GHENT – Omi International Arts Center celebrated its long-time partnership with Coarc on Friday, May 19, with a reception in the Omi education pavilion. Artists, friends and families gathered to admire a salon-style wall of pictures of great quality and variety.

Omi’s Director of Education Sasha Sicurella said that the project is a reminder of Omi’s efforts to increase accessibility and outreach to everybody in the community. This year there were over forty participants, double last year’s enrollment and the most ever. This year Ms. Sicurella recruited people from more Coarc centers in Hudson, Mellenville, Dayhab Without Walls and self-directed services in addition to Evergreen Hall in Valatie where the project started. Read more…

AUSTERLITZ—In the library at Steepletop, the home of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay for 25 years, a well-worn copy of Floyd Dell’s “Love in Greenwich Village” lies atop a table next to her reading chair.

Dell’s collection of short stories, published in 1926, featured, in fictional form, his intimate relationship with Millay while both were writing or performing for the Provincetown Players, a groundbreaking theater group founded in 1916.

Millay’s library is preserved much as it was when she died in 1950, so it seems that Dell may have been on her mind, or in her heart. In a new book, “Blood Too Bright: Floyd Dell Remembers Edna St. Vincent Millay” (Glenmere Press), Dell suggests that he, too, was long preoccupied, or even haunted, by his memories of Millay. Read more…

KINDERHOOK–On Sunday, February 12 at 2 p.m. Concerts in the Village will present its 20th performance in seven years. The program, held at The School on Broad Street (Route 9), is 20th Century Music for Strings and Women’s Voices and will feature works by Vaughan Williams, Britten, Saint-Saëns, Poulenc and Foote performed by sopranos Amanda Boyd and Caroline Dunigan, and flutist Elizabeth Chinery with the women of the Broad Street Chorale and strings of the Broad Street Orchestra.

The concert will highlight the orchestra’s string musicians and the group’s female vocalists as well as the acoustical environment of the former Martin Van Buren school, which was repurposed into an exhibition space for contemporary art and opened in 2014.

Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis written and performed in 1910 at England’s Gloucester Cathedral will be a “sonic miracle,” David Smith, the group’s artistic director, conductor, manager and founder, said during a recent interview. Read more…