When cellist, composer and filmmaker Christopher Hoffman moved into the former home of Rex Brasher in Amenia in August 2023, he didn’t arrive with a plan to make an album about the painter and ornithologist who once lived there. But once he began to learn about the home’s former inhabitant — about his attention to land, to birds, to work done slowly and with devotion — he started to compose. “Rex,” Hoffman’s solo cello album (releases Jan. 16, 2026) is not a portrait of Brasher so much as an echo of a person, a place and a way of seeing the world.
Brasher (pronounced “brazier”) was born in Brooklyn in 1869, the son of a stockbroker whose passion for birds left a lifelong mark. After his father’s death, Brasher vowed to paint every bird in North America, and to do it from life. He eventually created more than 1,200 works, depicting birds with a precision and intimacy that bordered on obsession. Working largely outside the art world, Brasher lived on 116 wooded acres he called Chickadee Valley, where he painted, wrote and published his monumental 12-volume “Birds and Trees of North America.”
Rex Brasher at his home in Chickadee Valley.Provided
Founded in 2008 to preserve Brasher’s legacy and promote bird and habitat conservation through art, the Rex Brasher Association became an early point of connection for Hoffman, who composed and performed an original piece at the 2023 Rex Brasher Symposium just months after moving into Brasher’s former home. After many years in Brooklyn, Hoffman and his family had been looking for a change when they were shown the 116-acre property by association board member and architect Matthew Schnepf, who shared the history of the land and of Brasher himself.
“We’re the first renters outside of Rex’s family,” Hoffman said, explaining that the house is rented as part of an agreement to maintain the estate. Upon moving in, Hoffman dug deeper, purchasing the two-volume set of “Birds and Trees of North America” and immersing himself in Brasher’s world. Around the same time, and at the encouragement of composer, saxophonist and flutist Henry Threadgill, Hoffman debuted his first solo project at Tomeka Reid’s Chicago Jazz String Summit, planting the seed for the 13-track album that he then composed, recorded, mixed and mastered in Brasher’s home. The RBA (Rex Brasher Association) was equally supportive of the finished work, granting Hoffman permission to use Brasher’s artwork for the album, including the swallow-tailed kite painting that appears on the vinyl packaging. “You open up the record and the whole painting is right there,” said Hoffman.
‘Swallow Tail Kite’ by Rex BrasherProvided
Though birds are central to the record’s spirit, Hoffman deliberately avoided literal birdsongs. Instead, the cello is layered into dense soundscapes that suggest rather than illustrate. “There are tracks with tons of layered stuff where I guess you could hear bird sounds if you wanted to,” he said. Brasher’s refusal to accept approximation — destroying paintings when feathers didn’t look right — mirrored Hoffman’s own instincts as a musician. Tracks were built, discarded, rebuilt. Nothing stayed unless it felt true.
For Hoffman, “Rex” became a kind of reckoning. Though Hoffman has begun noticing birds with new intensity, using the Merlin bird app to identify some 30 species on the grounds, he says Brasher’s acuity still feels out of reach. “Even with binoculars, I still can’t see the details he was seeing.”
The album will be released Jan. 16 on Out of Your Head Records. Composed for acoustic and electric cello, the record reflects the solitude and intensity that shaped both Brasher’s vision and Hoffman’s process. “This guy was working so hard,” said Hoffman of Brasher. “And it was like, ‘Alright, Chris, get it together. Make the solo record you’re afraid to make.’”
To listen and purchase the album, go to: https://christopherhoffman.bandcamp.com/album/rex
KK Kozik in her studio
It is a particularly fitting philosophy for an artist whose paintings often begin with the world around her but rarely end there. There might be something recognizable — a stone wall, an apple tree, a crow — but then there is something less certain. Something that appears to be one thing becomes another upon inspection. Memory gets involved. So does imagination. So does time.
Since moving from New York City to Sharon, Connecticut in 2006, the landscape around her has become increasingly important to that process.
“I just saw things differently,” Kozik said.
The change was not immediate. She remembers an earlier version of herself driving through Vermont without paying much attention to what was happening beyond the windshield.
“I didn’t have the means to see what was happening around me,” she said. “I just sort of la, la, la, la, la, driving to Vermont.”
But, she said, she started to pay attention differently.
“I became more sensitized as time went on,” she said.
Asked whether that change came with age, she said, “Age and so-called wisdom.”
There’s a sense of loss in her landscapes, but a particular kind of loss that also has a twinge of redemption. Specifically, what happens to a landscape when people leave it?
“When the people go away, the wildlife comes back,” Kozik said.
KK Kozik in her studio with her painting “Golden Delicious.”Natalia Zukerman
Kozik’s work has never settled into a single recognizable formula. She has painted landscapes, figures and still lifes, moved toward abstraction and returned to representation. Her subjects change, but the underlying impulse remains: to take what is in front of her and discover what else there might be.
Kozik describes herself as someone who is always trying to figure things out. Her paintings often have the feeling of a thought in progress rather than a conclusion. They have been called “single-line novellas,” a description that makes sense: They can contain the suggestion of an entire story without telling you exactly what happened.
The animals are part of that storytelling.
They arrived partly because of what was disappearing.
“They were like the new redemption in a way,” she said.
There is something almost funny about the way Kozik talks about this — not because the loss itself is funny, but because she refuses to turn it into a grand pronouncement. She observes something, considers it, and lets it complicate the work.
That same sensibility comes through when she talks about her own development as an artist. Her paintings make room for interpretation. They don’t always tell the viewer what an animal symbolizes, or why a landscape has been altered, or where a particular image came from. Instead, they leave enough evidence to make you curious and enough room for your own stories.
The effect is not accidental. Kozik has spent years thinking about how images work, both as paintings and as containers for ideas.
Her work is currently included in “The Naturalist,” a group exhibition on view through Sept. 13 at Kenise Barnes Fine Art in Kent, alongside Richard Klein, Sally Maca, Rick Shaefer and Tricia Wright. The exhibition brings together artists whose work engages with the natural world, including its forms, histories and mysteries.
Kozik is an especially apt fit for the exhibition. She is described by the gallery as a landscape painter, figurative painter and interiors/still-life painter whose work frequently moves toward painterly abstraction. Her practice, the gallery notes, is “fluid and continuous” — always searching for new pictorial problems to solve.
That search has also extended beyond her own studio.
For several years, Kozik ran ICEHOUSE Project Space, an 18th-century icehouse on Sharon’s town green that she transformed into an unusual venue for contemporary art. It opened in 2018 with Dan Devine’s “Inside-Out NASCAR” and went on to host site-specific projects by artists including Mark Dion, Eric Aho, Janet Biggs, Richard Klein, Kristin Jones, Lisa Hoke and Ryan Frank. The projects addressed everything from the decline of winged insects and native and invasive plants to Sharon’s iron industry, its gardens and its history as an ice-producing community.
The space is now closed, but its premise still feels connected to Kozik’s painting practice. Each project responded in some way to the physical location, turning what might otherwise have been a little historic outbuilding into a setting for contemporary art.
Kozik’s own work does something similar with the landscape. She takes a place and lets it become more than a place.
Kozik’s paintings tell us that something happened before we arrived, and that something will happen after we leave.
And then there is the question of what to do with the space in between.
Maybe Kozik’s paintings are less about that space and more about an idea, as she put it, of “which questions to think about.”
Jazzmine Bone and A Stitch in Tyme power through the Gambler’s Choice run during the 2024 Lakeville Open.
The event, which has been held continuously for 69 years, is open to the public with free admission.
Individual competitions will run from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and visitors can stop by briefly or settle in for the day.
A food truck, bake sale and portable restrooms will be available on-site.
The show is the primary fundraiser for The Lakeville Pony Club, with proceeds supporting young riders who need financial assistance to participate in lessons. Members and their families work throughout the year to create the event for both competitors and spectators.
Members of the Lakeville Pony Club and Echo the pony arrive for the costume class during the Lakeville Open in 2024.Caitlin Von Graf
For those new to horse shows, the day offers a chance to learn more about the sport and understand what happens in the ring. In equitation competitions, judges evaluate the rider’s skill, from beginners learning walk and trot to more advanced riders navigating cantering and jumping courses.
Hunter competitions focus on the horse’s style and smoothness over fences, while jumper classes emphasize accuracy and speed as horses and riders race against the clock without knocking down rails.
The day also includes a crowd favorite: the costume class, where horses and riders dress up in creative ensembles for a chance at the top prize.
Programs will be available onsite to help spectators identify competitors and horses. A full list of competitions, entry information and details for those interested can be found at rigameadow.com
Whether an experienced equestrian or simply curious about the sport, the Lakeville Open Horse Show offers a chance to enjoy a Hudson Valley tradition that continues to bring the community together.
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