Carol and I recently attended a lovely dinner party hosted by Abigail Sturges and other supporters of the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild. On its website, the Guild describes itself as “a vibrant center for arts and crafts in the beautiful and unique rural community of Woodstock, New York, while preserving the historic and natural environment of one of the earliest utopian arts colonies in America.”  Carol and I live in the Woodstock Byrdcliffe community and the beauty abounds whichever way you turn.
I had the good fortune of being seated next to Katherine McKenna at Abigail's dinner party. Katherine is on the Board of the Guild and was Carol’s painting and color Instructor at the Woodstock School of Art, which is a sweet coincidence. Katherine and her brothers Douglas, Andrew and Bruce grew up in Englewood New Jersey, and Carol was Bruce McKenna’s 8th grade elementary school teacher. Small world.
Katherine now divides her time between the Hudson Valley and the American West. Her landscape paintings of Wyoming, Colorado, Montana, Utah, and Arizona reveal an attachment to the natural geology and essence of place that she was first exposed to on the childhood trips she writes of in her memoir.
Katherine has exhibited widely, and her paintings reside in permanent collections of the Rockwell Museum, the Museum of Northern Arizona, the Booth Museum, the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum, and the Desert Caballeros Museum in Wickenburg, Arizona
Katherine also serves on the boards of Pratt Institute, the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and the Arts Society of Kingston.
Over dinner, Katherine told me of her father’s work as a paleontologist, including at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and of her own field work out West with her father when she was very young. I was fascinated that her artistic journey started with what she was exposed to at a very young age, and what she learned at the side of her father.
Katherine mentioned that she had written a memoir, which I then ordered from the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and that we discussed on the podcast