The New York Men Who Made The City Modern

The Haystack Book Festival, a program from the Norfolk Foundation in Norfolk, Conn., will inaugurate its fifth year with a series of events around the theme “New York Stories.” Punctuating the summer months from June 4 to Aug. 5, the festival’s four readings, performances, and conversations will tell the story of how modernism infiltrated and cross-pollinated dance, poetry, music, photography, and painting in New York between the mid-1940s and the mid-’60s.

The line-up will include discussions of the work of photographer George Platt Lynes, who worked with Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine, co-founders of the New York City Ballet, a reading of the epic autobiographical poem “I Remember” by Joe Brainard, and a discussion of the influence of music on the work of poet John Ashberry, followed by a performance by Melvin Chen, director of the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival.

While the more established September Haystack Book Festival is known as a more traditional literary conference, in which a committee pursues books and writers for a weekend of literary edification, the festival’s co-directors, Steve Melville and Michael Selleck, conceived of the summer festival as a way of integrating Norfolk’s historic ethos as a home to the arts into its biannual celebration of literature.

This festival’s four events will be held in conjunction with the celebrated local arts institutions based at the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Estate in Norfolk — in June, the Yale Summer School of Art; in July, the Yale Summer School of Music and the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival; in August, the Yale Poetry Center — to explore a range of different art forms through the lens of contemporary literature.

The festival will begin on Sunday, June 4 at The Art Barn on the Stoeckel Estate, with a participatory reading of “I Remember,” Brainard’s book-length autobiographical poem. Brainard, who died of AIDS complications in 1994, is better known for his work as a visual artist of the New York School, working primarily in painting and drawing, collage, and assemblage — a style that is echoed in “I Remember,” a series of memory fragments brought into harmony by the titular refrain.

On Friday, June 23, also at The Art Barn, will be a conversation between artist and writer Jarrett Earnest, the author of “The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930-1955,” and Allen Ellenzweig, author of “George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye,” the first complete biography of George Platt Lynes. Inspired in part by this year’s theme at the Yale Summer School of Art, “Freedom of Form,” Earnest and Ellenzweig will look beyond Platt Lynes’s more established role as a portraitist and fashion photographer to explore his work as the principal photographer of Balanchine’s dancers as well as his pioneering engagement with the male nude, to locate the his place in the development of American Modernism.

Timed with the opening events of the Norfolk Music Festival, “John Ashberry’s Playlist” Sunday, July 9, at The Norfolk Library, will explore Ashberry’s poetry and the soundscape in which he wrote it. “I have always felt that my ideas came out of music,” Ashberry has said. “I listen to music all the time, especially when I am writing.” A discussion between Karin Roffman, author of “The Songs We Know Best: John Ashberry’s Early Life,” and Melvin Chen, Deputy Dean at the Yale School of Music and director of the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival (Chen also happens to be Roffman’s husband), will be followed by a performance, by Chen, of some of the music that inspired Ashberry’s work.

The festival will close on Saturday, Aug. 5, with “Modernism and Tradition: The Foundations of American Art and Culture,” a conversation between Jennifer Homans, author of the Pulitzer-finalist “Mr. B,” a biography of George Balanchine, and Hugh Eakin, author of “Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America.”

Granary Books

Joe Brainard, 1975 by Frederick Fulmer Courtesy the artist / Asher Grey Gallery / fredart.net

Oxford University Press

Granary Books

Latest News

Joseph Robert Meehan

SALISBURY — Joseph Robert Meehan the 2nd,photographer, college professor and nearly 50 year resident of Salisbury, passed away peacefully at Noble Horizon on June 17, 2025. He was 83.

He was the son of Joseph Meehan the 1st and his mother, Anna Burawa of Levittown, New York, and sister Joanne, of Montgomery, New York.

Keep ReadingShow less
Florence Olive Zutter Murphy

STANFORDVILLE, New York — It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of Florence Olive Zutter Murphy, who went home to be with the Lord on June 16, 2025, at the age of 99.

She was born in Sharon, Connecticut on Nov. 20, 1925, and was a long time resident of the Dutchess County area.

Keep ReadingShow less
Chore Service hosts annual garden party fundraiser

Chore Service hosted 250 supporters at it’s annual Garden Party fundraiser.

Bob Ellwood

On Saturday, June 21, Mort Klaus, longtime Sharon resident, hosted 250 enthusiastic supporters of Northwest Corner’s beloved nonprofit, Chore Service at his stunning 175-acre property. Chore Service provides essential non-medical support to help older adults and those with disabilities maintain their independence and quality of life in their own homes.

Jane MacLaren, Executive Director, and Dolores Perotti, Board President, personally welcomed arriving attendees. The well-stocked bar and enticing hors d’oeuvres table were popular destinations as the crowd waited for the afternoon’s presentations.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bach and beyond
The Berkshire Bach Society (BBS) of Stockbridge will present a concert by cellist Dane Johansen on June 28 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.
Provided

The mission statement of the Berkshire Bach Society (BBS) reads: “Our mission is to preserve the cultural legacy of Baroque music for current and future audiences — local, national, and international — by presenting the music of J.S. Bach, his Baroque predecessors, contemporaries, and followers performed by world-class musicians.”

Its mission will once again be fulfilled by presenting a concert featuring Dane Johansen on June 28 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church at 29 Main Street, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Keep ReadingShow less