Moose to murals: Art finds a stage in Pittsfield

By Kate AbbottPrint Story | Email Story
Pittsfield arts czar Dan O'Connell stands in front of a mural across from the Berkshire Artisans Gallery on Renne Avenue (iBerkshires file photo)
Daniel O’Connell has been building an arts district in downtown Pittsfield for almost 30 years. He would like to have the downtown designated a tax-free zone for artwork and art supplies and feels prospects are good, he said Monday. Just this year, he brought stone lions to City Hall and a statue of a moose to Park Square. O’Connell paints murals on public buildings and drives van pulling a stage on wheels that can be set up instantaneously for public events. He is the founder and artistic director of Berkshire Artisans in the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts. Since 1975, he has worked to make the arts physically and economically accessible and to keep his services to the city inexpensive and easy to use, he said. Any artist can send slides to Berkshire Artisans juried shows without a fee or reserve a studio space by sending a postcard. Tenants and art students can use their studios and classrooms at any hour of the day. O’Connell said Pittsfield has established a rich arts scene, and his roots in it have grown with his organization. This February, he said, Berkshire Artisans will hold an exhibition celebrating 73 North St., a collection of artists who had studios in former Newberry’s building for more than 20 years. During their tenure, they created a sculpture garden, held art festivals, made guerilla raids for nighttime sidewalk chalkings and filled the air with balloons. “Art is about trust. It’s about the ambiance you create in the space,” O’Connell said. “It’s a safe haven — whether you’re throwing a pot, or working in the darkroom at night, playing the piano or painting in a studio.” Berkshire Artisans began as a VISTA volunteer program more than 25 years ago. It is now a full city department. Its current building at 28 Renne Ave. cost about $100,000 when Berkshire Artisans moved in. O’Connell has improved it with the city’s help, grant support and donated labor. He said a recent assessment valued it at over $1.6 million. “It’s quite real. If you create more cultural things, businesses come. It’s economic development. Here, we’re making sure that as the arts develop, they’re for everybody,” he said. O’Connell grew up in Pittsfield. Both his parents are Irish. He went through St. Joseph’s grammar and high schools and Berkshire Community College, and from there to University of Iowa in painting. He got a masters degree, ran a few gallery programs in Iowa City, and painted his first murals on public buses, depicting characters like the Marx Brothers. In 1975, he finished graduate school and returned to Pittsfield, starting out with the Berkshire Artisans program as a VISTA volunteer. Ralph Froio, then chairman of the Council on Aging and leader of Elderly Arts, gave him an office in the Senior Center. O’Connell said he wanted to work for social change by making the arts available to everyone he could reach. He started wheelchair ballet programs in nursing homes. He talked with people who lived in the nursing homes to collect images of an older Pittsfield for his murals. As a CETA worker, he put up wheelchair ramps around town. He put together First Night concerts in the city for 10 years, at New Year’s. He also ran The Studio, a nightclub in the former England Brothers building, with Mort Cooperman. Over a period of 13 years, they brought 75 “big” groups, such as Jefferson Airplane, to the 2,000-seat house. They designed the space so the stage backed the storefront windows, and they piped the music outdoors, so anyone who could not afford a ticket had a free backstage pass. O’Connell also worked with the 73 North artists, whose work he will honor in the gallery this winter. They had studios in all the space above Newberry’s from 1977 to 1999, he said. While they were there, they set up the Gallery and Center for Creative Exhibits and the Radius Gallery, covered the sidewalks with chalk paintings at nights, made the Life Yard sculpture garden in an abandoned lot and launched many other projects. The city evicted the artists when it redeveloped the space, and they are now scattered across Pittsfield. “Over a long period of time, we developed arts in the downtown. We softened it up. We created the right atmosphere,” O’ Connell said He began with classes in a storefront on North Street in the late 1970s. Berkshire Artisans grew and moved several times, he said. Then he met Kitty Lichtnestein. As a young girl, Lichtenstein had escaped from Nazi Austria with her mother. “Her father was a concert pianist,” O’Connell said. “He was killed by the Nazis, because Hitler killed the artist, the writer, the intellectual first when he entered a country. He killed the spirit.” Lichtenstein wanted to develop an arts center because she felt her father would still have been alive if arts had become free and accessible to all, O’Connell said. She bought the building that now houses the center for $100,000, spent $1 million renovating it and gave it to the city. Despite Lichtenstein’s help, and the city’s continuing support, Berkshire Artisans’ path has not been easy, O’Connell said. Some past mayors have tried to get rid of it. Some City Council members have questioned its usefulness. But the city now gives Berkshire Artisans $50,000 a year. O’ Connell said he would like eventually to expand the organization to create a downtown art district, to maintain it and to make it economically successful. In the long run, he said, he would ask the city and the state to make the arts district a tax-free zone, in which artists would not pay taxes on their materials or their studio spaces and would not have to charge sales tax on their work. A tax-free zone would bring artists in from other communities, he said. Even without such a zone, the arts have begun to take hold in the city, he added. “It’s all really happening,” I’ve seen it work. Even in December, when things are quieting down, I see people walk through the door that I’ve never seen before. People want new murals. They want to take classes. I haven’t had a studio vacant in 20 years,” he said. Today at Berkshire Artisans, O’Connell has events and resources on hand for artists and for the public in general. Berkshire Artisans encourages the public to make and enjoy art, and helps artists to find space to create and exhibit it. He has 10 artists’ studios, all full. He raises outside funds to keep the costs of all his programs as low as possible. Besides exhibitions, Berkshire Artisans offers arts classes, performances and the Berkshire Writer’s Room. “Having artists in the community, going to the coffee shop, is enough,” O’Connell said. “They sit down with their coffee and have an aesthetic conversation in the coffee shop. That’s what changes the community.” Studio artists and students in art classes get their own keys to the parts of the building they use. Musicians come in to practice. A blues band borrows the space, and piano prodigies Luke Massery and Eamonn O’Hara come with their Tanglewood teachers to play the grand piano. They often come in when the gallery is closed, so they can be alone, O’Connell said. In addition, local music teachers give free recitals in the building space. Visual artists can submit slides for the juried shows, also without charge. Most shows charge a fee up to $25, but that won’t happen in the city’s space, O’Connell said. “One of Kitty Lichtenstein’s rules was that money couldn’t change hands here,” he said. People come from all over, he said, noting that he showcased a Czech artist last year. He finds the jury through the National Endowment for the Arts and is already booked through 2006, he said. Outside the gallery, O’Connell manages to keep busy as well. “This weekend, the public stage is going to an Alzheimer’s walk in Cheshire. then to Lee the weekend after that.” He had the public stage made so he can pack it a trailer and haul it to and from destinations with the mural van. He works with local groups, including police departments for picnics, radio stations for concerts at Pontoosuc Lake and various ethnic groups for celebrations. O’Connell has painted murals all over town — on the walls of the police station, the fire station, the Boy’s Club and Harry’s Supermarket, among others. He is designing a mural for the new intermodal center too. Each mural takes two years or more to paint and can cost up to $300,000, he said. The Pittsfield mural series began with master muralist Daniel Galvez of Oakland Calif., O’Connell said. Galvez came to Pittsfield through a grant to bring minority artists to New England and taught mural painting in the Mexican tradition. He has since painted nearly a dozen murals with the Berkshire Artisans mural team: O’Connell, William Blake and Stephen Mark of Great Barrington, Colleen Quinn of Pittsfield, Bonnie Bergman of Mason, Wisc., and Diane Porier of Cape Cod. Galvez will be back Oct. 4 to help restore the Vietnam War Mural. It needs restoring after many years exposed to the elements. The city has given Berkshire Artisans permission to move it to more visible downtown location, although councilors have not decided where. O’Connell had the mural photographed and sent the photographs to Russia to be enlarged and printed on heavy vinyl. His team of artists is repainting the mural on the vinyl, using the print guidelines. They work from a print only to restore murals, he said. They stand on ladders to paint originals from scratch. “Anyone who’s lived in Pittsfield between the 1970s and today has received a higher quality of life because of what I’ve done, O’Connell said with pride. He added with disappointment that the new owners of the former Giovanni’s Restaurant in Lanesboro have just painted over Richard Britell’s 1984 “Venice” mural. O’Connell had hoped to create an ordinance so the owners of buildings would at least have to call an artist before they painted over a work. He wondered whether all of his murals could be painted over one day but said he preferred not to believe it would happen. “Someone will pick up where I leave off,” he said, reading aloud the Berkshire Artisans motto, from Latin: “Ars longa, vita brevis est.” — “Life is short; art is long.
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Williams College Gives All-Clear After 'Suspicious' Package Found

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff

Williamstown Fire and Northern Berkshire EMS stood by at the scene during the investigation of a suspicious package at Williams College's Wachenheim Science Center on Thursday.
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — A suspicious package that caused the evacuation of Williams College's Wachenheim Science Center on Thursday has been determined to be not dangerous. 
 
A post on the college website at 4 p.m. stated the "device was determined not to be a bomb or other danger."
 
The college said all buildings, residences and streets are reopened that no further updates will be made. 
 
In a message to the Williams community, President Maud Mandel said she could not speak to some particulars. 
 
"There are limits on what I can share due to the fact that police are continuing to investigate and some facts simply are not known to us," she wrote.
 
Mandel said a package was delivered just after noon to Wachenheim and the person who opened it immediately called campus safety, who called both the Williamstown Police and Fire Departments. 
 
"The nature and purpose of its contents were unclear and concerning to the people involved," said the president. "As a precaution, we promptly evacuated all academic buildings, residences and streets within a set perimeter. Given that we could not rule out the possibility that the contents were dangerous, the state bomb squad was called in. 
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