BIKING through undulating countryside, walking in the footsteps of iconic artists, picnicking in the shadow of gothic cathedrals, sampling wine from the barrel with the vintner, learning to prepare risotto from a famed chef - in previous summers I have enjoyed these adventures visiting Provence, the Cotswolds, Tuscany and Bavaria. Last summer, I did all this and more within a little more than an hour’s drive from Princeton.

To showcase this magnificent region, the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation hosted a three-day “adult camp,” starting in the city and venturing out to Valley Forge and the Brandywine Valley. We stayed in charming inns with (more…)

The other day I went to visit my friend Janet Purcell in Hopewell. (Her painting, at left, is titled “Freeze Dried.”) Jan’s house could be in Vermont, surrounded as it is by woods. Her sunny spaces are just like her paintings, and her favorite room, where she served me lunch, is the screened-in porch with that view of the woods.

It was my first time visiting her studio, and her canvases of sensual flower close-ups, Cape Cod scenes, shore birds and woodsy landscapes fill the house — they are on all the walls and fill the neatly organized room she keeps her studio in.

In addition to painting and maintaining her beautiful garden, Jan writes a weekly column for The Trenton (more…)

Princeton University Art Museum has made a major commitment to modern and contemporary art by appointing Kelly Baum the first Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

Previously assistant curator of contemporary art at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, Ms. Baum arrived in Princeton in 2007 and worked with Curator of Photography Joel Smith on Body Memory, featuring 20th- and 21st-century works of art that focus on the body as subject, medium, or expressive device.

Visitors will experience the additional fruits of her labor in the fall when the major exhibition Nobody’s Property: Art, Land, Space, 2000-2010 opens. Nobody’s Property will (more…)

Everett came home to visit this past weekend with Gabby. Gabby is working toward a master’s degree in regional planning at Cornell, and is doing some interesting work in the Catskills this summer. Among the groups she’s working with is the Ashokan-Pepacton Watershed. Of course it immediately brings to mind the Jay Ungar tune “Ashokan Farewell,” (listen here) made famous in Ken Burns’ The Civil War. A few years ago, when I interviewed Ken Burns, he described Ungar as the “Jewish boy from the Bronx who wrote the Scottish-Irish lament about fiddling camp breaking up.” Ungar and his wife, Molly Mason, run the (more…)

Yesterday, I went to see Starburst, the blockbuster exhibit on color photography from the 1970s at the Princeton University Art Museum. (Stay tuned for my story on this.)  I am reading the catalog foreword by Aaron Betsky, director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (where the exhibit originated), where he says: “The photographers whose work appears in this exhibition looked neither at the studied poses of the beautiful nor at the anguished expressions of those caught in poverty, but at the bland, the everyday, the normal, that which was around them everywhere.”

And it made me think of Out of the Ordinary that just closed at the Zimmerli Museum in New Brunswick. That exhibit looked at the work of Larry Clark and Garry Winogrand, (more…)

Today, while cruising through Doylestown, Pa., I was reminded of a visit I made a few years ago to the Moravian Pottery and Tile Works.

Henry Chapman Mercer (1856-1930) was a Renaissance man. Harvard educated, he was a historian, archaeologist, lawyer, anthropologist, architect, collector, ceramist, businessman and major contributor to the Arts & Crafts movement.

Today he is probably best known for the three buildings he designed in his hometown of Doylestown - Font (more…)

A few weeks ago, when I ran into Chuck Katzenbach and his wife, Bru, at the Artists Gallery in Lambertville, they invited me to their Hopewell home to see their Boer goats. Mr. Katzenbach originally wanted the goats, bred in South Africa for meat production, to mow his lawn, but he has since built a barn for them with a solar roof, and he will be learning Halal butchering to help serve the Islamic community, who would otherwise be unable to get locally source goat meat.

Mr. Katzenbach, an artist who often paints on glass, has created his own small village on the Hopewell property he grew up on. The original stone house that had been his father’s is now occupied by Mr. Katzenbach’s son, a public defender, and his family. The timber house Mr. and Ms. Katzenbach live in was originally located in Berks County, Pennsylvania. In (more…)

Artist Robert Hummel specializes in cartoon-y paintings of familiar scenes in our region — Princeton, Cranbury, Kingston and Hightstown. His “War of the Worlds” painting (left) hangs in Grover’s Mill Coffee Shop in West Windsor, and would be an ideal submission to the West Windsor Arts Council’s opening exhibit, Community Collage: West Windsor Then & Now. (see prospectus, below) West Windsor has a rich history, not only because War of the Worlds took place in Grovers Mill. When the Battle of Princeton was fought, the battlefield — now Princeton — was  West Windsor.

It was once a vibrant farming community. Ethan Hawke and Bryan Singer grew up here, and John Nash (more…)

I last wrote about Diane Savona nearly two years ago (see post), but she’s back, this time with work in From the Archives at the Center for Emerging Visual Artists in Philadelphia. The Passaic-based artist embeds domestic objects between layers of cloth to form fossil-like impressions, which can be read as hieroglyphic symbols. Combined with apron images, Ms. Savona’s stitched markings suggest cultural maps.

The artist uses samples of “domestic archaeology” she finds at flea markets and garage sales -  pot holders, knitting samples, sewing tools, pieces of crochet work, kitchen tools and well-worn fabric. She creates garments by piecing these together. They are not garments meant to be worn, but rather tell the story of the person, or culture, from which the samples came.

She has created a series of quilts from her mother’s old clothing, patterns, fabric, tape measures, and photo-graphs. Another series chronicles her mother’s illness and hospitalization before (more…)

Princeton-based architects Farewell Mills Gatsch have nearly finished restoration of the famed Louis Kahn Trenton Bath House, first opened in 1955. And, yes, it will continue to serve as a bath house. The Garden State Historic Preservation Turst Fund and Mercer County Open Space have contributed funding toward  this architectural gem. In anticipation of a July re-opening, I remembered a tour I took several years ago, when its continuity was in question. Here’s what I wrote five years ago:

When thinking of Louis Kahn - one of the most important architects of the 20th century - we often picture (more…)