BerkShares Heroes: W. E. B. Du Bois
Gifted scholar, historian, sociologist and founder of the civil rights movement, Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois is internationally renowned as one of the leading intellectuals of his time, and revered for his lifelong commitment to the freedom of all peoples. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington in 1868, “by a golden river in […]
BerkShares Artist: John Isaacs
Remarks at BerkShares Benefit Event, September 20, 2006 by John Isaacs of John Isaacs Design “First off, I think BerkShares did a marvelous job of choosing images. Each one is beautiful. The selection was sufficiently variegated to ensure a distinct look for each denomination, and yet had a consistency of tone and character that provided […]
BerkShare Heroes: Norman Rockwell
Norman Rockwell is one of the most popular American artists of the 20th century and a beloved local hero of the Berkshires. In all, he created over 4,000 studies and final works of art for stories, advertising campaigns, posters, calendars, and books, many of them during the last twenty-five years of his life spent at […]
BerkShares Heroes: Herman Melville
Novelist, essayist, poet and mariner Herman Melville is best known as the author of the great American novel, Moby-Dick (1851). Written at his Arrowhead farmhouse in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, it places Melville amongst a prestigious group of literary figures who emerged from the Berkshire area. Mount Greylock is even said to have been the inspiration of […]
BerkShares Heroes: Robyn Van En
Secluded on a winding country road In South Egremont, Massachusetts, Indian Line Farm has been making history as a model for small-scale, economically and environmentally sustainable agriculture for the past twenty years. The late Robyn Van En, former proprietor of Indian Line, co-founded the farm in 1985 as the very first community supported agriculture (CSA) […]
BerkShares Heroes: The Stockbridge Mohican
The Mohican Nation, an Algonquian tribe of some 20,000 people, was the dominant Native American group along the Hudson River before the arrival of Europeans early in the seventeenth century. The government of Massachusetts granted a six-mile-square township to the tribe in 1736, comprising today’s towns of Stockbridge and West Stockbridge. From that time they […]
BerkShares Artist: Michael McCurdy (1942-2016)
Michael McCurdy (1942-2016) was an award-winning artist, illustrator, author and publisher who worked from his red barn studio in the hills of Great Barrington for twenty-five years before retiring to Springfield, Massachusetts. Born in New York City in 1942 and raised in New Rochelle, New York and Marblehead, Massachusetts, he attended the school of the […]
BerkShares Artist: Warner Friedman
Born in 1935 and raised in New York City, Warner Friedman was the recipient of several awards for his artwork as a child, but started out his adult life as an engineer. After completing a Bachelor’s degree in engineering at Clarkson College in New York, he decided to enroll in art classes at night school […]
BerkShares Artist: Janet Rickus
Janet Rickus was born in 1949 and raised in Chicopee, Massachusetts, but moved as a young girl to West Springfield, where her parents operated a grocery store. She started painting landscapes and portraits after graduating with a B.S. from Central Connecticut State University, and first began painting still lifes in 1983. In 2006, Ms. Rickus […]
BerkShares Artist: Morgan Bulkeley, Jr.
Morgan Bulkeley, Jr. was born in the Berkshires in 1944. He grew up on a rural farm here, in Mount Washington, surrounded by the many species of wild animals adopted by his family. Today, these childhood friends, along with the floundering souls of the modern human race, animate the paintings, sculptures, masks, and carved reliefs […]