DELHI — There is a recurring theme when old folks who are folkies of all sorts meet. We bemoan the fact that the internet today robs artists and craftspeople of the journey that leads to creation in our fields. When I was in my teens, back in the seventies, if you wanted to learn about traditional ships, you cut school and sailed on Scandinavian square riggers. If you collected ballads, you walked through the hardest, most remote parts of Ireland, Scotland, Cumbria and Wales, lugging a huge tape recorder in the rain and sleet, holing up in a corner of a pub with the oldest ballad singer you could find. If you wanted to learn traditional anything, it was a hard and often cold physical journey. You learned the craft as completely as you could from family and then others in the craft. Today, you go to a singing session and some young person pulls out their phone and "sings off the screen" as we used to be horrified at "singing off the page" when a singer held the written page up while singing, rather than committing the song to memory. Such singing has no soul of understanding. It is not wrapped in the traditional vocal ornaments and most importantly, your voice colored by the journey.
Well, old folkies, there is hope for the world. Put on your walking shoes and make your way over to the Bushel at 106 Main Street, Delhi, NY June 20-July 27 for "Catskill Builders", a book launch and installation by Ty Tamburo.
Not to take credit away from Ty, for discovering the path on his journey through craft, I must give credit to his father, who well may have been an example of where to find his approach to his trail. His father restored old boats. He and I spoke about boat building at the opening of the exhibit. He didn't learn boat building on the internet. He did as I did, and learned from the generation before of master builders.
So, Ty set out to build a dance platform for his dancer wife as they started their project in Andes, "The Pillow Fort Center." He had not yet built anything so he asked his neighbor for advice, the basic how-tos of building his project. He found that the more builders he confronted with construction questions, the more solutions to any building question presented themselves. Each builder sent him on to another builder to broaden his understanding of the craft of building and joinery. He found that his pool of builders all had their own way of approaching things and often didn't share their craft solutions with each other. Ty didn't find a community around building and wanted to "build community."
"My book is kind of an ethnography," Ty says as I ask him about his journey into the craft and culture of building, "from the perspective of someone who is trying to do the thing in the place." It sounds very much like what we called "participatory sociology" when I went from the shipyard and remote singer's cabins to the university to get a piece of sheepskin to memorialize my life's journey in traditional craft. But big words and sheepskin can be the rule that breaks the spirit. This book launch, for me, is a young man's journey into elder wisdom. As I apprenticed in maritime blacksmithing many decades ago, a master blacksmith once told me, "what the hands learn, the brain never forgets." Learning the culture of building is more than learning to produce a product. It is learning to listen to those who generationally have had other's hands train their brains.
Among the photos and recorded interviews with builders, there is one that especially caught my eye. It was a picture of a house in West Kortright. "My sister and my mother gave me 12 acres of land, when I was 18," Clarke Sanders tells me. Never having built a house before, at 19 he set out to put a house on the land. "I thought maybe it will take me two years, then I kept going with it." Building the house was a break from the intense mental labor of college, he could rest his head by working with his hands. College was also an inspiration in the building's design. He was a student at Cornell, where "there were magnificent buildings with thick slate roofs. It took him ten summers to do the stonework. "We moved into the house, but then I had to slate it. All in all, it was a 25 year project." It may have been a 25 year project, but it was the first leg of a life's journey into learning about materials, methods and outcomes. On the way he discovered "Straw Bale Construction." Interestingly, Ty's next project involves Straw Bale construction. In a society of builders, ideas spread and grow.
I should tell you about the spreading and growing of the Bushel. As Anna Moschovakis tells it, there were five artists at a Halloween party in Stamford. One attender had been born and raised here in the Catskills. A few others had been living here a decade or more. One was farming, a couple were writers in this party group. All had a desire for public or semi-public space. When she moved here in 2006, "it was hard to find where I might cross paths with people. There were churches and some art spaces but not some place you'd walk down Main Street and be surprised by an event happening." They began by renting a storefront, month to month, growing as others found them. They were holding events, poetry readings and other art events. Eventually, in 2019, her family bought the building in Delhi at a fire sale, where the Art Collective rents the storefront. Besides art events, as folks in the community need a place to meet, they often are extended a welcome.
Among the artists in the collective, there are generational waves of migration, from recent arrivals to folks who came up and stayed in the 1970s to "legacy families... I think we like to frame it differently," says Anna Moschovakis "and not have there be a locals vs. outsiders divide. I think more about what it means to be a part of the current community." Anna is careful to remind me that she is one voice of many who can speak about the intentions of this more or less anarchic group. There is a growing art scene in the Catskills and it is reflected in the collective's membership. How does it grow? As I interviewed Anna and Mina Takahashi as they served beverages behind the bar, a young woman artist, Nicole DeSilva, from Albany asks about showing a feminist film series. As Mina tells her about the collective, Mina turns to me and says, "See that's how we grow!"
