Maria Reidelbach is a local food activist who engages in social practice, interdisciplinary art and writing. Her current work is focused on food and agriculture in the Mid-Hudson Valley. Current projects include Stick to Local Farms, [1] an interactive map featuring local farms, The Yardavore, [2] a column about eating locally foraged and cultivated food, and the Stick to Local Farms Cookbook: Hudson Valley. [3]
Since 2003, Reidelbach has focused on interactive art and writing that engages the public. Past projects include Goofy Garden Golf, Homegrown Mini-Golf, the world's largest garden gnome and Valley of the Giants, [4] a community plan.
As an artist, she cultivates an "interaction of art and life," bringing people together in public art projects, sometimes involving found objects and donations of materials, along with recycled items collected by dumpster diving through lower Manhattan.
Stick to Local Farms comprises an annual map to over two dozen farms in the Rondout Valley for which Reidelbach has created art stickers; participants tour the farms and collect the stickers, having adventures and earning awards.
Reidelbach assisted sculptor Milo Mottola to create the Totally Kid Carousel, an award-winning public artwork and amusement ride at Riverbank State Park (at 145th Street and Riverside Drive), facing the Hudson River. Displaying a menagerie of full-scale carousel figures designed in collaboration with neighborhood children, the carousel received the 1996 Award for Excellence in Design from the Art Commission of the City of New York.
In 1991, Reidelbach wrote the definitive history of Mad , the bestselling Completely Mad: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine (Little, Brown), ranked by Library Journal as "essential for pop culture collections."
In 1985, at New York's Guggenheim Museum, she organized an exhibition on the eccentric visionary painter Alfred Jensen. Garnering favorable reviews, her art exhibitions and gallery shows have often displayed unusual subjects (art revealing the subjectivity of science, editorial cartoons, architect-designed furniture, Victorian underwear).
Fascinated with mom-and-pop culture, Reidelbach co-authored Miniature Golf [5] (Abbeville Press, 1987), the only book ever bound in artificial turf, and in 2004, she teamed with the artist Ken Brown to create Goofy Garden Golf, a decorative miniature golf course at Pier 2 (west of North Moore Street) in Manhattan's Hudson River Park. Goofy Garden Golf was planned as a tribute to Frieda Carter, who designed the first miniature golf course at Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, in 1928.
Her 2006 project, Homegrown Mini-Golf, was landscaped entirely in edible plant, annotated with information about their biology, history and edibility. As a "roadside lure", she created Chomsky, the world's tallest garden gnome (13 feet and six inches high), as acknowledged by Guinness World Records. The project was designed to celebrate local agriculture, and is sited on Kelder's Farm, a 200 year old fruit and vegetable farm. The popular giant gnome and roadside attraction has become a permanent part of the family's thriving agritourist business. [6]
Her bestselling Completely Mad: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine (Little, Brown) was a 1991 selection of the Quality Paperback Book Club. For that comprehensive study, she interviewed many cartoonists, and Bill Gaines, publisher of Mad and EC Comics, gave her total access to his magazine's internal correspondence and filing cabinets. Speaking at the memorial service for Gaines in the Time Warner building on June 5, 1992, she described her research:
Publishers Weekly reviewed:
Beatrix Cadwalader Farrand was an American landscape gardener and landscape architect. Her career included commissions to design about 110 gardens for private residences, estates and country homes, public parks, botanic gardens, college campuses, and the White House. Only a few of her major works survive: Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden on Mount Desert, Maine, the restored Farm House Garden in Bar Harbor, the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden, and elements of the campuses of Princeton, Yale, and Occidental.
Kerhonkson is a hamlet and census-designated place (CDP) in Ulster County, New York, United States. The population was 1,684 at the 2010 census.
Garden gnomes are lawn ornament figurines of small humanoid creatures based on the mythological creature and diminutive spirit which occur in Renaissance magic and alchemy, known as gnomes. They also draw on the German folklore of the dwarf.
Kykuit, known also as the John D. Rockefeller Estate, is a 40-room historic house museum in Pocantico Hills, a hamlet in the town of Mount Pleasant, New York 25 miles north of New York City. The house was built for oil tycoon and Rockefeller family patriarch John D. Rockefeller. Conceived largely by his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., and enriched by the art collection of the third-generation scion, Governor of New York, and Vice President of the United States, Nelson Rockefeller, it was home to four generations of the family. The house is a National Historic Landmark owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and tours are given by Historic Hudson Valley.
Rock City is a tourist attraction on Lookout Mountain in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. Opened in May 1932, the attraction gained prominence after owners Garnet and Frieda Carter hired Clark Byers in 1935 to paint "See Rock City" barn advertisements throughout the Southeast and Midwest United States; Byers painted over 900 barn roofs and walls, in nineteen states, by 1969.
Lawn ornaments are decorative objects placed in the grassy area of a property.
Olana State Historic Site is a historic house museum and property in Greenport, New York, near the city of Hudson. The estate was home to Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), one of the major figures in the Hudson River School of landscape painting. The centerpiece of Olana is an eclectic villa which overlooks parkland and a working farm designed by the artist. The residence has a wide view of the Hudson River Valley, the Catskill Mountains and the Taconic Range. Church and his wife Isabel (1836–1899) named their estate after a fortress-treasure house in ancient Greater Persia, which also overlooked a river valley.
Ken Brown is an American filmmaker, photographer, cartoonist, and designer. He grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and currently lives in New York City. He has directed dozens of animations, experimental films and video documentaries over the last four decades.
City Park, a 1,300-acre (5.3 km2) public park in New Orleans, Louisiana, is the 87th largest and 20th-most-visited urban public park in the United States. City Park is approximately 50% larger than Central Park in New York City, the municipal park recognized by Americans nationwide as the archetypal urban greenspace. Although it is an urban park whose land is owned by the City of New Orleans, it is administered by the City Park Improvement Association, an arm of state government, not by the New Orleans Parks and Parkways Department. City Park is unusual in that it is a largely self-supporting public park, with most of its annual budget derived from self-generated revenue through user fees and donations. In the wake of the enormous damage inflicted upon the park due to Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism began to partially subsidize the park's operations.
Shelburne Museum is a museum of art, design, and Americana located in Shelburne, Vermont, United States. Over 150,000 works are exhibited in 39 exhibition buildings, 25 of which are historic and were relocated to the museum grounds. It is located on 45 acres (18 ha) near Lake Champlain.
Paul Dye Jr., known as Pete Dye, was an American golf course designer and a member of a family of course designers. He was married to fellow designer and amateur champion Alice Dye.
Hope Valley was the first full-fledged country club community in the suburbs of Durham, Durham County, North Carolina. It is developed around an 18-hole Donald Ross golf course. Created in 1925-26 just before the stock market crash of 1929, Hope Valley remained a unique rural colony until after World War II. Well outside the city limits Hope Valley was situated between Durham and Chapel Hill, and their university campuses, Duke and UNC Chapel Hill. It was one of North Carolina's first suburbs designed to be completely serviced by the automobile, well beyond urban transportation routes. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009 as the Hope Valley Historic District, a national historic district.
Castle Park, formerly Castle Amusement Park, is a 25-acre amusement park and family amusement center located in Riverside, California. The park utilizes a medieval "castle" theme and includes attractions such as a miniature golf course, arcade, and 22 amusement rides including two roller coasters such as Merlin's Revenge, a junior rollercoaster, and Screamin' Demon, a spinning Wild Mouse rollercoaster. The main "castle" themed building, houses the arcade as well as its only dark ride, "Ghost Blasters", an interactive attraction, designed by Sally Corporation, which can also be found at other amusement parks throughout North America. The park was designed, built and operated by Bud Hurlbut, who designed several rides at Knott's Berry Farm. Castle Park is currently owned and operated by Palace Entertainment.
Stacy Levy is a sculptor who works with ecological natural patterns and processes, often using water and water flows as a medium. Many of her works address environmental problems at the same time that they make the functioning of the environment visible. Her studio is based in rural Pennsylvania, but she works on projects around the world.
John Francis Putnam was the art director and designer of Mad from 1954 to 1980. "Until John came to us, Mad was just a comic book," said publisher Bill Gaines following Putnam's death. "He joined Mad as a $75 a week temporary employee, and was [in 1980] the oldest member of the staff both in terms of age and time with the magazine."
Wheaton Regional Park is a public park and county-designated protected area, located in Wheaton, Maryland. It is operated and managed by Montgomery County Parks, a division of a bi-county agency, Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission (M–NCPPC), which serves both Montgomery and Prince George's counties in the Washington, D.C. suburbs of the state of Maryland. The park was established in 1960, incorporating several large parcels of land into one of the county's largest parks, at the size of 538.7 acres.
American cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman was the founding editor and primary writer for the humor periodical Mad from its founding in 1952 until its 28th issue in 1956. Featuring pop-culture parodies and social satire, what began as a color comic book became a black-and-white magazine with its 24th issue.
Mary Rutherfurd Jay (1872–1953) was one of America's earliest landscape architects and an advocate of horticultural education and careers for women. The great, great granddaughter of American Founding Father John Jay, she grew up in Rye, New York surrounded by the gardens of her ancestral homestead at the Jay Estate in Westchester County overlooking Long Island Sound. Her education was fostered by travel abroad with her mother and domestically through classes in design and horticulture taken at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Bussey Institute in Forest Hills, Massachusetts.
Alfred E. Neuman is the fictitious mascot and cover boy of the American humor magazine Mad. The character's distinct smiling face, parted red hair, gap-tooth smile, freckles, protruding nose, and scrawny body, actually first emerged in U.S. iconography decades prior to his association with the magazine, appearing in late nineteenth-century advertisements for painless dentistry—the origin of his "What, me worry?" motto. However, he actually first appeared in advertisements for an 1894 play, called "The New Boy", which portrayed a variation of him with the quote, "What's the good of anything?—Nothing!". He also appeared in the early 1930s, on a presidential campaign postcard with the caption "Sure I'm for Roosevelt". The magazine's editor Harvey Kurtzman claimed the character in 1954, and he was named "Alfred E. Neuman" by Mad's second editor, Al Feldstein, in 1956. Since his debut in Mad, Neuman's likeness has appeared on the cover of all but a handful of the magazine's over 550 issues. Rarely seen in profile, Neuman has almost always been recognizable in front view, silhouette, or directly from behind.
Trump National Golf Club Westchester is a private golf club in Briarcliff Manor, New York. The 140-acre (57 ha) course has eighteen holes, with a 75,000-square-foot (7,000 m2) clubhouse. Founded in 1922 as Briarcliff Country Club, it later operated as Briar Hills Country Club and Briar Hall Golf and Country Club. Donald Trump, the former president of the United States, purchased the property in 1996 and renamed the club after its county, Westchester, in a similar manner to his other golf properties. He had the clubhouse and course rebuilt for its 2002 reopening; the course was designed by Jim Fazio. Donald Trump served as president over Trump National Golf Club LLC from August 2000 until January 19, 2017, the day before his inauguration.