This Month’s Featured Articles…

Design is a powerful tool that transforms our daily lives. Everything from the colors we select in our homes to the subtleties of lighting, evokes a mood and creates ambiance. After devoting many years of marketing, business development, and public relations expertise to Deloitte, Ernst & Young, PwC, and Accenture, businesswoman Maryline Damour was inspired to make a change in the wake of the earthquake in her home country of Haiti in 2010. In 2005, she purchased her first house in Kingston, NY. “For the first [...]

Feel stuck? Paralyzed and unable to take a step? Is your life out of sync with who you are, or who you want to be? Do you think you have to figure it out alone? It doesn’t have to be that way. Enter the Designing Your Life (DYL) methodology, a way to think about your life that permits you to take off the blinders and venture onto other paths. DYL utilizes design thinking methodology as you solve the “wicked problem” of your life. A wicked [...]

There’s one thing you can’t overlook when you meet the works of Tim Jones and Silda Wall Spitzer: they’re heavy. Heavy because the works are typically large and are made with varying sizes and types of metals which are then combined and secured with other pieces of metal. You have to be strong to create pieces like the ones that line the driveway to Tim’s studio, Stissing Design, in Pine Plains, NY. Strong and tough and gritty. The works feature giant screws; a repurposed meat [...]

Renowned for his short stories, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, American author Washington Irving is regarded as the Father of the American Ghost Story. Born in Manhattan in 1783, Irving was also a historian, essayist, and biographer. Both of the ghostly tales mentioned above appear in Irving’s collection, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (more commonly known as The Sketch Book), published in the 1819-1820 time frame. Although the story of Rip Van Winkle is set in New York [...]

Since the October issue celebrates the area’s rich history, it proved to be an opportune time to honor the achievements of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. Renowned as W.E.B. Du Bois, he was a scholar, sociologist, historian, activist, and journalist. The Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, MA, features a permanent exhibition that highlights some of his life’s work. Visit The Feigenbaum Hall of Innovation, an interactive exhibition that celebrates innovators like Du Bois who hail from the Berkshires. Here’s a history and a few highlights [...]