John Gill is surveying his fields after last night’s heavy rain, and it doesn’t look good; the stream that borders his property was clear yesterday, but this morning it’s brown from the topsoil that’s washed off his land. His fields are riddled with muddy puddles that have wiped out rows of corn seedlings, and Gill worries about the strawberries planted behind the family farm stand. “If they sit more than 24 hours in water, they’ll die,” he said.
Chris Drabick spreads pine needles. Keith Desmarais remembers hundreds of first names. Veto Napolitano builds cedar railings. Elois Sanford did the laundry using a washing machine powered by an old car engine.
They’re secretive, slimy, kind of cute, and up to nine inches long. Some are polka dotted. You’ve probably never seen them, since they spend 11 and a half months of the year hidden away—under leaf mold or a log and in the winter months, inside the burrow of a shrew or mole.
Joan Snyder is at work in her Woodstock studio, dabbing papier mache onto a large canvas. In the large white room, which is illuminated by skylights and adjoins the house she shares with her partner, Margaret Cammer, the painting sings, its vivid, white rosettes like soprano notes emerging from a basso continuum of sweet, dripping purple soaked into the canvas, with a scrawl of red providing a screeching counterpoint. Snyder, in a loose sleeveless gray T-shirt, stands, looks, and applies the material a few times before graciously taking a break to speak to her afternoon visitor.
Martin Puryear’s sculptures, which were exhibited in a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007, represent a striking departure from the overly ironic, content-driven, late mannerist oeuvre one has come to expect from an art-world luminary.
