At last month’s Champaign on the Park, the annual fundraiser for the Lark Street Business Improvement District, Michael Weidrich did something of a runway turn on the stage. First, he was presented with an award for his work as founder of First Fridays, the successful gallery night based primarily in the Center Square neighborhood.  Moments later he returned to the stage having just been re-introduced as the new executive...

Every month Harold Lohner flips through the new issue of Art Calendar, a magazine that provides copious listings of exhibitions and other opportunities for artists. He regularly finds calls for submissions to shows of female artists and occasionally of gay artists. “I’m gay and an artist, but I don’t want to be a practitioner of gay art. It’s like you don’t have to be very good,” says Lohner,...

“Striking frogs and getting fairies ready!” It’s the first rehearsal for act one, scene one of “Sleeping Beauty,” and Basil Twist is telling the frogs how high to hop (and when to “strike,” or leave the stage) and the winged fairies how to glide through the air with grace. A crew of 12 young puppeteers does its best to make the creatures respond. Twist and his company have come to...

“You’ve decided what you’re going to do, and it’s all you can think about. Everything else is a bother. Going to work is a bother. Going out to get something to eat is a bother.” Albany artist Kevin Bruce is describing his feelings when in the midst of creating. “You can spend a whole day painting and not eat and suddenly feel really faint and nauseous and dizzy and sick,” he says. “And you’ll...

It’s easy to drive right past the town without even noticing it. A smattering of old buildings on Route 29 northeast of Greenwich in Washington County, Battenville sits beside the Batten Kill and was briefly the home of Susan B. Anthony, who taught school there in 1826. In 1971, artists Robert Nunnelley and Gerald Coble bought an 18th-century house to serve as their country home and studio. Since then, the two men –...