Jonas and Betsy have been a part of my life - and the life of my extended family - since they moved to the Berkshires when I was a kid. Jonas and my father Peter were great friends and engaged in some epic cross-country aerial adventures over the years. I worked for Jonas - and with him - on myriad projects over the years - we were in touch just a few days ago about making some updates to his website, which I’ve managed since the web began back in the early 2000s.

If you listened carefully to a panel discussion at the Guggenheim Museum a few weeks before the opera by Mason Bates, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, opened, you could hear the problems staging this work was going to face at the Metropolitan Opera.

A couple of days ago my friend Jonas Dovydenas was killed in a collision while visiting his native Lithuania. He was a renowned photographer and philanthropist. For a number of years he was on the board of The Mount with two as chairman. In 2010 he flew in for lunch. We met at the North Adams airport. But he forgot the book, a work in progress, that he wanted to show me. It was back in Pittsfield. We flew back, seven minutes each way, for a truly memorable experience.

Berkshire artists and patrons Jonas and Betsy Dovydenas visited his native Lithuania a couple of times each year. He was on hand to present an annual prize for Best Lithuanian Novel which he funded. On September 23 they were involved in an accident. He was killed and she was injured. We interacted with them recently during a performance at Shakespeare & Company. As a settlement with the cult Bible Speaks, for a time, they owned the campus of the former Lenox School for Boys which is now the campus of Shakespeare & Company. In 2014 I interviewed him about his photography exhibition at the Lenox Library.

New South Florida theater company Bridge Across the Pond has teamed up with Barclay Performing Arts, and The Find Your Voice Foundation to stage Arthur Miller's "The Price." The production will take place in an intimate venue in Boca Raton, Fla.

Dating to just a few years after his return from Paris, The Diver is perhaps something of a transitional work for Arthur Polonsky, presenting a stark and puzzling juxtaposition of figural elements. At the most direct and literal level, the painting simply depicts the titular diver leaping off a dock, with a distant bridge standing before far-off factories.The work is on view at Childs Gallery, 168 Newbury Street, Boston.

Theatre Lab, Florida Atlantic University's professional resident theater company, presents the world premiere production of "Heebie Jeebies: Tales from the Midnight Campfire."

The carte orange was a subway pass with your picture on it. You renewed it once a month, and it allowed you to travel wherever and as often as you wanted on the metro and buses of Paris. The pass was second class, unless you splurged. In those days the metro had first class carriages too.

Joseph de Rocher faces execution for the grisly murders of young lovers. Though unrepentant, he requests and receives spiritual counseling from Sister Helen Prejean. The opera based on the true story scintillates on all dimensions.

Jacob’s Pillow  announces the presentation of its first-ever fully-produced fall program on campus featuring a special weekend run of Caleb Teicher & Nic Gareiss, an evening-length duo concert performed by the acclaimed dancers and creative partners. 

He cited Edwin Dickinson as his mentor, admiring Dickinson’s painterly restraint, his sensitivity, and the way he taught teaching through seeing and doing. For his whole life, he invoked Dickinson as his most important influence. He used to say that he started painting simply because he was interested in the world, and it seemed to him that painting could be a way that he could learn about it.

In her review of Forum Gallery’s 1968 exhibition, Rosalind Browne wrote for ArtNews, “Gregory Gillespie, a formidable young virtuoso who has lived in Rome on grants for the past four years, loads twentieth-century pornography, trompe l’oeil and discreet plaster montage into a highly enameled, explosive sixteenth-century Flemish package. The setting is Roman, the aura is Bosch, the concept is literary.”

Poets of Patchin Place features the première of settings of Barnes’ poetry by William Kentner Anderson. Also on the program: Victoria Bond: “Leopold Bloom’s Homecoming” from Ulysses by James Joyce. Nehemiah Luckett: “Oceans Always Lead to Some Great Good Place,” inspired by James Baldwin’s Another Country and commissioned by The Village Trip for Baldwin’s centennial,

Celebrated for creating diverse, timely and relevant opera, White Snake Projects (WSP) returns to Boston’s Strand Theatre, September 26-28, 2025, for the world premiere of White Raven, Black Dove, in a season dedicated to addressing the climate crisis through art. Composed by Jacinth Greywoode and Andrew Lynch, and written by librettist Cerise Lim Jacob, White Raven, Blake Dove is an original work of science fiction fantasy exploring two issues consuming America today – race and climate change.

A small-scale grand opera, Cosi revolves around a bet that two sisters will be unfaithful to their fiances within 24 hours. To tempt the women, the men are required to dress like Albanians, with each man pursuing the other's beloved. Cosi is full of beautiful, if unmemorable music, but the comic chops of the singers are what makes the opera most appealing.

Latiné Theater Lab has mounted its second ever production, a world premiere of a Science Fiction comedy titled Last of the Red Hot Robots. A social media influencer learns from a DNA test that she is among the 40 percent of individuals who can smell asparagus in their urine. An otherworldly being tells two zoo-goers that ants, not humans, are among Earth’s dominant species.

The Carbonell Awards, which represent the best of South Florida theater, has announced nominees for the past year. The ceremony will take place at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 17 at Florida Atlantic University's University Theatre in Boca Raton. For the first time in a while, the ceremony will take place in Palm Beach County. The Carbonells cover Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach Countiess.

“With this exhibition we are pleased to feature an exceptional artist of our time and powerful works that speak to Martin Puryear's creativity and exceptional craftsmanship, and the lifelong learning that has fueled his practice,” said Pierre Terjanian, the MFA’s Ann and Graham Gund Director. “The sculptures included in this survey extend a compelling invitation to engage with themes of culture, identity, and history. We are grateful to our colleagues at the Cleveland Museum of Art for their partnership in making this project possible.”

The playwright deftly envelopes the essence of Sholem Asch's "God of Vengeance" into a dramatic wrapper of the history detailing Asch's unending challenges from his community and from authorities concerning the play's alleged obscenity.

During the era of Colonialism African nations were ruled by Europeans. This occupation resulted in the looting of some 90% of traditional African art and culture. In recent years German museums have returned tons of Benin Bronzes to NIgeria. The Museum of Fine Arts was pressured to return 34 works loaned to them as eventual gifts by collector Robert Owen Lehman. In a complex negotiation he nullified the agreement but the museum has retained and displayed five works. Noah Smalls of Williams College Art Museum helped to organize “Toward an Inclusive Framework: (Re)Building Black Art Histories in Academe, the Art Market, and Beyond,” for the 2025 College Art Association Conference. With Robert Henriquez we met for lunch to discuss these issues.

Incoming Ocean, a site-specific video installation by Georgie Friedman, splashes across the interior architecture of the Cultural Center. The waves, filmed at nearby Halibut Point State Park, break over walls and doors, advancing toward one’s feet while also washing across a school of 50 life-sized Ghost Cod, hand-carved by Jessica Straus.

ZAZ is an immersive sensory performance that shifts traditional viewing practices beyond just sight and sound. The performers embody the oral histories and recorded experiences of survivors of Hurricane Katrina. They perform in tap shoes, hard-soled shoes, gumboots, and barefoot, creating a rhythmic score that supports the narration woven into the performance.

Alicia cleaned fancy apartments in the sixteenth arrondissement in Paris. She looked worn out, her face was prematurely lined from years of exhausting work, but when she spoke Spanish, her face lit up. She was always in a good mood. One evening she told me she and her husband were planning a visit to Sevilla to see her relatives, but the real purpose of the trip, she confided, was to buy a plot for herself and her husband in the San Fernando Cemetery.

Josh returns home to Colorado in hopes of recovering from alcoholism and getting to know his grandparents better. A shared characteristic between them is memory loss, the difference being that the cause of Josh's is reversible, while that of the older generation is not.

Asked about the job opening. She said she was the manageress. She told me her name was Astrid. And yes, she strode. She strode everywhere. That was how she moved through her life. Now she came up to me and said: “Yes, we’re looking for a bartender. Come by the lamp here on the bar, open your mouth.”