Author: Saratoga TODAY

SARATOGA SPRINGS — The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College has received a gift of 24 contemporary artworks from the collection of Michael O. and Sirje Helder Gold. 

The gift includes works created in the 1990s and 2000s by a diverse group of leading and emerging artists, including Louise Bourgeois, Sean Duffy, Naomi Fisher, Iva Gueorguieva, Michelle Grabner, Carol Hepper, Steve Roden, Jonathan Seliger, Glen Seator, George Stoll, Beverly Semmes, and Barbara Takenaga.

The Golds are prominent art collectors who have lived in New York City and Los Angeles, and are known for championing the work of younger artists. Many of the paintings, photographs, and sculptures included in their gift are by artists from the West Coast and represent the Tang’s first acquisition from their oeuvre. Other works were created by artists who have been featured in exhibitions across the Tang’s twenty-year exhibition history. The gift will introduce many of these artists to new audiences, and the additions to the Tang’s growing collection will provide valuable opportunities for research and study by students and scholars from a variety of disciplines.

Now celebrating its 20th anniversary year, the Tang Teaching Museum has grown its collection to more than 16,000 objects. Numerous works from the Tang collection, including works from the Golds’ gift, are on view during its twentieth anniversary year. Energy in All Directions (through June 13) brings rarely seen artworks and new acquisitions from The Tang Teaching Museum collection together in dialogue with objects from the Shaker Museum’s extensive holdings to celebrate the life and legacy of artist and gallerist Hudson (1950–2014); Never Done: 100 Years of Women in Politics (though June 6) features work by 100 women and non-binary artists as a way of exploring the advances women have made, and still have to make, in the century since the ratification of the 19th Amendment; We’ve Only Just Begun: 100 Years of Skidmore Women in Politics (online through June 6), a companion exhibition to Never Done explores Skidmore archives to tell the stories of Skidmore women and their involvement in politics; and Nicole Cherubini: Shaking the Trees (through Sept. 11), an installation builds upon the artist’s longstanding exploration of the history of objects and space, and will juxtapose ceramic tiling, modular seating, sculpture, and works from the Tang Teaching Museum’s collection. 

The Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College is a pioneer of interdisciplinary exploration and learning. The Tang building is closed to the public, due to the coronavirus, but is open online. For updates, please visit tang.skidmore.edu

SARATOGA SPRINGS — The second annual Capital Region Thomas Edison Music Awards – aka the Eddies Music Awards – will be broadcast live at 7 p.m. May 2 from Universal Preservation Hall in Saratoga. 

The awards show has been twice rescheduled. It was originally planned to be held in front of an audience at the Proctors MainStage last spring and then was rescheduled due to the pandemic to be broadcast in December from UPH. A surge in COVID-19 cases late in 2020 resulted in further postponement. 

Scheduled performers and panelists will be announced in the coming weeks. 

The show will be broadcast live on Collaborative Studios’ Amazon Fire TV, Roku and Apple TV apps, its public access channels in Albany and Schenectady, and on YouTube and Facebook. It will be available on-demand for free after the event. 

Show highlights to include musical performances, and announcement of winners in 34 categories.  Broadcast and event details will be updated at theeddiesawards.com.

BENNINGTON, VT — Literature Evenings, Bennington College’s distinguished Wednesday night readings series, will highlight prestigious authors, faculty members, and student voices during its Spring 2021 series. 

All Literature Evenings readings will be presented remotely over Zoom. All events begin at 7 p.m. and are free, open to the public, and can be accessed and shared from the Literature Evenings webpage.

“Our Literature Evenings are normally held in the Franklin living room,” said Benjamin Anastas, a member of the Literature faculty. “It’s an intimate setting with a lot of history: writers like Bernard Malamud, Anaiïs Nin and poet Mary Oliver all read their work in front of that fireplace.”

“Temporarily,” Anastas continued, “we’ll have to gather at the hearth of Zoom.” 

On Wednesday, March 17, Literature Evenings celebrates the book launch of Small Bibles for Bad Times by Liliane Atlan and translated by faculty member Marguerite Feitlowitz. Visionary French poet/playwright/novelist Liliane Atlan was driven to “find language to say the unsayable . . . to (find a way) to integrate within our conscience, without dying in the attempt, the shattering experience of Auschwitz.” 

This event will begin with a staged reading from Mister Fugue (Atlan’s best-known play, also translated by Feitlowitz) performed by Drama Faculty Kirk Jackson, with students Joshua Goldberg, David Guzman, and Ruby Loewenstein.

On Wednesday, April 28, faculty member Paul La Farge will read. La Farge is the author of four novels: The Night Ocean (Penguin/Random House), The Artist of the Missing (FSG), Haussmann, or the Distinction (Picador), and Luminous Airplanes (FSG), which continues as a large Web-based hypertext. He has also written a book of imaginary dreams, The Facts of Winter (McSweeney’s). His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Harper’s, and elsewhere.

The Literature Evenings series concludes in May with two events led by Bennington students. Details for both events are forthcoming and will be available on the College’s Event Calendar.

Literature Evenings are a hallmark of Bennington College’s active literary community. Literature and writing at Bennington are grounded in the idea that good writers are by definition good readers. 

Bennington College’s alumni include twelve Pulitzer Prize winners, three U.S. poets laureate, four MacArthur Geniuses, and countless New York Times bestsellers and National Book Award recipients. Learn more at bennington.edu. 

SARATOGA SPRINGS —James McBride’s most recent novel, Deacon King Kong, is a poignant and clever portrayal of 1960’s Red Hook Brooklyn. Saratogians with family ties to the city will find the setting and characters familiar and if not highly entertaining. 

The novel begins with the  shooting of 19-year-old, up and coming heroin dealer, Deems Clemens by the 71-year-old affable, drunk handyman/church deacon Cuffy Lambkin a.k.a. Sportcoat. This single act ignites the community that is the Causeway Housing Projects with unpredictable results. More than a solitary act of violence in a tough neighborhood, this shooting, and its aftermath, tells the story of a neighborhood, a way of life and the power of collective struggles and heartache with humor
and pathos.

Our shooter – Sportcoat – is fumbling through life as he is being pursued by the local police for the shooting for which he has no memory.  He is aided kindly by his friend, Hot Sausagewho provides him with homemade hooch he calls King Kong.   Sportcoat’s community includes his fellow project residents, his Five Ends Baptist Church members and clergy, his blind 20-year-old son Pudgy Fingers, and his deceased wife Hattie who mystically appears to him every day mostly to nag him from the great beyond.

Through great charm and irony, McBride intertwines competing drug gangs, Italian mobsters, devoted church members, sympathetic police and a handful of romances to produce a tale of morality in which the reader is not always sure of where the greater good lies. Throw in the government free cheese program of the time, some missing Christmas club church funds, a hidden religious relic and you have quite a story. This book is perfect fodder for endless conversations of right and wrong, struggle and practicality and personal and societal responsibility.

“I had the great pleasure of hearing James McBride speak at our own Northshire Bookstore this past March to discuss Deacon King Kong. It was the last public event I attended prior to shelter in place and am awfully glad he made it under the wire.  (Mr. McBride was way ahead of social distancing when he preemptively apologized for not shaking hands and instead waived to all attendees. He confessed that a downside of celebrity was the general public’s desire to always shake your hand.) Mr. McBride discussed his conveying of history through fiction as a preferable and more illuminating way to bring realities of a people and a place to life.  This was clearly evident in his 2013 pre-civil war John Brown novel “Good Lord Bird” for which he won The National Book Award for Fiction.  To fully appreciate the unique prism through which author McBride views the world, I would urge readers to get his nonfiction biographical “The Color of Water” which takes us through his Brooklyn upbringing with a white, orthodox Jewish mom, a Black pastor father and numerous siblings.

Through the foibles of each of his characters, James McBride brings us back to Brooklyn in the 60’s with the influx of the heroin trade, poverty, racism, neighborhood segregation all with relevance to today’s world.  His characters’ complexities nuance immoral acts in moral people, kind acts in seemingly immoral people and love of an individual versus bias of a group.  The themes of friendship through familiarity, acceptance and spiritual presence are throughout this wonderful read. 

If you want to be able to produce a smile on demand, read this book and keep its characters ever ready in your memory bank.”

Elise Gotimer is a Saratoga resident and avid reader. She is a mother of three grown children and a practicing attorney in the social service field. She may be reach at egotimer@verizon.net