Korongo: May 2012

Sunday, May 6, 2012

The Art of Agriculture

Great energy in the room on Friday when some 20 people turned out to hear Fat Toad Farm interns Melissa Hayashida, Lily Baker, and Elisa Mayes explain what drew them to farming as a vocation. Answers ranged from "didn't want to spend my life behind a desk," to "I picked up Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and couldn't put it down," to "I was hooked from the time I visited my first CSA farm when I was eight." Passion, in a word. Other young farmers in the room shared similar stories. For Chip Natvig, owner of Pebble Brook Farm in Brookfield, it was the smell of his grandfather's greenhouse that turned him on. Natvig, who had "zero dollars" to invest as a beginning farmer, got his start with help from retired farmers and "an awesome business plan" that he crafted in the Vermont Farm Viability Enhancement Program. Andrew Stowe, the new manager of Highfields Farm in Randolph, also stressed the importance of business training. All portrayed Vermont as a supportive environment for beginning farmers. The interns, who come from California, Minnesota, and North Carolina, picked Fat Toad Farm out of a variety of internships offered on a list-serve called Good Food Jobs ("satisfying the hunger for meaningful work"). Among the reasons they gave for their choice were the chance to work with livestock, the farm's New England location, its effective marketing and publicity materials, and above all, the high quality of its internship program.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Quote of the Day: How to Look at Art

Gillianchicago for Creative Commons

From art dealer Michael Findley, interviewed by Brian Boucher in the current issue of Art in America: “I teach a course at Christie's, and the students are told to look at a work of art for 15 minutes. Those who do five or 10 are doing well. I suggest it as a way of being extreme. The Louvre has clocked the average viewer at 10 seconds. If you come in somewhere over 10 seconds and under an hour, you're doing a pretty good job. An hour spent looking at one or a couple of pictures is more worthwhile than trudging around a museum until you're bleary-eyed, footsore and thirsty. I think we spend more time reading a novel or seeing a movie, and a work of art shouldn't be given such short thrift.” Findley is the author of The Value of Art, due out from Prestel this month.

The Randolph Herald on Korongo

From Herald writer Dian Parker: "Living in the East Village in Manhattan in the late '60s and all through the '70s, I’d often hang out with artists at a street café and we’d talk about our work incessantly. Bongo drummers lined Second Avenue and the small alcove of my eighth-floor walk up was often a place for bums to sleep. Artists opened their apartments as tiny makeshift art galleries. On one wall hung a tie-dyed sheet and on the floor a double mattress. Not much else except art. And more art. It was everywhere, some of it not very good, but it was an outpouring nonetheless; a place to be seen. We never thought the East Village would become what it is now, one of the hip places to live in Manhattan, still filled with art, only much more expensive.

"Along comes the Korongo Gallery to Randolph, and we have promise again of a beginning that could very well burgeon into something hip and wonderful, a place for artists and writers to display and read their work, congregate and hang out. At the opening on March 17 there was a feeling of excitement and expectation that we might just be on the verge of a new happening, right here in downtown Randolph. The gallery was packed. Patrick Texier, the owner, schmoozed with the folks and Laurie Sverdlove Goldman, the painter, and talked about her work which hung on three of the walls. Jack Rowell took photographs and everyone was smiling and milling about. The food was delicious. This was a real opening in a new little gallery that has a big and bright future." To continue reading Dian's article on the Herald website, click here.