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Jazmine Bona and The Great Gatsby compete in the jumpers
Aly Morrissey
The show featured a mix of competitions in which horses and riders performed on level ground and over jumps, including hunter events judged on a horse’s movement, equitation events focused on the rider’s position and balance, and jumper events judged on the pair’s speed and accuracy.
Spectators also came out in support of the Lakeville Pony Club, which aims to inspire a love of riding while expanding access to a sport that can be expensive.
The Pony Club is a local branch of The United States Pony Clubs, a national organization centered on equine education for young riders. The Lakeville branch is one of the organization’s oldest continuously operating clubs. It currently has 11 members, ranging in age from 10 to 20.
“It teaches everything — veterinary work, farrier work, a little bit about everything — so you become a well-rounded horse person,” said organizer and director Linda Bushnell, who began riding at age three and is a Pony Club graduate herself.
With roots in Lakeville, the club was previously based on Route 41 before moving to the Millbrook area in 2018 after the original property was sold. Members participate in mounted activities while also learning horse management, including the day-to-day responsibilities involved in caring for horses and ponies.
Proceeds from Sunday’s horse show help support club activities, including rallies and clinics, but Bushnell said much of the fundraising goes toward maintaining Quincy, the beloved club horse available to young riders who do not have a horse of their own.
Having a horse specifically for club members is not something offered by every Pony Club, and the costs associated with Quincy — including boarding, veterinary care and farrier services — make him one of the Lakeville club’s largest expenses.
Members of the Lakeville Pony Club with their club horse, Quincy. Aly Morrissey
District Commissioner Sara Sartorini, the club’s volunteer leader and chief administrator of the Pony Club, estimated Sunday’s show would raise between $2,000 and $3,000, with proceeds also supporting club merchandise and activities throughout the year. The funds are raised through rider entry fees and sponsorships.
Years ago, Bushnell said, when the club operated out of Lakeville, many of the children interested in riding did not have a horse of their own.
“Some people thought it would be really good for the kids to be able to have their own horse,” she said. The club began offering designated riding days with Jerry, its club horse at the time, a tradition that continues today with Quincy. The arrangement gives members access to a horse without the expense of owning one.
“It’s like your own horse for a day,” Bushnell said.
Millerton resident Jaclyn Perusse purchased a gift certificate for riding lessons for her daughter, Lillian, for Christmas and said she became hooked. “She’s been riding since the day after Christmas,” said Perusse, who is also a life-long rider.
“Everyone at the club is very welcoming,” she said, adding that the short distance from Millerton is also a draw. Perusse said she and her husband were proud to see their daughter compete in her first competition Sunday.
Sartorini’s daughter, Eliza, joined the club in 2022 after her 4-H club closed. Sartorini was then recruited to serve as district commissioner.
“It’s like another part-time job,” she joked. “But it’s worth it because I know she’ll have her barn friends for life.”
Bushnell said she hopes to see the Lakeville Pony Club continue to grow.
“We need new members because the children all grow up and go to college,” she said.
Membership for 2027 costs $185 and includes access to Quincy, the club horse, monthly meetings and a weekly summer program, among other activities. Members can arrange designated days to ride him and may also compete with him in horse shows, giving children without horses of their own an opportunity to participate.
Former Pony Club member Mia Dodge returned to the show with Trigger, a young horse competing for the first time. The pair won each of their events, earning a championship ribbon.
Dodge, now 19, was 8 years old when she first competed in the Lakeville Open.
“I love getting to come back here and compete,” she said. “Pony Club taught me a lot that I now get to use when working with a young horse like Trigger. It’s a great environment to show him the ropes and support young riders."
Aly Morrissey
Mia Dodge and Trigger compete on the flat.
Gustavo Portillo goes for a header
Riley Klein
The game was split into two standard 40-minute halves with a 3-minute pause for "coach's time" in each half. The intermissions were reminiscent of the hydration breaks that soccer spectators became accustomed to during the recent 2026 FIFA World Cup.
HVRHS coach Adolfo Portillo tested out different lineups throughout the game, alternating between a 4-3-3 and 4-4-2 formation. In each third, the Mountaineers' game-tested veterans provided stability and anchored the team.
On defense, seniors Wyatt Bayer and Ryan Segalla locked down the middle lane. Torrington's attacks were stifled before ever becoming threats. Sophomore Ryan Houghtaling started the game in goal for HVRHS.
In the center, senior Gustavo Portillo acted as a vocal on-field coach. The box-to-box midfielder directed his teammates in real time and provided encouraging affirmation for younger players. Portillo scored the first goal of the scrimmage: an unassisted strike from the right side to start the second half.
Up front, senior striker Jackson McAvoy created offensive opportunities through agile cuts and quick bursts of speed. Midway through the second half, a sharp, threaded ball from McAvoy set Peyton Bushnell loose on a fast break that ended in the day’s second goal.
Last season, HVRHS ended as runners up in the Berkshire League tournament. The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference ranked the Mountaineers as the 28th best team in the state's Class S boys soccer division in 2026.
The first regular season game for HVRHS was scheduled to be played in Winsted on Tuesday, Sept. 8, against Northwestern Regional High School.
Peyton Bushnell takes a shotRiley Klein
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KK Kozik in her studio
Natalia Zukerman
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.”
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