On July 16, 2017, SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine, hosted a fundraising bash to help finance a new roof for Lupinewood, a majority-trans living, arts, and organizing collective in Greenfield, Massachusetts. Providing sweet-ass sounds that encouraged total abandonment on the dance floor were bands Diva Cup, Paper Bee, and DJ Kobold, aka Andrew Huckins.

Portland, Maine and Greenfield, Massachusetts
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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

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Linda McInerney is standing on the set of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale directed by John Bechtold, a recent immersive theater project of Eggtooth Productions in the five-story Arts Block in Greenfield, Massachusetts. McInerney is at the heart of Eggtooth, a nonprofit theater company based in Greenfield. She wants you to be unsettled. “We have to become comfortable with extreme discomfort,” McInerney says, beaming warmly.

With roughly forty years of theater experience as an actor, director, writer, and producer, artistic director McInerney has the practical know-how of staging performances and a unique, creative insight for developing new work by experienced artists and newcomers. “What I love to do,” says McInerney, “is to provide opportunities to people with dreams and vision and there’s become a community of people who are resources to those creators. My job is almost like a matchmaker or conduit.”

“One of Linda’s many strengths,” says cross-artform artist and scholar Terry Jenoure of Greenfield, “is that she’s able to sense what is needed. She’s great at that.” Jenoure created a theater piece, “Honey Bees, A Communion,” for Eggtooth’s Full Disclosure Festival in June 2016. The festival paired artists with climate scholars to develop new work. Jenoure’s Communion was a sensory incantation, punctuated with the addicting, harmonic buzz of her violin and real honey on the tongues of the audience.

Terry Jenoure performs with drummer Bob Wiener in the Full Disclosure Festival | Photo by Michael Bannon

“I will say I have a particular interest in placemaking and what art does to a place,” McInerney says. “What people’s experience of art in a place does to the people in the place, and what that impact is over time and what’s the collective incremental, you know, when that pebble gets dropped in the pond, how far out can those rings go?”

Indeed, place itself is an important component to the ethical underpinning of art for McInerney. How people develop their relationship to where they live and how art prompts a reexamination of that connection is something very much on her mind. To that end, Eggtooth has invested in commissioning new work that focuses on place, incorporating local spaces in their downtown and other unconventional venues.

Lindel Hart performing in his adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein | Make-up by Joe Dulude II

The commission of the reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by Lindel Hart, of Greenfield, in the former First National Bank building, was very much a piece of theater about place as a reflection of the philosophical themes at the center of the literary work. Hart’s adaptation made thoughtful use of the grand and torn cavernous space, simultaneously bringing in an audience for a gripping piece of theater and nudging interest in the building itself. That production went on to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2015, where it earned high praise.

“Audiences are hungry to be excited, to be shaken up, to be surprised, to be filled with wonder and awe and that’s a real blessing in this area. We sell out almost everything we do. … There’s nothing passive about the way work happens in this valley. It’s very active. That comes from the business community, that comes from people who share their venues, that comes from the audiences,” McInerney says.
Asked why she feels particularly compelled to reach out and shake up an audience, her embrace of discomfort, as she calls it, McInerney responds quick and dead-serious: “Because it makes you woke. It makes you aware of what’s going on around you. … you gotta be here now. Because if you’re not, you’re not working with what’s here now. And that’s the wonderful thing about this kind of theater,” McInerney adds.

“You’re living in a world of what’s possible, and it’s endless.”

Top photo: Lindel Hart performing in his adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein | Make-up by Joe Dulude II

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