Linking Collections, Building Connections

Howard Greenberg donated photographs by Jessie Tarbox Beals, the first woman to be hired as a photojournalist by an American newspaper, to the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild. As a visitor to the Byrdcliffe Art Colony in 1908, Beals documented the buildings and studio activity of the early Byrdcliffe Colony. Eastover is a large residence inhabited by artists visiting the early colony, as well as participants in Byrdcliffe’s artists-in-residence program today. 

The Loom Room was built in 1906 as an addition to White Pines, the home of Byrdcliffe’s founders Ralph and Jane Whitehead. The Loom Room was used primarily as a studio and teaching space by Marie Little, Byrdcliffe’s weaver-in-residence from 1902 until around 1915. Her students included the Whiteheads. Ralph Whitehead dreamed of learning the art of tapestry from William Morris, one of its foremost practitioners in the nineteenth century; Morris told Whitehead that he might not be cut out for the difficult art form. 

Historian Cheryl Robertson discusses Byrdcliffe's Loom Room in this video excerpt from Cambiz Khosravi’s documentary Woodstock: In Search of Utopia.