WCMA to Host Tattoo Session, Meditations With Tibetan Lama

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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Williams College Museum of Art will host Lama Tashi Norbu, one of the artists featured in the current exhibition "Across Shared Waters: Contemporary Artists In Dialogue with Tibetan Art" from the Jack Shear Collection, for three programs from April 25-27, culminating in a live tattooing session at WCMA.
 
Tashi Norbu will lead drop-in meditation sessions in the galleries from 5 to 6 p.m. on Tuesday, April 25, and Wednesday, April 26.
 
On Thursday, April 27, the artist will tattoo a participant from the community, basing the design on Tibetan astrology and the recipient's own personal Buddhist mantra. During this live performance, local musicians will improvise alongside Tashi Norbu as he chants the mantra and tattoos the recipient. The galleries will remain open until 5:30 p.m, when the program begins. 
 
This project is supported by Alexis Rosasco, a local artist and owner of AR Designs Fine Art & Tattoo shop in North Adams.
 
"Lama Tashi Norbu's week-long residency at WCMA will be an extraordinary opportunity for students and visitors to get to know the artist and experience his incredibly wide-ranging practice," said Lisa Dorin, WCMA's Deputy Director for Curatorial Engagement. "His live tattoo performance will definitely be a first for us. We can't wait to find out who will be the lucky recipient." 
 
According to a press release:
 
Lama Tashi Norbu was born in Bhutan. He received his education at the schools of the Dalai Lama, where he became a traditional Thangka painter and ordained as a monk. He is educated in European western fine arts in Belgium and The Netherlands. Lama Tashi became an accomplished artist who never lost his spiritual Buddhist upbringing. After numerous world travels, where his art was exhibited in prestigious world museums and galleries, he founded the Museum of Contemporary Tibetan Art in the Netherlands, which is the only museum in the world dedicated to Tibetan art and is recognized by the Dutch government and registered as one of the National Museums of the Netherlands.
 
Lama Tashi now combines art, meditation, and Buddhist teachings, and he creates Tibetan Sand Mandalas on his many world tours. Lama Tashi is also playing with some of the greatest musicians of the world, such as Earth, Wind and Fire, and he has performed in prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall in New York City.
 
 
 

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Williamstown Select Board Awards ARPA Funds to Remedy Hall

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Select Board on Monday allocated $20,000 in COVID-19-era relief funds to help a non-profit born of the pandemic era that seeks to provide relief to residents in need.
 
On a unanimous vote, the board voted to grant the American Rescue Plan Act money to support Remedy Hall, a resource center that provides "basic life necessities" and emotional support to "individuals and families experiencing great hardship."
 
The board of the non-profit approached the Select Board with a request for $12,000 in ARPA Funds to help cover some of the relief agency's startup costs, including the purchase of a vehicle to pick up donations and deliver items to clients, storage rental space and insurance.
 
The board estimates that the cost of operating Remedy Hall in its second year — including some one-time expenses — at just north of $31,500. But as board members explained on Monday night, some sources of funding are not available to Remedy Hall now but will be in the future.
 
"With the [Williamstown] Community Chest, you have to be in existence four or five years before you can qualify for funding," Carolyn Greene told the Select Board. "The same goes for state agencies that would typically be the ones to fund social service agencies.
 
"ARPA made sense because [Remedy Hall] is very much post-COVID in terms of the needs of the town becoming more evident."
 
In a seven-page letter to the town requesting the funds, the Remedy Hall board wrote that, "need is ubiquitous and we are unveiling that truth daily."
 
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