An exhibition featuring design sketches, models and watercolors for film and theater by the award-winning designer Carl Sprague, a native of Stockbridge, Mass., is on view at Opalka Gallery at Russell Sage College in Albany, N.Y., now through Friday, February 23. Carl Sprague’s career as a designer spans stage and screen. He has worked in the art departments of more than 40 films, which between them have a combined total of 35 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture-winner 12 Years a Slave. Though he has worked with Martin Scorsese (The Age of Innocence), Steven Spielberg (Amistad), and Damien Chazelle (La La Land), his most enduring collaboration has been with Wes Anderson, as reflected in the exhibit. (now through Fri, Feb 23)
Visual artist Phillip Schwartz’s Shoah: A Meditation on The Holocaust opens at Christ Church Episcopal in Hudson, N.Y., on Saturday at 5-7pm, and remains on view through Sunday, February 11. Schwartz’s exhibition is inspired by the Stations of the Cross, told through visual art that has been used for centuries in Christian prayer and meditation. The installation is a combination of egg tempera paintings, icons, and textile works. Schwartz is a Hudson-based artist and iconographer whose work has been shown locally and internationally. The exhibit’s opening falls on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, now known as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. (opening Sat, Jan 27; runs through Sun, Feb 11)
Author and journalist Madison Margolin will discuss her new book, Exile & Ecstasy: Growing Up with Ram Dass & Coming of Age in the Jewish Psychedelic Underground, in conversation with journalist Noah Eckstein, at Time and Space in Hudson, N.Y., net Wednesday, January 31, at 7pm. Through the perspective of having grown up in the community surrounding Ram Dass, author of Be Here Now, and in the cannabis legalization movement, Margolin takes readers on a journey inside New York’s Jewish counterculture and the Hasidic underground, reconciling her roots, tackling ancestral Jewish trauma, and finding intersectionality between the Jewish and psychedelic experience. (Wed, Jan 31)
Singer-songwriter Jill Sobule, who made history in 1995 when her song “I Kissed a Girl” became the first openly queer-themed Billboard Top 20 single, brings her extensive catalog of highly personal, confessional new-folk songs to the Egremont Barn in South Egremont, Mass., on Thursday, February 1, at 7:30pm. Sobule entertains, amuses, provokes, and more often than not, takes her audiences on an emotional roller coaster, from comedy to pathos in a few bars of music, often within the same song. Sobule’s satirical song “Supermodel” was featured in the hit teen-comedy Clueless. Addressing the legacy of the Holocaust, Sobule’s song “Attic” asks the essential question: “Would you have hidden me in your attic … or packed me on that awful train?” (Thu, Feb 1)
Also of note:
Doom Dogs, an improvising trio featuring David Bowie sideman Reeves Gabrels, is at Colony Café in Woodstock, N.Y., tonight at 8pm.
Pianist Tristan Geary brings his hard-swinging jazz trio to Time and Space in Hudson, N.Y., on Saturday at 8pm.
Winds in the Wilderness Concerts features a chamber ensemble performing classical and jazz works at Church of St. John in the Wilderness in Copake Falls, N.Y., on Sunday at 3pm. The program includes works by Piazzolla, Bach, Jobim, Miles Davis, and George Harrison.
Jeff Zinn, director, writer, actor, producer, and founder of Wellfleet Harbor Actor’s Theater, will be in conversation with Great Barrington Public Theater artistic director Jim Frangione at St. James Place in Great Barrington, Mass., on Monday, January 29, at 6pm.
Seth Rogovoy is editor of the Rogovoy Report, available at rogovoyreport.substack.com.
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