A Byrdcliffe Childhood

A Byrdcliffe Childhood

EXHIBITION: October 13–December 31, 2023
OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, October 14, 4-6pm

PHOEBE & BELMONT TOWBIN WING

A Byrdcliffe Childhood is an exhibition presented in conjunction with a new book of the same title designed and edited by lifelong Woodstock resident and art collector Abigail Sturges. The exhibition at the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum includes over thirty artworks from the museum’s permanent collection and Sturges’s private collection that recall memories and meanings from the childhood lives of eleven friends who resided in and around the Byrdcliffe Colony in the 1950s and early 1960s. The art selection includes work by twentieth-century landscape painters including Zulma Steele, Marianne Appel, Ethel Magafan, Joseph Pollet and Wendell Jones who depicted the scenic Catskill Mountains and countryside, and portrait artists Bruce Currie, Jane Jones, Norbert Heermann, Betty Sturges, Eugene Speicher, Arthur Zaidenberg and others who painted real life representations of people in the community. Artwork is paired with archival photos of the children enjoying classic pastimes together. The exhibition and publication touch on the nostalgic yearning for the idyllic small-town life of the Byrdcliffe Colony of the 1950s, in search of a simpler, more peaceful time.

A Byrdcliffe Childhood, the anthology, accompanies the exhibition and is available for purchase at WAAM and online.