Stockbridge —The constant threat of fire was part of the reason sculptor Natalie Tyler didn’t want to stay in California. Her glowing sculpture “Wildfire,” made of cast bronze, glass, and a decaying pine tree she found on the side of the road, was displayed at Chesterwood a few years ago and subsequently went to the United Nations for the International Year of Glass. “It’s very intensive,” she said of her process. “It takes a lot of time.” But when people respond to it, they connect back to the earth. Helping people see “how precious our earth is” is her impetus for creating her recent pieces.
Then the Berkshires had their wildfire. Tyler remarked, “I thought we were safe here. Will there be a safe spot, and what can we do to shift? There’s still time, we can still shift.” She noted how “The pandemic was a bad time for us, but it was the best time on earth in the last 100 years…it gave the earth a chance to recuperate.”
This year, Chesterwood’s 47th annual outdoor sculpture show, “Global Warming/Global Warning,” asks viewers to consider such themes amid the threats that climate change poses to Chesterwood’s own old-growth forest.
Tyler, one of five artists whose work adorns the woods and grounds of Chesterwood, finally completed her glass “Tornado,” which was unveiled—completely coincidentally—on May 29, thirty years to the day from the Great Barrington tornado, which Tyler did not know about. Initially planned for last year, building the nine-foot-tall cast-glass sculpture was more intimidating than she envisioned. She spent about four months in 2024 applying for grants. A few months ago she was in tears in her studio, thinking she couldn’t finish it. Her mother even flew out from California. “I couldn’t have done it without her,” declared Tyler.
“Tornado” was placed to get as much full sun as possible. On a sunny day, especially at noon, it gets illuminated. “The glass sparkles from the inside and it glows,” said Tyler, who came from a bronze-casting background. “I got into glass because I wanted to incorporate light and color into the work. I wanted it to come alive and glass can do that; it can breathe.” When work is “living outside,” she mused, “it changes depending on the weather, the time of day you see it; it’s like a collaboration with the sun. It’s collaborating with the environment.”
Michael Lynch, the curator of the show, said that what he finds “fascinating” about Tyler’s and Kathleen Jacobs’ work, is that “they developed the processes to create their work. Nobody was doing what Kathleen did. She developed that process.” Jacobs, Chesterwood’s painter-in-residence, creates her paintings on trees, the paintings taking their form from the bark of the trees. When Lynch met her at Turnpark, he thought, “We have all these trees that are under attack at Chesterwood; maybe Kathleen would be interested in wrapping a few of them and painting canvasses.”
She began wrapping the trees last summer, covering the linen with gesso, and applying layers of paint, which takes two years to complete. Visitors will be able to see the process of creation, as well as a few finished pieces currently in the Woodshed at Chesterwood. “So often you just see the finished product, you have no idea what went into it,” Lynch said. “I love that [walking through the woods] you can see one from the other; you’re just drawn through the entire installation.”
While Lynch has been coming to Chesterwood and its sculpture shows for decades, he never imagined he might curate one. He was an architect and an engineer who specialized in historic buildings. About ten years ago, when Chesterwood exhibited glass sculptures in the woods, he describes being struck by the fragility of the artwork. In 2019, Rick and Laura Brown installed their sculptures up in the trees, and two weeks after the show opened, one of the pieces simply collapsed into the woods when the standing dead hemlock fell over. “I realized that the woods themselves were fragile,” he said. On the board at the time, he suggested to the staff that Chesterwood should do a show about climate change and its impact on the landscape, but the idea “fell by the wayside.” When he became Chesterwood’s interim director two years ago, he made it happen.
Ann Jon, who will also have a retrospective exhibition of her work at Chesterwood later in the summer, has several pieces in the show that speak to the scarcity of water and the plight of climate refugees. She has explored these themes for a while and hopes her work inspires greater awareness. “My work is not happy and jolly, but I’m thinking about everything that’s going on both environmentally and politically, and if I can remind people to think about it maybe they’ll take some action,” she explained. “I was looking at a piece that goes back at least 15 years,” she recounted, of two eagles “standing on a platform of the earth burning.” She thought, “Oh, even then it was in my awareness.”
While the problems that are represented in her sculptures may not yet be at the top of people’s minds here in the Berkshires, Jon said, “I don’t want to look just at one place at one time. I want to see the bigger picture. We don’t have people necessarily fleeing from those situations, but we do have people coming here from all over the world who are refugees.”
“Global Warming/Global Warning” will be on display through October, along with other changing exhibits. Executive director Miguel Rodriguez highlighted the many offerings at Chesterwood this summer, from music and poetry to a new series of children’s activities. The French family residence is open for tours after a four-year restoration and renovation project, with three new exhibition spaces, one with an exhibit about female artists and models at Chesterwood. There will be a garden tea party fundraiser on July 12.
A monthly ice cream social for children revives a tradition of Daniel Chester French. High Lawn Farm created an ice cream flavor for Chesterwood based on the preponderance of berries and chocolate in old French family menus.
Find the full calendar of events, and read artist statements for the work in “Global Warming/Global Warning” on Chesterwood’s website at this link.
