Lindsay J. (Warner) Westley

Originally posted 1.26.2012 at www.Forbes.com

‘The only thing I could have done to make them accept me was to water everything down — and I wasn’t prepared to do that.’

By Lindsay J. Westley

When architect Zaha Hadid walks into the Philadelphia Museum of Art, conversation stops. Dressed all in black,she strides purposefully across the vast exhibition hall, her presence nearly dwarfing even the mural-sized Marc Chagall stretching from floor to ceiling behind her.

Hadid’s larger-than-life persona is a frequent topic of conversation in the architecture world, and in concert with the gravity-defying, curvilinear buildings she creates, has earned her a reputation as the diva of architecture. It’s a term applied by admirers and critics alike, to which she responds bluntly “You wouldn’t call me a diva if I were a guy.”

Originally posted at http://www.emsexploration.com/wordpress/mitts-for-when-the-mercury-drops/

When the skis, boots, poles and skins made an appearance in the living room for the third night in a row last week, I knew it was time to either get my husband a hamster wheel, or go visit the snowmakers on the mountain.

Vermont holds the record for most terrain covered by snowmakers in the East — after all, it’s home to “Hug a Snowmaker Day” (really), so we headed up to Jay Peak to pick up DJ’s season pass and to check out the powder — whether real, imagined, or man-made. (And as per last night’s snow-dump, everything is newly dusted in fresh snow.)

We arrived late enough in the day that all of the lifts were closed, which made skinning up the mountain both easy and legal, according to Jay’s AT/backcountry rules (off-limits when the lifts are running). Stir-craziness abated, DJ took a few turns while I put my new Black Diamond Mercury Mitts to the test.

Originally appeared in the print version of Seven Days on Dec. 14, 2011 and posted here: http://www.7dvt.com/2011digitizing-treasury-objects-fleming-museum

Janie Cohen walks through the stacks on the top floor of the University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum of Art, running a finger along the shelves and pointing out favorites. Ancient Native American pottery shares a shelf with pre-Columbian artifacts, which perch next to small-scale European sculpture. Cohen, the museum’s executive director, stops to point out a tattered-looking collection of maps created by Napoleon and his troops, then continues down to the end where the paintings hang. A nearby table displays smoking apparatuses, under consideration for a winter exhibition; a row of hunting spears hangs above a drawer full of Native American beadwork.

This area of the museum — where the Fleming keeps its treasures — is generally off limits to visitors. It’s one of three on-site storage vaults, and it’s crammed with objects dating from 3500 BC to the present day. Cohen knows them all. Visitors, even regular ones, probably haven’t seen a quarter of the collection.

All museums struggle to represent the full range of their holdings, and the Fleming is no exception. Cohen estimates that only 5 percent of its 24,000 items are on view at any time; the other 95 percent sit on shelves upstairs, neatly labeled but as good as invisible.

Originally appeared in the print version of Seven Days on Nov. 23, 2011 and posted here: http://www.7dvt.com/2011shelburne-museum-shuts-down-winter-not-everythin...

In Beach Lodge, the bears are hibernating. The temperature is a chilly 45 degrees, and the windows will soon be boarded up, leaving the taxidermy Ursus in darkness. It’s creepy in here.

Outside, groundskeepers, curators, gardeners, carpenters and conservators rove the grounds in golf carts, their activity recalling a scene from Richard Scarry’s Busytown. Twenty-three gardens have already been cut back and composted; the carousel has been disassembled and stored.

Welcome to the end of the season at the Shelburne Museum, where workers have indeed been busy battening down the hatches for winter. It’s an aspect of the museum the May-to-October crowd never sees. And, in a way, that’s too bad, because the process of buttoning up 39 historic buildings over 45 sprawling acres is itself an interesting “exhibition” with history lessons.

On board the 220-foot grounded steamboat Ticonderoga, director of buildings Chip Stulen resurrects many winterizing tactics from the early 20th century, when the ship was still sailing Lake Champlain.