SALISBURY – Over the past few weeks, Camp Isola Bella on East Twin Lake was alive with the sounds of saws buzzing, hammers pounding and the drone of massive cement trucks. However, for the 16 volunteers working on the island from sunrise to sunset, there was only silence.
The historic camp property, owned by the American School for the Deaf since 1963, has undergone a $700,000 expansion and renovation, and the alumni who toiled from sunrise to sunset on the last leg of the construction project were all former campers, including ASD’s executive director, Jeffrey Bravin.
Bravin, who is in his ninth year as the school’s administrator, and 20 years with ASD, used sign language as his interpreter, Marie Langill, spoke. He explained that the long-overdue expansion will allow the West Hartford-based school to welcome an additional 75 campers to Isola Bella every summer, a 63% increase.
“We had talked about it for years, and now is the time,” he said during a late afternoon visit on May 26 during which he took a break from painting the exterior of a newly built cabin to reflect on the camp’s increased demand and long waitlist, its link to the community and the Twin Lakes Association, and the lush island’s long and storied history.
The goal of the alumni, he said, was to have the property ready for 125 youngsters, ages 8 through 17, who will converge on the island in three groups beginning June 25, the opening day of the five-week camp season.
The 125 campers will not be all converging on the island on opening day. Three groups totaling 125, are expected during the 2022 camp season.
“They work sunrise to sunset,” noted Bravin, pointing to his work crew as the skies darkened overhead and a brisk breeze blew off the lake. “They are up at 6:30 a.m., eat breakfast, are out the door by 7, and I never know when they are going to finish. They are just so committed.”
The executive director also ditched his shirt and tie for the occasion. “As you can see, I’ve been painting,” he said a broad smile and pointing to his paint-spattered jeans and sweatshirt. “Hopefully we will be done by next week. Fingers crossed on that.”
The expansion/renovation includes construction of two handicap-accessible cabins, the renovation of two existing bathrooms to include handicap shower and toilet facilities and ramp access, renovation of the old bunk houses, enclosure of a covered patio to increase dining space and replacement of the camp’s pavilion roof.
The project also allowed for a multi-use sports court —the concrete was poured the prior day—and a major electrical and Wi-Fi upgrade.
One of only six camps of its kind in the U.S.
ASD is the only school for the deaf in Connecticut and is the oldest school of its kind in the United States. ASD operates one of only six summer camps in the nation that serves deaf and hard-of-hearing children, children of deaf adults or siblings and, as of two years ago, those on the autism spectrum
Campers come from all over the U.S and on average, nearly 70% of them return for more than one season. Reunions and other events draw campers back year after year, according to ASD.
In addition to the 29-acre island, the school also owns a large field on the mainland, which brings the school’s total land ownership to 52 acres, Bravin said. “We call it Primos. That was the name of the caretaker for the Alvord family” who were among the island’s succession of owners.
Twin Lakes Association came to the rescue
Bravin said the school has been working collaboratively with the Twin Lakes Association (TLA) for nearly a decade. “They have been so supportive and it’s such a wonderful community. They worked with the school in 2013 to renovate the stone tower,” a project with a price tag of $200,000. “They paid half and we paid half,” he said.
“So when this project started, I spoke with them again and asked if they would help support it, and they came up with a very quick ‘yes,’” said Bravin, adding that the Twin Lakes Association “raised a lot of money for us.”
Extra donations also allowed for the construction of a large outdoor sports court featuring two basketball courts and volleyball and pickleball courts, he explained, and state funding covered the cost of several handicap-access ramps.
Bravin credited the association’s president, Grant Bogle, for his “unbelievable support. He’s committed not only to the lake community, but also to Camp Isola Bella.”
Bogle, he explained, serves as a trustee on the ASD Board of Directors, and “and I serve on the Twin Lakes board.”
Bogle, who owns lakefront property on East Twin Lake, said the camp is “truly a treasure” not only from a nature and historical perspective, but also in way it has enriched the lives of countless young adults over the past half-century.
“We raised funds locally which were combined with funds raised from alumni and other sources in Hartford and a state grant,” said the TLA president.
A typical day at the camp
Camp Isola Bella offers the same physical activities as any other summer camp. The difference is that on this appropriately named “beautiful island,” youngsters get to be with their peers. The camp, said Bravin, also plays an important role in a child’s social development, all executed with the needs of deaf students in mind.
“Obviously we want the campers to have fun, but at the same time, most deaf and hard-of-hearing children, about 90 percent, come families that can hear, so communication is a challenge for these children.” He also noted that many hail from urban areas. “We want them to continue to learn and experience nature.”
Activities such as experiential learning, teamwork, communication and cooperation, and literacy initiatives are integrated into daily programming. Classes in boating, archery, arts and crafts and camp studies define a typical day at the camp. In the afternoons, campers also spend time focusing on team building, self-esteem, cooperative games and problem-solving skills.
They also enjoy nature activities, swimming, hiking, snorkeling, kayaking, canoeing, tubing and sailing as well as cooperative and non-competitive games.
One of first campers
returned to help
Using sign language, Wesley Miller explained that he is a 1970 graduate of ASD and was among the first campers to set foot on Isola Bella when it opened in 1964. He returned in 1965. “I look back at the time I spent here, and I want the kids of today to experience what I did,” said Miller, noting the reason he volunteered.
Bravin explained that Miller is a former construction company owner. “So, when I started this project, I felt he would be a great leader. I call him our foreman. He heads our team here.”
Nearby, Alexandra MaGee, who attended camp in 1971 and 1972 and is the former president of the ASD Alumni Association, explained that Isola Bella is more than a camp experience, it part of her being. “ASD and Isola Bella live in my heart,” she signed.
Mark Drake of Drake & Sons in Granby is the general contractor for the Isola Bella renovation project.
“I was surprised when I was told I was getting 16 volunteers. I had no idea what I was getting into,” he said. “Then all of a sudden I got an established work crew. They are so dedicated to the school and the camp. They are a Godsend.”
Photo by Debra A. Aleksinas
Photo by Debra A. Aleksinas
Photo by Debra A. Aleksinas
Photo by Debra A. Aleksinas
Photo by Debra A. Aleksinas
Dan Baker, left, and Daniel Latzman at Barrington Hall in Great Barrington.
The partnership behind Barrington Hall began long before the building itself. Both Baker and Latzman grew up on Long Island, spent more than a decade in New York City, and eventually found their way to the Berkshires, drawn by the desire for something different. What they didn’t realize at first was just how closely their lives had already mirrored one another.
They were born in the same hospital, a year apart. Their families had distant connections. They even played on the same soccer team — never meeting, but moving through the same spaces. It wasn’t until they became neighbors in Egremont about five years ago that those parallels came into focus.
“In hindsight, it feels inevitable,” Latzman said. “But it was actually extremely random that we ended up here.”
From the beginning, Barrington Hall was meant to be a place people return to, not for any one event, but for the experience of being there. On any given week, the space might host a jazz performance, a dance party, a songwriter circle or a children’s event. Some nights bring in touring acts. Others highlight local creatives. The variety is intentional and so is the atmosphere.
“It’s about people,” Baker said. “It’s about being present.”
Inside Barrington Hall.Provided
Baker and Latzman are keenly aware of the world outside with its constant barrage of information, political conflicts, a culture that pulls people deeper into their screens. Barrington Hall offers a way out of that noise.
“A little bit of a bubble,” Latzman said. “A place to step away from everything else.”
During a recent event, they noticed something telling: a full room of people dancing, talking, engaged — and almost no one on their phone.
“That’s when you know something is working,” Baker said.
Taking over a beloved local space comes with responsibility, one Baker and Latzman have met by honoring the building’s traditions while also expanding them.
“We didn’t feel obligated,” Latzman said. “We felt honored.”
Part of what makes the space distinct is its versatility. Large enough to host more than 250 people, yet intimate enough to feel personal, it fills a gap in the local landscape, serving a wide range of people and bringing different groups together in the same space.
“We want people to feel like, if something’s happening here, it’s worth checking out,” Latzman said.
They are carefully balancing community access with the realities of running a business, with an eye toward the long term.
“We want this to be here in 20 years,” Latzman said.
Inside Barrington Hall.Provided
That vision extends beyond the building itself — future collaborations, expanded programming, a growing role in shaping the cultural life of the Berkshires. But at its core, the mission remains simple: to create a place where people can gather, a place that feels alive.
And perhaps most importantly, to create a place where, if only for a few hours, people can step away from the noise of the world and enjoy being together.
When asked who they’re most excited to host next, their answer was immediate: The Mammals on April 10 and Lee Ross, a one-man party band from Massachusetts, scheduled to perform on May 1.
For more information and tickets, visit
barringtonhallgb.com
Gail Rothschild with her painting “Dead Sea Linen III (73 x 58 inches, 2024, acrylic on canvas.
Her work begins, often, with something small: a scrap of linen from the Judean desert, dating “to a time before the notion of ‘Israel’ or ‘Palestine;’” a fragment so diminished it barely registers as an object; or a rare indigo-dyed child’s head cloth from Tutankhamen’s tomb.
“I call them portraits of ancient linen,” she said.
Rothschild grew up in Greenwich and studied drawing and painting at Yale University. “That was kind of my first love,” she said. But she quickly veered toward something more collective, working with Peter Schumann at the Bread and Puppet Theater, building papier-mâché puppets and participating in a kind of performance-based activism that blurred art and politics.
“After Yale, I got out of school and thought‘Wait a second. I don’t want to paint anymore. I need to work with people in communities and make things.’”
She moved to Brooklyn and began working in public schools, developing projects rooted in collaboration and local history. The projects were ambitious, research-driven, and often confrontational. At the University of Massachusetts, she recalled asking students: “Did you know that Amherst was named for Jeffrey Amherst, who was responsible for giving blankets infected with smallpox to Native Americans? Why don’t we look into that?’”
There were sculptures, letters to watchdog groups, installations. She worked on four such projects a year, she said, until the pace became unsustainable. “At some point I just said, ‘I’m exhausted. I’m going back to the studio.’”
What brought her back was a book, “Prehistoric Textiles ” by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. Inside, she encountered an image of a 7,000-year-old textile, unraveling.
“It said to me, ‘this could be a great big abstract painting’,” she said. “What does it mean that this textile, this thing that used to be a Cartesian grid and over time has gone back to nature?”
That question became a kind of axis for her work. “There is this cusp between nature and culture,” she said. Early on, she avoided textiles with imagery, drawn instead to the raw language of fiber itself. But eventually, even that boundary softened. A project with the Godwin-Ternbach Museum introduced her to Egyptian textiles — Christian, pagan, Greek, Roman influences colliding in woven form.
Gail Rothschild’s “Esquina Decorada” (52 x 52 inches, 2022, acrylic on canvas)Gail Rothschild
What followed was a deepening relationship with museums and, crucially, with conservators. Institutions like The Metropolitan Museum of Art and collections in Berlin and Paris began sending her images of textile fragments, sometimes pieces she has still never seen in person.
“It’s almost easier for me to transform it when I haven’t seen it,” she said.
Her process is both precise and intuitive. She grids the canvas and the source image, drawing freehand to “honor what the object is.” For a time, she works closely from the photograph. Then something shifts. “At some point I’ll say, ‘It’s a painting. It’s got to talk to itself,’ and then I stop looking at the photograph.”
What emerges is layered, luminous and muscular. “Sometimes people say, ‘Do you miss making sculpture?’ and I say, ‘I never stopped.’”
You feel that in the surfaces: the tension of threads pulling apart, the sense that something is both forming and dissolving at once. Even the backgrounds — often ambiguous, atmospheric — are not neutral. “It’s really more about feeling the space around the object,” she said, especially as she considers how ancient fragments are mounted on modern fabrics. “I get to invent an entirely other language.”
Some of her most arresting work is on the monumental textiles of The Met Cloisters, where medieval tapestries, some towering more than a dozen feet, are slowly, painstakingly conserved. It’s in the conservation labs that Rothschild has observed the physical reality of these works: their own weight pulling them apart, threads breaking under centuries of strain. Conservators insert new threads to stabilize them and Rothschild documents this process. “There’s a kind of poignancy to their work,” Rothschild said, “because as hard as we work to conserve the objects of our past, in the greater cosmic scheme of time, it’s only temporary. There’s something beautiful about that.”
Time operates on multiple levels in Rothschild’s work. There is the time of the object —thousands of years, in some cases — and the time of the painting, which unfolds over months. “Once I start working on something, I can’t stop,” she said. “But then it’ll rest for a while and I may change it, add layers.”
And then there is the time of attention itself, the way looking can tip into obsession, into pattern-seeking that doesn’t quite turn off. Rothschild is aware of that edge.
“I have to make myself stop or I just see patterns everywhere and I can’t stop, really,” she laughed. “That’s why I’ve built in other things I need to do in my life like take the dogs for a hike or, you know, volunteer at the Sharon Land Trust… otherwise I go a little nuts. And it wouldn’t be good painting either.”
A painting session, for her, has its own its own arc. “There’s kind of a trajectory for every work session. I might be repeating something and suddenly it looks linear. The language I started painting with may change by the end and I think, ‘Oh God, I’m gonna have to go back and repaint that.’”
But then, she said, there is a pause.
“I kind of step back and say, ‘No, this painting can hold both. That’s part of its history. There’s the history of the object but then there’s the history of the painting.’”
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