Edward Hopper (1882–1967), Study for New York Movie, 1938 or 1939. Fabricated chalk on paper, 8 3/8 x 10 15/16 in. (21.3 x 27.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.

Movie Going

By Anthony F. Hall

Friday, May 17, 2013

“The movie theater and the church often existed side by side in a small town,” the late novelist John Updike once remarked in an interview. “The old Hollywood movies were very pious. Sins were punished in exact proportion to their seriousness. In many ways, the movies carried religious weight.”

Updike grew up in the 1940s, and by the 1960s, when I was growing up in Warrensburg, the movies may have played a smaller role in shaping moral habits, but they did help fire one’s own imagination, and, for that matter, the collective imagination.

I recently looked at the facebook page of a Warrensburg Central School alumni group, where Joey Scriver (Class of 72) initiated a discussion about the old Warren Theater, which, as it happens, was across the street from the Episcopal Church. It was not an especially impressive building (and what structure built in Warrensburg after the Depression was?), but it served its purpose, which was not simply to show low-budget or second-run movies every weekend, but to give children and teenagers a space unsupervised by adults for a few hours every Friday. (Saturday nights, at least in winter, were reserved for basketball games, for watching the likes of Jack Toney, Jerry Quintal and Bud York crush Lake George and Johnsburg in the high school gymnasium.) I don’t think I ever saw an adult enter the theater. And perhaps because of the absence of adults, the class and caste distinctions that kept Warrensburg segregated during the day were lifted.

At the very least, the images on the screen – whether of James Bond and Goldfinger or of surfers and snow bunnies – transfixed everyone equally. Our access to popular culture was limited, so movies helped explain the world to us – a world the churches’ traditional teachings no longer could. Joey Scriver, who attended the Catholic Church, noted that the Diocese distributed a guide every week identifying the movies that were appropriate, and inappropriate, for young people to see. “It was a great way to find out which were the really good films: the inappropriate ones.”

Scriver’s post elicited nearly one hundred replies. I was astonished by the accuracy of people’s memories of specific films (and there were some deliciously bad ones, like “Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte” and “Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors”).

No less interesting was how deeply the movie-going experience had etched itself upon everyone’s memories: the first dates, the sundaes and sodas afterward, the walk home under the elms and even the character of Clyde Farrar, the drug store owner who wrote verses which he had bound and printed and who refused to permit even a fly to be killed. (Steve Parisi, now the director of the local historical museum, contributed the interesting information that Farrar had been unlucky in love.)

When we entered the theater, we left the world of the small town behind; back on Main Street, we had returned to it. We could no longer assign the same significance to our small town, and perhaps for a time we were dissatisfied with it. It would be years before we would realize that life in a small town is as rich, if not richer, than any life elsewhere.

Tags: Adirondacks, Arts & Leisure, Hopper

Celebrating “Last of the Mohicans” on Film

By Joseph W. Zarzynski

Friday, April 26, 2013

Last year was the 20^th anniversary of the USA release of the 20^th Century Fox production, “The Last of the Mohicans.” That blockbuster movie, released on September 25, 1992, starred London-born actor, Daniel Day-Lewis. Just over two years earlier he won his first Best Actor Oscar award for the 1989 movie, “My Left Foot.”

As the 20^th anniversary of the most recent motion picture version of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel approaches, it is appropriate to acknowledge another film anniversary associated with this historical fiction account based upon the 1757 fall of Fort William Henry.

Several months ago, November 10, 2011, marked the 100^th anniversary of the official release of the original “The Last of the Mohicans” motion picture. That black-and-white silent film was only “one reel” or “1,000 feet” of film in length. For a silent film that equaled a little over 11 minutes in duration. Early in the silent film era, motion pictures were classified by the number of film reels or the number of feet of film stock.

The October 21, 1911 issue of the weekly entertainment publication, The Billboard, had an article on the 1911 edition of “The Last of the Mohicans” movie. One of the actors in “The Last of the Mohicans” (1911) was James Cruze who played Uncas, the Mohican son of Chingachgook. Cruze, born in Utah, was described as being of Ute Native American ancestry. He would go on to have an impressive acting and directing career being in over one hundred movies, making him one of the film industry’s early stars.

The Billboard article also promised the motion picture would “be remarkable for its scenic beauty and fidelity to the novel.” The news account likewise described the production’s film location: “The whole cast worked in and around the Adirondacks and the lakes for a whole month.”

James Fenimore Cooper, a Cooperstown resident, had his book published in 1826. A year earlier, he visited the Lake George/Glens Falls area where he conducted research. Cooper then wrote his novel, set during the French & Indian War (1755-1763), over a 3-4 month time period while vacationing with family on Long Island’s north shore.

As the 20^th anniversary of director Michael Mann’s “The Last of the Mohicans” (1992) movie approaches, we should recognize the long lineage of earlier films of that title. The 1920 motion picture program of “The Last of the Mohicans,” a silent film that starred Wallace Beery, is considered to be the best film adaptation of Cooper’s popular novel. In 1995, the Library of Congress, listed the 1920 movie onto the National Film Registry, the official list for noteworthy American motion pictures that are ”culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films.” This preservation program began in 1989 and each year up to twenty-five films are added to this roster.

Other American-made movie versions of “The Last of the Mohicans” came out in 1932, 1936, and 1963. There was even a 1977 made-for-television “movie” that starred Steve Forrest as Hawkeye.

This year, celebrate the 20^th anniversary of “The Last of the Mohicans” (1992) by watching it on DVD or via download. However, during that nostalgic screening, also give a nod to the movie’s rich film ancestry.

Tags: Arts & Leisure, Film, Last of the Mohicans

Dorothy Dehner at The Hyde: Life on the Farm and Beyond

By Anthony F. Hall

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

“Dorothy Dehner at The Hyde,” a new exhibition of works owned by the Glens Falls museum, affirms the many connections between the artist and the Lake George region.

No other institution has done as much to build and sustain her reputation as The Hyde, and no institution meant as much to her, despite the fact that her career as an artist truly began only after 1950, when she left Bolton Landing for New York.

The museum hosted a reception to celebrate the opening of the exhibition, as well as the larger 50^th anniversary “Five Decades of Collecting” show, on January 26.

“I’m so pleased for Dorothy; she would have been very pleased to know that this work will stay here,” said Bolton resident Theta Curri.

While The Hyde has helped call the art world’s attention to Dehner, it is Curri who, almost single-handedly, has reminded residents of Bolton Landing that an abstract artist of national significance once lived in town.

Growing up in Bolton in the 1940s, Curri knew both Dehner and her more famous husband, the sculptor David Smith.

“Everyone knows all about David Smith; they knew his second wife and have come to know his two beautiful daughters; but very few know anything about Dorothy Dehner and what became of her. That became my mission: to educate Bolton about Dorothy Dehner,” said Curri.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1901, Dehner enrolled at New York’s Art Students League, where she met David Smith in 1926. They bought their Bolton farm in 1929 and became year-round residents in 1940.

“In Bolton Landing, it was like living in a giant salad bowl, all shades of green, all textures. So we both threw our hearts into country life; gardening, later on raising pigs and a few chickens, smoking hams, making sausage and preserving uncounted jars in our larder,” Dehner recalled in essay written for the catalogue for The Hyde’s 1973 show, ‘David Smith of Bolton Landing.’

The couple’s “country life” provided the material for a remarkable series of miniatures painted by Dehner in 1943, called ‘Life on the Farm.’ (One of them is included in the current exhibition.)

Those images of life in Bolton in the 1940s became the catalyst for the friendship that developed between Curri and Dehner during the last decades of the artist’s life.

“When I retired from teaching in 1986, I became the director of our local history museum,” Curri explained. “Dorothy had remained friends with Hugh Allen Wilson, the harpsichordist, and she had entrusted him with a gift for our museum. It was a collection of prints made from her series, ‘Life on the Farm,” which is all about life in Bolton and on the farm she shared with David Smith.”

Curri continued, “I was responsible for the museum when the prints arrived. I was sitting at my desk, writing a thank you note to Dorothy, when the phone rang. It was Dorothy. That was the beginning of our friendship.”

“We began telephoning one another,” Curri said. “I could call her up at 10:30 pm and I knew she’d be awake, but I learned never to call her before noon. She always asked about Bolton folks, about the people she knew.”

Through Curri, Dehner was able to re-establish a relationship, however indirectly, with the place that meant so much to her.

“She called me her Bolton connection,” said Curri.

Curri, in turn, re-connected Bolton with Dehner.

She mounted a display of the ‘Life on the Farm’ prints at the bank in the off-season, when the museum was closed, and encouraged visitors to the museum to spend time viewing the prints.

One of those visitors was Martha Nodine, who attended the reception for “Dorothy Dehner at The Hyde” with Curri.

Curri recalled, “Marty had helped to organize an exhibition of David Smith’s work in Texas, and when she and her husband came east, they made an excursion to Bolton Landing. She looked at our museum’s David Smith exhibit, and I directed her to the wall where ‘Life on the Farm’ hung. ‘Those are by Dorothy Dehner,’ I said. ‘Who’s Dorothy Dehner?’ Marty asked.”

Curri felt the two should meet, which they did, and developed a friendship of their own. Before her death in 1994, Dehner selected Nodine to be her authorized biographer.

The biography, which is nearing completion, is called “No Day Without a Line: the Life and Times of Artist and Activist Dorothy Dehner.”

“People will discover that there’s a range and depth to Dehner’s work and extraordinary experiences that might surprise them,” said Nodine. “Her life did not end with ‘Life on the Farm.’”

In fact, according to art collector Bernard Brown, a Hyde trustee, Dehner’s mature work is by far her most interesting.

“At age fifty-one, Dorothy Dehner had her first solo exhibition in New York at the Rose Fried Gallery, which is notable in part because the gallery had never shown the work of a woman artist before that date,” said Brown.

“In the early 1950s, Dehner developed new techniques in her work by combining the expression of geometric forms in pen and ink with watercolor washes and splattered paint. She applied wet sponges to the paper and painted wet-on-wet resulting in blurred images, which contrast sharply with the precisely drawn elements of the painting. After 1955, she turned to sculpture and this medium would dominate her interest for the next thirty-eight years,” Brown said.

But rather than leaving Bolton Landing behind, Dehner incorporated it even as she found her voice or vision as a mature artist.

‘Low Landscape, Sideways (1962),’ for instance, which is included in this exhibition, “suggests a panoramic view of nature,” writes Joan M. Marter, the art historian who serves as president of the Dorothy Dehner Foundation for the Visual Arts.

“One is reminded that David Smith often made sculptural landscapes,” Marter writes, while noting that Dehner had found a sculptural vocabulary of her own.

Even works that appear to have no relationship to Bolton, such as “Interior Studio” bear traces of its influence. Tellingly, an almost identical version of the work, which Dehner gave to Theta Curri, has a different, more Bolton-inflected title, “Barns.”

Of course, Dehner herself acknowledged Bolton’s lasting influence on her life and art.

“Bolton Landing remains forever vivid in my mind – because of the great beauty of the place and the joy I had in the sense that I was part of it,” she wrote in 1973.

So it comes as no surprise to learn that among her last requests was this: that her ashes be scattered above Lake George.

“Dorothy Dehner at The Hyde” will remain on view in the Hoopes Gallery through April 14. The Hyde, which is located at 161 Warren Street in downtown Glens Falls, is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 am to 5 pm and on Sunday from noon to 5 pm. For more information, call 518-792-1761.

Tags: Arts & Leisure, Bolton Landing, Dorothy Dehner, Life on The Farm, The Hyde Collection

The Lake George mural by Judson Smith in 1942

Lake George’s Prized Post Office Mural Will be Repaired, Restored

By Anthony F. Hall

Monday, March 25, 2013

The mural decorating the wall of Lake George’s Post Office, which appears to have been damaged by leaking water, will be repaired and restored, Post Office officials state.

“The contractor who replaced the building’s roof will be responsible for repairs to the mural using the services of a qualified, approved restorer. This will come at no cost to the Postal Service,” said Maureen Marion, a spokesperson for the US Post Office.

Elizabeth Kendall, a Chicago-based art restorer who was hired by the US Post Office to clean the mural several years ago, said, “Almost any type of damage can be dealt with, both structurally and aesthetically, and I am sure this will be the case with this mural.”

The repair of the mural will be undertaken in the spring, said Marion. The condition of the mural, a view of Lake George at sunset painted by Judson Smith in 1942, had elicited the attention of Village Mayor Bob Blais, Supervisor Dennis Dickinson and Congressman Bill Owens. According to Marion, leaks from the ceiling began to appear after the roof was replaced.

“Since the project’s substantial completion, we have seen evidence of water leaking into the facility above the mural on a handful of occasions. “At first, it was believed to be a masonry issue and two separate masonry-related repairs were made after leakages occurred. However, yet another leak did occur. If there is a silver lining here, their investigation in this instance has given them the clearest view of the source of the leak. We believe this will be the ticket to a final, effective repair,” said Marion.

Portrait on Judson Smith

According to Elizabeth Kendall, it was the policy of the federal government during the 1930s and early 1940s to require that 1% of the costs of constructing a new post office be devoted to art work for the building.

“It was not a relief program like the WPA to keep artists employed,” said Kendall. “It was much more prestigious. The artist had to submit a proposal; Smith probably came to Lake George to make some sketches. The local postmaster had the final say about whether the piece would be installed. He might ask for some changes if the colors of the cows were wrong.”

It is unclear whether Smith painted the canvas in his studio and brought it to Lake George or painted it on-site, Kendall said.

By 1942, Judson Smith was already a well-established artist.

Born in Michigan in 1880, Smith studied in New York with John LaFarge and John Henry Twachtman. He moved to Woodstock in 1921 and became a member of a school of artists associated with a realism that was infused with European, modernist influences. After World War II, Smith abandoned realism altogether and painted in a non-objective, abstract style. He died in 1962.

“This mural is very different from most of those we see in schools and post offices,” said Kendall. “It has a much more modern idiom. It’s quite beautiful.”

Tags: Arts & Leisure, Lake George, Lake George Post Office, Mural

Elizabeth Pitcairn

Elizabeth Pitcairn Brings Star Power to Luzerne

By Mirror Staff

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Elizabeth Pitcairn is a world class violin soloist and a summer camp director. That’s not as discordant a combination of vocations as it may sound, since the summer camp is the Luzerne Music Center, where members of the Philadelphia Orchestra teach the campers and where one of upstate New York’s finest classical music festivals takes place every year.

A camper herself at Luzerne for two summers in the late 1980s, Pitcairn was named Artistic Director in 2011 and President and CEO earlier this year.

“The two careers fit together nicely,” said Pitcairn. “My solo career takes me around the world, but I’m always promoting the Luzerne Music Center. People everywhere have heard of it and appreciate it. If you look at the people who have taught here and performed here over the past thirty-two years, you’ll find it staggering.”

Conversely, Pitcairn said, “When I’m on tour, I’m making contacts with musicians who I hope will become involved with the Luzerne Music Center.”

Pitcairn will return to the Adirondacks next June to oversee the camp, its campers and weekly concert series.

She’ll also be a visible presence on Lake George, where her great-uncle, Harold Pitcairn, purchased Cooper Point (known today as Green Harbor) in 1934 and where Pitcairns summered for decades.

Several benefits organized by the newly-organized

Friends of the Luzerne Music Center will be held, including some where Pitcairn will introduce a screening of “The Red Violin.” That 1998 film was reportedly inspired by her own violin, a 1720 Stradivarius that disappeared for approximately 200 years.

“The benefits provide an opportunity to introduce the Luzerne Music Center to a new audience,” said Pitcairn.

“However well-known the Luzerne Music Center is in the world of classical music, in the Adirondacks, we’re a hidden gem,” said Pitcairn. “We’re trying to bring more attention to it.”

As head of the Luzerne Music Center, “I’m focused on education; it’s all about the students,” said Pitcairn.

She knows from her own years as a camper how valuable the Luzerne experience can be.

“The camp is a low-pressure, non-competitive, warm environment where everyone is encouraged to fulfill their potential. You can accomplish a year’s worth of work in one two-week session,” said Pitcairn.

But as the Luzerne Music Center’s President and CEO, Pitcairn is not only responsible for the students’ education; she must also ensure that the facilities are equal to the needs of the students and faculty.

“This is a hundred-year-old camp for boys, which Bert Phillips and Toby Blumenthal bought from the Catholic Archdiocese of Albany in 1980,” said Pitcairn. “It’s a dated facility.”

Pitcairn has announced that the Luzerne Music Center’s Board of Directors is in the process of planning a capital campaign.

“I’d like to see us with first class facilities,” said Pitcairn. “We need a new performing arts center, a new dining hall and proper housing for faculty.”

Pitcairn acknowledges that she has a lot of fund raising to do within the next few years.

In the mean time, she has a music center to run.

Tags: Arts & Leisure, Elizabeth Pitcairn, Luzerne, Luzerne Music Center

Another Side of Seneca Ray Stoddard: New Show at State Museum Presents the Photographer as Social Critic

Monday, September 3, 2012

In the full-scale exhibition “Seneca Ray Stoddard: Capturing the Adirondacks” at the New York State Museum in Albany is a photo by Stoddard titled “The Color Line.” Dated 1879, it shows affluent children and adults crowding the verandah at the original Fort William Henry Hotel in Lake George (an architectural wonder before it burned down in 1909, as so many of these photos reveal). Seated below them—significantly—on a balustrade are more than a dozen African-American men, presumably hotel employees, who are leered at by an elderly woman in the far left corner.

“The Color Line” is one example from the more than 100 photos in “Capturing the Adirondacks” that provides a different way of looking at Seneca Ray Stoddard’s photography—a way that hasn’t been fully explored before (especially outside the Adirondacks). It is, in fact, the first time since these 101 photos were acquired by the New York State Museum in 1972 that they have been publicly exhibited. Most come from a collection accumulated by Maitland De Sormo, the Adirondack historian who rescued Stoddard’s work from oblivion in the 1960s, as well as the Chapman Historical Museum in Glens Falls, and the New York State Library. “Capturing the Adirondacks” remains at the NYS museum through February 21.

In the Adirondacks, Stoddard (1844-1917) is celebrated as a native photographer of landscapes, placid life in the wilderness, as well as a conservation advocate who influenced public opinion with his photography, clever writings, and lectures to help establish the “forever wild” clause in the New York State constitution in 1894. “Capturing the Adirondacks” honors this established legacy, but it gestures elsewhere as well. It presents Stoddard as a photographer who documented people “from diverse economic and cultural settings, from the very rich to the much less so,” and as an artist who had “a dedicated intent” to explore those social and economic disparities.

Much of the work in this exhibit is of the upper classes, of course. In the late 1800s, they sought an escape from congested, industrial towns and cities and found it in the Adirondacks. Stoddard was there with his camera to document, rather romantically, the chic hotels and comfortable playground they built in his backyard (he lived in Glens Falls). However, when juxtaposed with a photo like “The Color Line,” the exhibit starts to make an interesting case for Stoddard as a social critic. His romantic images of wealth begin to raise questions about class and race. Other photos here do the same, though to a lesser degree: “An Adirondack Home,” for example, which shows a backwoods woman leaning in the doorway of a tiny log shack, as well as Stoddard’s photos of working-class loggers, and one shot of a Native-American encampment on Lake George.

But do these alone make Stoddard a social critic? It would appear not. “The Color Line” is an anomaly in the exhibition, not the rule (though it does alter conventional wisdom about Stoddard). Besides, Stoddard strikes one as being too practical of a photographer to be a social critic. He too had an entrepreneurial spirit, not unlike his affluent subjects. He published successful tourist guidebooks with his photos when some might have considered that a cheapening of his art. With his photos of the upper classes, moreover, Stoddard was able to sell the Adirondacks to politicians and the public as an elegant tourist destination worth preserving. Had he been a social critic, few would have given him the time of day.

Even so, “Capturing the Adirondacks” is still an extensive exhibition with some of Stoddard’s finest landscape photos, those that played a crucial role for the Adirondacks. With a subtle, smart technique, Stoddard was able to shape the public’s understanding of the New York wilderness. The exhibit features, for example, three photos of the Fort Ticonderoga ruins, taken in the 1870s and 80s long before the reconstruction. Here the man-made rubble sharply contrasts with the vitality of the landscape. (One photo, titled “The Parade Ground,” could even be an ironic quip about war.) Stoddard took other photos of ruins in the Adirondack as well, suggesting the impermanence—and insignificance—of anything built or imagined by man in relation to the land.

Stoddard, however, could be more explicit with his conservation message. Twenty years after Matthew Brady took his iconic photos of ravaged bodies on the Civil War battlefields, Stoddard captured a different kind of destruction: desolate acres of land stripped of forest, and hundreds of abandoned logs sitting in piles of snow. Juxtaposed with his blooming vista photos, Stoddard’s message could not have been clearer.

“Capturing the Adirondacks” features other rarely seen works as well, such as a few early landscape paintings by Stoddard, completed before he decided to focus on photography (which, it turns out, was an excellent decision). He also took a number of compelling photos of the Statue of Liberty from inside the crown, as well as from inside the torch. Early editions of his guidebooks such as “Lake George Illustrated” with covers he designed are on display as well. Included with these is the original, ornate portfolio he created for William West Durant shortly after the latter built the great camp Sagamore and hired Stoddard to photograph it.

If this exhibition marks a long overdue break for Stoddard, there’s still a long way to go. Lighting in the gallery was poor, which meant a lot of time staring at shadows, and a couple of Stoddard’s photos were placed on a door that was in use. With that said, by exhibiting a photo like “The Color Line,” the museum has inched Stoddard toward wider recognition. Stoddard’s photos of the Horicon ladies sketch club may not reach an audience far beyond New York, but a photo like “The Color Line” just might.

Tags: Adirondacks, Arts & Leisure, New York State Museum, S.R. Stoddard

New State Marker Affirms Artists’ Connections to Lake George

By Mirror Staff

Saturday, September 1, 2012

There may have been more significant artists to have lived and worked on Lake George, but none more famous than Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe.

The couple spent almost every summer at the lake from 1918 to 1946, but to the dismay of local historians, officials and business owners (not to mention the fans of Georgia O’Keeffe), there is nothing in Lake George to indicate they were ever here.

Until now, that is.

On Thursday, August 4, board members from the Lake George Arts Project and officials from the Town of Lake George unveiled a New York State Historical Marker not far from the former sites of Oaklawn, the Stieglitz family mansion, and the two artists’ studios on the hill across the road.

It reads: “Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986): They lived on this hill and created art reflecting their love of Lake George.”

“We’re reclaiming and reburnishing the artistic legacies of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz,” said Sarah Rodman, a graduate student who spearheaded the campaign to purchase and install the marker.

According to Ann Luby, who represented Governor Andrew Cuomo at the ceremony, even students of modern American art are frequently unaware that Georgia O’Keeffe lived on Lake George and created some of her finest work there.

“This is sorely needed,” said Erin Coe, the curator of “Modern Nature: Georgia O’Keeffe and Lake George,” an exhibition of works by O’Keeffe to be shown at The Hyde Collection in 2013 before traveling to museums in Santa Fe and San Francisco.

“After our show opens at The Hyde, tourists are going to want to see this hill,” said Coe.

Tags: Arts & Leisure, Georgia O'Keeffe, Lake George, State Marker

The Marjorie Lansing Porter vinyl collection

The Memory Keeper: Marjorie Lansing Porter’s Legendary Collection of Adirondack Folk Music is Now Accessible to the Public

By Anthony F. Hall

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Rockwell Kent once suggested that Pete Seeger compose an opera based on Adirondack folk tunes, and that my father write the book.

Although it’s hard to imagine my father, a lifelong newspaperman, collaborating on an opera, the idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds.

In fact, in 1960, Seeger did release “Champlain Valley Songs,” an album based on lyrics and tunes recorded by Marjorie Lansing Porter as she traveled throughout the North Country.

Porter began collecting tunes in 1941. At a resort on Lake George, she happened to meet “Grandma” Lily Delorme, who was demonstrating the techniques of woolen-goods production on an old spinning wheel for the resort’s guests.

“Her story of pioneer life in an Adirondack valley was set to a musical hum as she paced, now close to the big wheel, now away from it,” wrote Porter.

“Grandma’s saga continued in lively conversation as she rode home,” wrote Porter. “She spoke of her grandfather, Gideon Baker, and of his muzzle-loader and bullet mold from the War of 1812. Did she, by any chance, happen to know a ballad composed by the wife of General Macomb during the battle of Plattsburgh, The Banks of Champlain? Why, yes, it went this way, ‘Twas autumn and round me the leaves were descending—‘ Her thin, reedy voice told the whole story in a score of verses.”

Porter said the encounter with Lily Delorme was “the seed for a constructive activity – the collection of folksongs, ballads and lore illustrative of life in the Adirondacks and its adjacent Champlain Valley.”

By the time Porter died in 1973, that collection consisted of 33 reel-to-reel tapes that held folk ballads, lyrical folksongs, early hillbilly pieces, French-Canadian songs and fiddle tunes, all taped on a Soundscriber Recorder.

“Her interests in grass roots history, and her methods of learning the history and collecting the lore found her to be in many ways ahead of her time,” says folk singer Lee Knight, whose album, “Adirondack Ballads and Folk Songs” includes songs from the collection.

The collectionis housed in the Feinberg Library’s Special Collections at SUNY Plattsburgh. Earlier this summer, the Library announced that the Soundscriber discs have been digitized and are available as mp3 files on a new Audio Station computer at the library.

Marjorie Porter was born in 1891 in the Champlain Valley, where her ancestors had migrated from New England in the 1790s. Her great grandfather, Wendell Lansing, founded the Essex County Republican in Keeseville in 1839 as an organ of the Whig Party and its anti-slavery platform. Porter herself, who graduated from the Plattsburgh Normal School in 1912, edited the newspaper in the 1940s.

Porter appears to have known everyone, including Pete Seeger and Rockwell Kent.

“She has had wide contact with people of this region of all classes, for she has acted as poll taker for the Gallup Poll,” Rockwell Kent wrote in a letter to my father in 1956. “She was for some years Historian of Clinton County but in the last election she was supplanted by a political appointee – to the outspoken indignation of the ‘better’ citizens of Plattsburgh.”

Porter was also the historian for Essex County, where she helped create the Adirondack Center Museum in Elizabethtown.

My father called Porter the North Country’s Mnemosyne – its memory.

Marjorie Lansing Porter

In the 1950s, North Country Life publisher Glyndon Cole made Porter the magazine’s associate editor. Rockwell Kent tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade her to buy the magazine from Cole and hire an experienced journalist – in this case, my father – to be its editor.

“She appears to have no definite idea about just what the magazine should be,” Kent wrote him. “She is a hard working woman but so like a shrinking violet in her approach to the people that she strikes us as being thoroughly incapable of promoting the enterprise.”

Shrinking violet or not, Porter has had a huge influence on contemporary Adirondack folk music.

“Marjorie Lansing Porter’s music collection is an extremely significant resource for anyone with an interest in traditional music or the cultural heritage of the Adirondacks and Champlain Valley,” said Hannah Harvester, the Program Director at Traditional Arts in Upstate New York (TAUNY), which is located in Canton. “It was very helpful for us at TAUNY when we created our Adirondack Music website module, as it contains songs from diverse groups such as loggers, miners, Irish, Iroquois, and French Canadian groups, as well as oral histories recorded with many of the singers. Many of the songs were recorded just in time, before the tradition bearers passed away.”

According to Debra Kimok, the Special Collections Librarian at the Feinberg Library, the files include more than one hundred songs sung by Grandma Delorme, versions of “The Three Hunters,” “A Lumbering We Shall Go” and “Adirondack Eagle,” by Yankee John Galusha, and songs such as Francis Delong’s “My Adirondack Home” and “Peddler Jack.”

“Porter’s collections have impacted the tradition, and have affected all of us Adirondack songsmiths,” says Chris Shaw, a Lake George native whose repertoire includes traditional Adirondack songs.

Of course, Porter’s collection is of more than musical interest.

In an optimistic scenario of the Adirondack Park’s future, one called “the Sustainable Life” and presented at the Common Ground Alliance Forum on July 18 in Long Lake by Dave Mason and Jim Herman, “The old divisions between natives and newcomers (will fade) as the values they share become more apparent.”

According to that scenario, natives and newcomers alike will recognize that “our cultural human values are just as important as our natural values.”

But how are newcomers to become acquainted with the values that have shaped life in the Adirondacks, let alone learn to share them?

They could do worse than by listening to the old songs in the Marjorie Lansing Porter collection.

Tags: Adirondacks, Arts & Leisure, Folk Music, Marjorie Lansing Porter

Bolton Town Historian Ted Caldwell and Clint Weber at Golden Heart Farm, where the Furlongs lived from the 1921 until 1952.

Tales from Golden Heart, Part Three: Documenting the Life and Times of Bolton Artist Weber Furlong

By Anthony F. Hall

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

For much of his life, Clint Weber has lived with a mystery: the source of an extraordinary collection of art he found himself the guardian of.

“Even as a nine-year-old, I would take these portfolios from underneath my bed and gaze at these wonderful things,” said Weber, a former Navy submariner now managing information systems for health care centers in Texas.

Those “wonderful things” included paintings and drawings by artists such as John Graham, David Smith, Dorothy Dehner, Max Weber and two remote relatives: Thomas and Weber Furlong.

The collection had passed from Thomas and Weber Furlong to their nephew, Clint’s father, and then to him.

“Fortunately, my family’s the kind that never throws anything out,” said Clint.

A few years ago, he met Mona Blocker Garcia, a world traveler who had settled in Marfa, Texas, which is frequently described as the emerging arts capital of the southwest. There, she bought a building on what had once been the campus of Fort D.A. Russell and turned it into the headquarters for her International Women’s Foundation, which she describes as “a training center for the artistic development and healthful aging of mature women artists.”

(Garcia’s building, Building 98, was once the officers’ club. It contains murals painted by German Prisoners of War during World War II, which she is restoring.)

“As soon as Clint told me about the collection, I had to see it,” said Garcia. “And as soon as I saw it, I knew he had to do something with it. It’s too important to be kept hidden.”

“Mona is the driving force. Without her, these things might still be under my bed,” said Clint.

This fall, Garcia and Weber will exhibit the collection at the International Women’s Foundation in Marfa.

The centerpiece of the exhibition will consist of Weber Furlong’s own paintings and will constitute the first major retrospective of the work of the artist, who Weber claims is “America’s first woman modern artist.”

As Weber and Garcia began to appreciate the depth and the extent of the collection, they felt compelled to learn more about the woman behind it.

What sort of woman could hold the respect and friendship of so many great artists, or create such astonishing work herself?

“I had found my life’s mission – to preserve the legacy of Weber Furlong and to create a record of her life,” said Weber.

That mission led Weber and Garcia to Bolton Landing, where Thomas and Weber Furlong lived from 1921 to 1952 at Golden Heart Farm, in the hills above Bolton Landing.

The house was built in the 1860s by Rufus Randall, a returning veteran of the Civil War. He cleared and farmed the land and raised his family there before selling the property to another Bolton man, Edson Persons.

The farm was reputed to have “one of the most magnificent views of the lake in the vicinity,” according to a newspaper clipping from 1961.

“Although my father had visited the farm when he was a child, I didn’t know much about it – where it was, whether the house even still existed,” said Weber.

He finally reached Bolton Town Clerk Pat Steele, who put him in touch with Ted Caldwell, the town’s historian.

Caldwell told him all there was to know about Golden Heart, and invited Weber to come see the farm himself.

In early May, Weber and Garcia flew in from Texas to begin documenting Furlong’s life in Bolton Landing and in Glens Falls, where the artist lived and worked from 1952 until her death in 1962.

“This is hallowed ground; this is where it all happened,” Weber said as he and Garcia arrived at Golden Heart Farm, where a reception was held in their honor.

According to Weber, Thomas and Weber Furlong were drawn to Bolton Landing by another artist, opera singer Louise Homer.

“Louise Homer’s daughters were attending a boarding school here in Bolton, and she recruited Weber Furlong to design some sets for a theater program,” said Weber.

(The school, Bremestead, closed in 1924. It was located near Braley Point.)

Clint Weber and Mona Blocker Garcia

The Furlongs moved to the farm in 1921. Although Weber Furlong was an administrator at the Arts Students League rather than a teacher, like her husband, she is generally regarded as the better artist.

Weber Furlong was born in St. Louis in 1878. She studied with William Merritt Chase and Max Weber and Furlong himself, whom she called “the best and most important” of her teachers. After the two were married, they moved to a building on Washington Square where John Graham, Alexander Calder, Thomas Hart Benton and Rockwell Kent also rented studios.

Weber Furlong refused to call herself a teacher. Rather, she saw herself as an enabler of other artists, distributing advice and encouragement.

After Thomas Furlong’s death in 1952, Weber Furlong moved to Glens Falls, where she continued to teach and paint until her death in 1962. James Kettlewell, a curator at The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, organized an exhibition of Furlong’s work at The Hyde in 1966, and he is largely responsible for the belated recognition she received from critics, collectors and museums as a serious, mid-century artist.

“Weber Furlong emerged as an artist only after Thomas Furlong’s death in 1952. And at that time the only art that could make it in America had to be very large and abstract. Nevertheless the art she produced was entirely of her time,” Kettlewell wrote in a catalogue for the exhibition.

Although she painted almost nothing but still-lifes, Furlong’s work was influenced by the abstract expresssionists, said Kettlewell.

“If she finds the place she deserves in the art historical record,” Kettlewell wrote, “she will be classified with the Abstract Expressionists, as was her friend, the greatest sculptor of the American modern movement, David Smith.”

(The Furlongs are credited with introducing David Smith to Bolton Landing, having invited him to stay at the farm in 1929. Shortly thereafter, he bought the farm on Edgecomb Pond Road.)

Kettlewell was among those interviewed by Weber during his visit to Warren County.

He also met some of Furlong’s former students, such as Loren Blackburn, visited The Hyde, which owns several Furlong works, and examined private collections containing pieces by both Furlongs.

“This was an amazing visit; I was able to fill in so many gaps in my knowledge of Weber and Thomas Furlong and their careers,” said Weber.

Weber is at work on a documentary film and book about the Furlongs, both of which he hopes will be completed before the exhibition of pieces by Furlong and her friends opens in Marfa in September.

Tags: Arts & Leisure, Bolton Artist, Bolton Landing, Golden Heart, Weber Furlong

Derek Mitchell aka Mitochi

Lake George Native Releases “Cryptic Cosmic” First Album

By James H. Miller

Sunday, July 15, 2012

Cryptic Cosmic is the title of local artist Derek Mitchell’s (a.k.a. Mitochi) immersive debut on Glens Falls’ Sub-Bombin Records, released Tuesday, June 26. Like some of the ambient, instrumental pioneers that precede him—Jean Michel Jarre or Tangerine Dream—Mitchell layers synthesizer tones that swell, whirl, and ripple to make a galactic sound. Unlike them, however, Mitchell works with hip-hop beats and manipulated rap samples.

“I love the beat of hip-hop, and I do a lot of sampling,” Mitchell says, who was born and raised in Lake George. But other influences, like new electronica music, have also shaped Cryptic Cosmic. “I don’t pigeonhole myself into just being a hip-hop person,” he says.

Mitchell has been involved with music in some shape or form since he was fairly young. When he was roughly 15, he dabbled in a couple different bands, playing bass and electric guitar. In the first, he covered songs by Nirvana, the 90s grunge band, and with the second, played punk rock out of a Queensbury garage. However, certain elements of hip-hop, the beats and rhythms in particular, increasingly appealed to him. He took a shot at writing rhymes and even did some recording in a studio in the old Troy Shirt Factory building, yet he didn’t appear to be cut out for it.

“I don’t have the voice for it, and my rhymes were always so abstract that no one knew what I was talking about most of the time,” he says.

When Mitchell acquired a basic drum machine in 2002, he found his niche. Since then, he has specialized in making those electronic beats and rhythms that initially attracted him to hip-hop. It was those instrumental aspects of hip-hop, more so than the lyrical content that had appealed to him. “It’s sometimes too ‘streetish’,” he says, “there’s too much talk about drugs, murder, and violence.”

Until recently, producing music has been a strictly personal, and more or less private, interest for Mitchell. “I’ve been working on this stuff for myself for a long time and not really playing it for other people,” he says. “I didn’t show it to anyone else. But then I had enough material that felt like an album.”

The Cryptic Cosmic limited edition USB

As a local label that specializes in instrumental hip-hop, Sub-Bombin seemed like the right place for Mitchell. On the label were producers working in a similar style, many of whom he considers influences. “I’ve always liked what those guys do and always paid attention to their label,” he says. Mitchell got in contact with Sub-Bombin, and the label likewise thought he’d make a good addition.

“He’s really broadened the musical spectrum of the label,” says Collin Badger (a.k.a. Midas), co-founder of Sub-Bombin. “That he can move between instrumental hip hop and a more ambient style should appeal to everybody. He’s a local musician from Lake George, too, which is always a draw for us.”

Sub-Bombin has released Cryptic on a limited edition USB card, which includes two bonus tracks. It’s an appropriate vehicle for this sequence of airy, futuristic songs. Cryptic is music for a planetarium, a passage up the Guggenheim building, or a walk along a dramatic shoreline. The quasi-video-game synths pan in and out as though coming and going from far-flung distances. The album is not something that forcibly hits you, so much as an open space that you can enter.

However, the truly original elements of the album lie in the hip-hop beats and rap samples. Rather than take a purely downtempo, contemplative approach, as most so-called “space music” tends to do, Cryptic has moments of danceablility. Call it hip-hop in slow motion. The tempo never reaches into the extremes, but it is, nevertheless, rather irresistible.

As the title of the album indicates, in addition to songs like “The Unknown Deep,” mystery is at the heart of Cryptic. “Some of the songs have a certain meaning to me,” Mitchell says, “but I wanted to do the album so that people could fill in the blanks for themselves.”

Tags: Arts & Leisure, Cryptic Cosmic, Derek Mitchell, Glens Falls, Mitochi, Sub-Bombin Records