Looking at the building that houses Wingate Studio’s impressive collection of meticulously maintained vintage printing equipment, it’s hard to imagine the business could exist anywhere but New England. Inhabiting a converted barn on a 55-acre family farm that practically straddles three states from its location at the convergence of Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, the 31-year-old print studio could double as a stage set for The Crucible.

Wingate Farms

Wingate Studio founder Peter Pettengill’s family has occupied the land for generations. His parents still live in the old farmhouse and his daughter, Olivia (along with partner Susie Parke-Sutherland), has revived the land back into a working farm that grows spinach, flowers, and summer greens, and is home to 900 egg-producing chickens and 8 pigs. A dog named Busy keeps things in order.

For a seven-year spell, however, Pettengill lived in San Francisco, where he attained the title of master printer at the city’s distinguished Crown Point Press and met his wife Deborra before returning back east to found his Hinsdale, New Hampshire studio. It was also where he met many of the influential artists he’s worked with over the years, including Sol LeWitt, Joan Jonas, Wayne Thiebaud, Ed Ruscha, and Elaine DeKooning.

“In the early days I was doing mostly contract printing for other publishers, especially the Limited Editions Club in New York,” Pettengill says. “My very first project here was printing Robert Mapplethorpe photogravures for them.”

Pettengill began publishing independently in the 1990s, producing work that was featured prominently in a 2015 30-year retrospective curated by Boston University, including prints by Xylor Jane, Chuck Webster, and Sebastian Black. Jane, a Greenfield, Massachusetts-based artist whose process he describes as “translating notions of time, meaning and pure mathematics into her own visual language,” is a mainstay with whom he still works with some frequency.

Wingate publishes printed editions of work it creates with both established and emerging artists who are invited to print at the studio. While specializing in intaglio etching, Wingate sometimes works beyond the usual bounds of this process according to the needs of the artist. The artist guides the project; the studio facilitates. The resulting prints are then promoted and marketed by Wingate both to private clients and institutions, including the Whitney, MoMA, and the Library of Congress.

When pressed, Pettengill singles out avant-garde legend John Cage as a favorite collaborator, who he recalls as “one of the most inspiring people I ever met, a very disciplined artist in spite of his famed reliance on chance operations.

“His approach was to imitate nature in her manner of operation,” Pettengill continues. “So he set up systems that would use chance to create strikingly beautiful visual work. He didn’t separate art and life, but continually showed how they were one and the same. His joy and pleasure in the ordinary aspects of life were absolutely contagious.”

Inside wall of Wingate Studios

Wingate is a place where artists can come to focus intently on a particular creative goal, living on the farm or in nearby lodging while immersed in a weeks-long project. The property isn’t impossibly far from New York City, however, so the studio does also attract the odd commuter, like painter Walton Ford, who might be up two days a week to keep a project rolling.

Known for his life-size watercolors of birds and animals in the style of 19th-century natural history painters like Audubon, Ford’s work is, according to Pettengill, “visually stunning and appealing,” but also bears “a large element of the grotesque.”

“His paintings and prints create complex narratives, often based on historical events or people, and function as critiques of the general human enterprise, exploring themes of colonialism, industrialism, the environment, extinct species and crackpot explorers and adventurers. It functions on many different levels, but it invariably draws viewers in before they have a chance to comprehend the breadth of it.”

Despite the somewhat arcane nature of the craft and (by today’s standards) an antiquated pace of distribution, Pettengill believes that print has a bright future thanks to interest from younger generations of artists. His son James and James’ wife Alyssa, who function as studio co-directors, have also brought a more modern edge to the business.

“They keep up with and are connected to today’s emerging artists, and they’ve really pushed Wingate forward in terms of our publishing program,” he says. “We have been working with a lot of younger artists over the last couple of years.”

In fact, he believes the art is flourishing, both through traditional outlets and via workshops affiliated with colleges and universities.

“We’re also in a moment where artists are working across media more than ever, not limiting themselves strictly to a painting practice or even material media. They’re interested in doing their work in many different forms, and, of course, there are so many new technologies that are carrying printmaking into the digital age.”

Peter Pettengill at Wingate Studios

Peter Pettengill, Found Wingate Studios
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Top photo portrait of Peter Pettengill working with his Inking Plate | All photos by Paul Teeling

The post Meet the Press appeared first on Take Magazine.

This article originally appeared in our April/May 2016 print issue. 

It’s a cold day in January when I speak with Hannah Mohan, guitarist/singer and primary songwriter for the western Massachusetts-based And the Kids, who calls me from amidst a month-long recording session at Montreal’s Breakglass Studios. Friends Share Lovers, the 10-song album they’re crafting with the aid of Canadian producer/musician Jace Lasek, is scheduled for release in June on Northampton, Massachusetts’ Signature Sounds label.

“We’re in the studio only during Mercury in retrograde,” Mohan notes, referring to the astrological phenomenon that’s customarily associated with confusion and delay.

“Isn’t that crazy?”

Part of the reason the band is recording in Montreal is that keyboardist Megan Miller is Canadian and had the unfortunate experience of being deported from the United States a while back. New York native Taliana Katz, who had just begun playing with the band when they performed for National Public Radio’s Tiny Desk Concert series last June, has assumed bass duties and was unceremoniously tossed into “the mom van” for two North American tours with the bands Highly Suspect and Ra Ra Riot, including a stop at Austin, Texas’s requisite South by Southwest rock roundup in March.

“I had just gotten back from India and moved up to western Mass. from New York,” Katz says of her whirlwind induction by fire. “When I got there, we talked about Tiny Desk and decided that it probably wasn’t a good idea for me to play it because I had just started. But when we went to the label to do a preview of the concert, we tried it as both a trio and a Hannah-[and]-Becca-[Lasaponaro] duo, and [Signature Sounds] decided that it would be all three of us. It was a pretty surreal experience!”

When I ask if the band has considered moving to a big city like New York or L.A., their answer is appropriately adventurous.

“We are constantly considering every city we go to,” Mohan laughs. She says she’d like to stay in Montreal but admits that the non-Canadian band members would then likely have similar problems to the border woes Miller has suffered. “Yeah, we already decided—no more deportations.”

The group came together at the Institute for Musical Arts (IMA), a nonprofit music education facility in the hills of Goshen, Massachusetts, dedicated to supporting women and girls in music. The camp was cofounded by Ann Hackler and June Millington, the latter a Filipina musician who fronted the trailblazing early ’70s all-female band Fanny. After Mohan and drummer Lasaponaro dropped out of high school, they were encouraged to see what the place might have to offer them.

And the Kids | Photo by Pierre Manning

“Our parents sent us to the IMA to make sure that we were actually doing stuff,” Mohan chuckles. The band’s name stems from a Peter Pan-ish tale of teen rebellion and resourcefulness that brought Mohan and Lasaponaro together during their wayward youth.

“It used to be ‘And the Kids and the Pirates,’ ” says Mohan. “We had a group of friends, and we all lived on this island [in the Connecticut River] for one summer. We built a huge fort out of all these tarps and just…lived on this island,” she laughs. “Sometimes we’d go out for supplies. To everyone else we were just ‘The Kids,’ but to us, we were ‘The Pirates.’ ” The name was eventually shortened to keep it simpler.

The band’s music is, like its musicians, unusually original and not at all constrained by any conventional pop sensibility. Buoyed from a young age by a strong network of supporters, they’ve been allowed to grow artistically in a way that is rare in the music biz—a way that is perhaps aware of the commerciality of the medium but not at all beholden to it or even that interested in it.

Frontwoman Mohan is a striking individual who’s remarkably confident and comfortable in her own skin—skin that’s been customized with unapologetic, unconcealable tattoos including a solid black line that dramatically splits her lower lip and gives her a tribal aura, and the words Folk the System emblazoned across her upper chest.

Her voice sirens in a mellifluous, elfin vibrato from the upper octaves, a sound that makes your spine tingle a little in a rare way, like the first time you heard Judy Garland’s “Over the Rainbow.” Mohan’s singing has been compared to that of ’80s punk/new wave icon Siouxsie Sioux, though she points mostly to more contemporary artists like Feist and Arcade Fire as influences and even some much older favorites like Buddy Holly and Jimmy Rogers.

“I grew up listening to country music. Oddly enough, my parents were really into pop country. And then I met Rebecca, and I started listening to ’60s rock. That’s kind of where I think the structure comes from, and then…I don’t know, I like noise music…a lot of different stuff.”

Lasaponaro has added to the mix some interesting percussion—another quality that gives the band a unique sound—including sleigh bells and glockenspiel, an instrument she describes as “what I imagine magic must sound like.”

She adds, “I think the percussion instruments add a little ear candy to the music—something people are maybe not expecting to hear, and when they do, they’re like, ‘What was that?’”

https://andthekidsmusic.bandcamp.com/

And the Kids – Hannah Mohan, guitar/vocals | Rebecca Lasaponaro, drums/percussion | Taliana Katz, bass | Megan Miller, keyboards
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Photos by Pierre Manning

The post The Kids Are Alright appeared first on Take Magazine.

Bernie Sanders isn’t the only Vermonter airing young America’s passions and woes on stages near and far these days. Brattleboro’s teenage sensations The Snaz seem to be popping up everywhere that something’s popping, with a modern sound that evokes everything from Spoon to the B-52s and The Black Keys.

Singer/guitarist/songwriter Dharma Ramirez paints sultry, well-woven vocal melodies over the band’s tightly crafted rhythms — solid unison alterna-riffs that collapse sometimes randomly into more fluid, neo-psychedelia provided by keyboardist Mavis Eaton and bassist Nina Cates. It all has a maniacal quality that seems to pull back just short of implosion and then relax into a buttery miasma long enough to get the offense rested and back on the field.

“We’re really working on stepping up our live performance,” says Ramirez. “We want people to come to our shows and know that they’re seeing something different each time they wouldn’t wanna miss.”

Photo by Andrew O’bierne

Though the band’s songs have a healthy helping of social and hormonal angst that might be expected from such a tender-aged crew, their main vibe seems to be more that of a focused, dedicated unit honing its songwriting and chops at a full-on, grown-up rock ‘n’ roll pace, playing all over New England and at Austin’s SXSW, and recording a new album (Running Away From Home) in the last year. Their song “Anna,” a poignant if snarky observation on teen girl envy, came in at #2 in The River’s listeners’ poll, and their fortunate fall-in with Newfane/Guilford producer Peter Solley (Procol Harum, Motorhead, The Romantics) has garnered them some ears that may otherwise have been attuned elsewhere.

What’s the next big thing for The Snaz? Ramirez says they really want to break into Boston and New York City, which they seem to be beating a path to already.

“We just confirmed our first NYC gig at Rockwood Music Hall at 4 p.m. Nov.14,” she says. “We’re pretty pumped.” Closer to home, check them out at Whetsone Station October 15, 2015 and at Burlington’s Skinny Pancake October 17, 2015

Photo by Andrew O’bierne

Top photo by Andrew O’bierne

The post The Brat Pack appeared first on Take Magazine.

Mass MoCA, the preeminent curator of cutting-edge visual art in the Berkshires, has also firmly established its reputation as a purveyor of live entertainment.

At the vanguard of its foray into the phonic is the biennial Solid Sound Festival, which takes place June 26-28 and is headlined by festival founders and alt-country messiahs Wilco. A weekend-long campout where you’re equally likely to stumble into a mandolin workshop, a falafel booth, or a bizarre bit of street theater, Solid Sound has become a summer staple for dance-starved, vibe-hungry visitors to North Adams.

Speedy Ortiz | Photo by Shervin Lainez

It’s also a festival where New England acts are well-represented, including the Expandable Brass Band and Northampton’s Speedy Ortiz, who were added earlier this month when Springfield native and blues icon Taj Mahal had to bow out of his slot citing health issues.

“This will be my first time playing at Solid Sound, but I was gonna go either way,” says Speedy’s Sadie Dupuis. “We’re really looking forward to playing with Wilco and Real Estate.”

Solid Sound Festival | Photo courtesy of TMM

Also on the bill are New England rock legends NRBQ. The band’s sax player, Klem Kimek, credits New England’s wealth of live-music venues for his musical evolution: “Me and my pals were music hungry, and New England was small enough that any venue in the six states was reachable by road trip to catch great music. It was a full-time hunt — bars, colleges, theaters, the Berkshire Music Barn, hockey rinks, and stadiums all presented great live music, and giants roamed the earth. Don’t get me goin’…”

Vermont folk artist Sam Amidon (performing with Bill Frisell), played a couple years back and “immediately loved the wide range of music and arts and the genuine spirit of celebration that pervades the festival,” and says he can’t wait to go back.

John Hodgman | Photo by Chattman Photography

Brookline, Massachusetts native (and Montague Book Mill haunter) John Hodgman returns to curate the comedy stage, along with fellow Daily Show alum Jessica Williams. Hodgman says he found his way into Solid Sound through the side door.

“I attended as a paying customer at the first Solid Sound in 2010,” he says. “Like all brilliant things that I love, I immediately wanted to parasitically attach myself to it. I succeeded.”

Solid Sound Festival | Photo courtesy of TMM

For kids, Vermont’s Circus Smirkus provides thrills and laughs, while performances by the Needham, Massachusetts-based nonprofit Plugged In, a program that helps kids who want to start or join bands get their jam on, might inspire younger audience members to strap on a Strat.

Top photo courtesy of TMM

The post Rock Solid appeared first on Take Magazine.