Wave Hill Brings Together Artist, Arborist and Oaks

The center gallery in Wave Hill’s Glyndor Gallery provided a quiet setting for artist Ilene Sunshine and arborist William Bryant Logan to share their interest in the oak, during a conversation that took place in early March. Sunshine’s drawing A is for Alba covers the entire west wall of the center gallery. It was inspired by nine oak species that grace Wave Hill’s gardens and underscores the range of the prolific oak family’s leaf shapes, their stenciled contours penetrating rows of dark, horizontal lines across the gallery wall. Sunshine lends her presence in other ways this spring, as she leads an adult art workshop, Collage, on March 22, and a Family Art Project, Conversations with a Leaf, on May 16, 17. William Bryant Logan is the author of Oak: The Frame of Civilization, which traces the influence of the oak tree on human development, about which he spoke at the second of Wave Hill’s 2009 Horticultural Lectures in mid-February. He is often at Wave Hill this year as he consults with Wave Hill on a year-long study of the garden’s 150 to 200 specimen trees, from which will emerge a maintenance plan and a planting scheme for the next century.

Andrew Appel Talks Cabaret with Steve Ross and Joseph Thalken

For Ross (on the far right) and Thalken (second from left), the journey began on a tour of the Grand Concourse with Bronx historian Peter Derrick last summer

In mid-March, I spent the morning with performer Steve Ross, who partners with Wave Hill to bring a mini-series of Cabaret performances to Wave Hill’s annual concert season, and composer Joseph Thalken. Thalken is working with lyricist Barry Kleinbort to create a song for the third and last concert in the series Cabaret and Grand Concourse, when KT Sullivan performs at Wave Hill.  Ross and Thalken talked with me about the Grand Concourse, which celebrates its centennial this year, about the experience of composing and the unique pleasures of performing in Wave Hill’s Armor Hall. In this clip, I am seated on the far left, with Joseph Thalken in the middle and Steve Ross on the far right.

 

Andrew Appel is Performing Arts Programmer at Wave Hill.