snow panorama in which the sinuous curve of a stream and line of soldiers leads the eye into the distance, where a hilltop settlement is in flames; the snow and mass of smoke contrast dramatically with the midnight blue sky, creating a crisp demarcation.

New Lands 1934, oil on canvas 39¼ x 50¼ in. Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, gift of Joseph DePaul

Guerrillas 1942, oil on canvas 42 x 50 in. Estate of Eugene Ludins

As a Russian-born progressive Jew whose family immigrated to America a few months after Ludins was born in 1904—Jews were unable to own property in the city of Mariupol, Ukraine, where the family lived, and the Bolshevik uprising had spurred the first pogroms—the artist was perhaps especially tuned in to the zeitgeist of the times. His paintings are like waking nightmares, nonsensical, but infused with anxiety. (Some of his titles from the 1940s—Rotten Foundations, Oil Riches, and Carbon Black—seem particularly prescient of the challenges facing the world today.)

Carbon Black 1946, oil on canvas 14 x 24 in. Private Collection

During World War II, Ludins served as the field director for the American Red Cross in Okinawa, experiencing one of the bloodiest battles in the Pacific. “When he came back, his painting was more focused, and from 1946 to 1960, he painted with obsessive intensity,” said Leval. The paintings became more monumental, the figures larger, often huddled in groups, like war refugees, in paint-smeared, elemental landscapes confronting some strange phenomenon—a pack of black, panther-like slinking beasts, or a giant chalkboard with indecipherable marks. His war experiences seep into the imagery: In Suspicion, for example, painted in 1951 and 1952, the spidery tree trunks and branches silhouetted against the ominous orange sky resemble the bomb-blasted trees in a war photo in Ludin’s possession.

Some of the most compelling works in the show are Ludins’ drawings, including the ones made during his wartime experiences. They are refreshingly spontaneous, showing the soldiers doing routine tasks around the barracks. Indeed, the pen and ink drawings, sometimes supplemented with a wash, reveal Ludins’ superb talents as a draftsman. His supple line can describe any form with ease—a bare, foreshortened foot, a Rubenesque nude, gun-toting duelists, a couple departing in a boat. The subjects range from the tragic to the comic: In one Goya-like sketch, entitled Putsch, dark, loosely drawn lines describe a scene of amazing complexity—soldiers carrying off the dead in an urban street, a crowd, grieving and demonstrating figures. In another sketch, entitled Sweetbreads, a thin, delicate line depicts two hooded figures at a table, while a frazzled chicken, harried rooster, and skinny dog, with a tail like a black brush, look on. With minimal means, Ludins describes a convincing space animated by barks, squawks, and the mysterious concentration of the human figures. There are domestic and romantic dramas, tabletop showdowns, animals emerging out of ink blobs, a robbery with Steinberg-like masked figures. Ludins’ drawings capture life as astutely as does the Japanese master Hokusai.

Putsch Undated, ink on paper 91⁄2 x 12 in. Collection Jane Jones

Sweetbreads Undated, ink on paper 91⁄4 x 81⁄4 in. Private Collection

In the 1960s, his palette lightened in a series of pastorals, suggestive of a more buoyant mood. Regenerator depicts another humongous machine, but it is more ornamental and whimsical than the oppressive contraptions he painted previously and echoes the poses of the people seated in background, on the seaside cliffs. Meadow features a Picasso-like bull in the foreground, while the rocket in To Space resembles a funereal-like tombstone, its lone form a striking contrast to the strolling couples in the landscape. The figures are roughly delineated in patches of paint or suggested in a few limpid lines, yet invested with character of cartoon-like intensity. They are more integrated into the ground, seeming to emerge from the luminous atmosphere. Their poses are peaceful and leisurely, like the dreamy figures in a Watteau, and there is a sense of poetic timelessness.

Regenerator 1965–75, oil on canvas 39 x 50 in. Estate of Eugene Ludins

Meadow 1960s, oil on canvas 40 x 50 in. Estate of Eugene Ludins

To Space 1961, oil on canvas 40 x 38 in. Estate of Eugene Ludins

The show also contains samples of Ludins’ plein air landscapes, which he made on trips down to the Mississippi River, Gulf Coast and the coast of Maine and Nova Scotia. The paintings depict cities or a horizon of land floating in an atmosphere of light, with a bit of grass in the foreground, often punctuated with a figure or boat. The elemental drama of the vast, luminous sky, sometimes underlined by a smoldering sunset, and reflected in the expanse of sea, has a raw, discomfiting quality.

Besides being an American original, Ludins was also a key figure in the Woodstock artists’ community, Pasti noted. He played baseball on the team founded by George Bellows—a talented player, Ludins had played on the upstate New York Farm Team of the American League as a teenager—and participated in the Woodstock Artists Association shows shortly after moving to the Maverick. In the 1930s, he was head of the Ulster County Artists’ Union, which was formed to lobby for jobs and money for unemployed artists, and later that year was appointed supervisor for the newly formed Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, serving Ulster County. One of his achievements in this position was the launch of the “Art Caravan,” a refurbished World War I ambulance used for traveling art shows of local artists’ work. A series of photographs in the show depict an Art Caravan worker unloading the folding screens and paintings from the van and setting up a show on the Village Green.

After the war, Ludins was elected chair of the Woodstock Artists Association’s Board of Directors, a position that qualified him as a “village elder.” He was also a talented frame maker—a source of income in the early years. (Ironically, his frames have fetched more money than his paintings, sometimes selling for thousands of dollars.) Ludins made his last landscape painting expedition in 1993, active nearly to the end of his life.

Jones recalled that Ludins “was one of the best liked people in Woodstock. He was physically imposing. Women were drawn to him even when he was in the hospital. People didn’t believe he was 90.” Jones, who studied with Ludins at the University of Iowa, said “not descriptions of life, but experiences of emotion interested him.” Ludins laid out colors on his palette—one is exhibited in the show—so that he could easily “discover a color he wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.”

The deceased painter would undoubtedly be thrilled with this comprehensive exhibit of his work. The show represents an unusual opportunity for viewers to look with fresh eyes upon a body of work that hasn’t been previously sifted by the critics, pre-packaged by an army of collectors, historians, and tastemakers, and digested by the public. One experiences the work with unpremeditated directness and is forced to analyze and honestly assess its impact using one’s own judgment. Perhaps Ludins’ paintings will strike people as quaint anachronisms, but then again, in today’s post-modernist world, where anything goes, Ludins’ work just might resonate, just might take.

The Dorsky Museum of Art is located at SUNY-New Paltz. “Eugene Ludins: An American Fantasist” is on view through July 12. Hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 11 am to 5 pm. Advance copies of the catalogs are available for purchase at The Dorsky. The price is $35/copy, not including membership and other discounts. Copies will be available for purchase elsewhere and on-line at SUNY Press beginning in April.

Lynn Woods is a freelance writer, art critic, and painter. She is co-author of Adirondack Style: Great Camps and Rustic Lodges (Universe Rizzoli), has lectured on Prohibition at the Adirondack Museum, in Blue Mountain Lake, and is currently researching the history of urban renewal in the Rondout district of Kingston, where she lives. She has a B.A. in art history from Barnard College. Samples of her writings and paintings can be found on her web site, www.kingstonstudio.com.