New England, March 2020

We were in New Haven and rural New England just before Covid hit. Everything was gorgeous. The food was great and there was lots of agrodiversity and local produce and small producers even in the smallest towns, things that you essentially can’t get, by the way, here in Berlin where I live. Hard as it may be to believe, they somehow have only barely started getting the memo on eating local. The pictures may look a little gloomy because this was “mud season”, the time in March after the beautiful snow has melted and before spring has started. The trees are bare, mud is everywhere, and many sights, shops and restaurants are closed or have reduced hours. They even advise tourists to avoid March but we had a wonderful time.

Pictures of the excellent Yiddish Book Center in Amherst are here.

New Haven

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The Yiddish Book Center – Amherst, Massachusetts

This is the Yiddish Book Center which lies four hours north of New York City in Amherst, Massachusetts, adjacent to Hampshire College. It’s really great and you should visit. It’s an archives, museum, and cultural center housed in a gorgeous new building recalling a rural eastern European village. A big draw for me was Shtetl in the Sun: South Beach, Miami 1977-1980, an exhibition of photographs of Jewish retirees.

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“Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove” – Symbolist and Surrealist artworks you don’t see every day

A few interesting and little-known works from the Symbolist and Surrealist movements.

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Exhibition in Paris: “Globes: Architecture and Science Explore the World”

This was an exhibit on globe-shaped and globe-inspired buildings since 1700, some actually built and some just proposed, at a museum called Cité de l’Architecture (click to enlarge)

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Paris – Museum of Trades and Industrial Arts

The Musée des Arts et Métiers (“Arts and Trades”) is an historical museum of engineering, communications, construction, transportation, materials and scientific instruments. Nowadays we’d call it technology but the word wasn’t in use when the museum was founded in 1794.  The term arts et métiers dates back to the middle ages and meant any kind of economic activity that isn’t agriculture or trade.

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Maira Kalman

Exhibit at the Eric Carle Museum, Amherst, Massachusetts

March 2019