Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities, "We the People" grant. The $36,265 award was given to support sustainable conservation of the collections and historic house. It will allow analysis of the complex data collected from a year long, ongoing environmental monitoring program. An outdoor weather station, 27 indoor dataloggers, pollutant data loggers, and microstations were placed on walls, in wall and ceiling cavities and in crawl spaces to collect and record temperature, relative humidity, pollutants and solar gain. This information will be used to understand climate activity inside and outside the house and solve problems such as moisture migration through walls and insure that the correct climate controls are being utilized.

The goal of the "We the People" initiative is to encourage and strengthen the teaching, study and understanding of American history

Listen to Director Kinney Frelinghuysen's interview with Alan Chartock about the House & Studio, the stories behind it, and this past season's special exhibit.

Click here to listen to the interview

In 1933, George L.K.Morris and Alexander Calder exhibited together at the Berkshire Museum. Morris most likely purchased the mobile from Calder at that time. The two artists went on to exhibit at the highly publicized "Five Contemporary American Concretionists" show in 1936 at the Reinhardt Galleries in New York.

The mobile's installation in the Crane Room at the Berkshire Museum celebrates the homecoming for the Calder collection which has been on tour in New York, Paris, and Toronto. The Berkshire Museum was the first to give Calder a public commission, the mobiles in the theater. They also gave Morris his first exhibit.

"Indian Composition", a 1942 George L.K. Morris painting owned by the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. has been replicated and enlarged to 150' tall to screen a luxury condominium project in Seoul, Korea. The condominiums are called Mega Hills and sell for $3 million dollars. They are located in the fashionable Gangnam section of Seoul, on Cheongdam Street which is sometimes referred to as the Fashion and Art Street or Rodeo Street, referring to Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, California.

Mega-Mark, the construction company for the project, chose the Morris work for the giant screen to express the artistic and modern flavor of their high end condominiums in a neighborhood full of art galleries and boutiques.

Frelinghuysen Morris House and Studio in Lenox, which owns the copyright to the painting, was paid a fee for the use of the image. Director Kinney Frelinghuysen would not disclose the figure but remarked, "It pays for the fully assessed property taxes the Foundation pays to the towns of Lenox and Stockbridge." He added, "I love that a piece of artwork shown in Seoul can be used to beautify a construction project and pay for schoolbooks in Lenox and Stockbridge".

"Of all the towns that could have played host to New England's first modernist building, Lenox, Mass., is among the least likely. When Mrs. Astor's 400 finished summering at their extravagant, ironically named "cottages" in Newport, R.I., they would shift to Lenox, in the Berkshires, for several more weeks before returning to Manhattan in the fall. Lenox's cottages embraced many architectural styles, but modernism definitely was not among them," writes Art and Antiques journalist Sheila Gibson Stoodley. Read the full article

"Of all the historic houses in Berkshire County, the only one in which I feel the presence of non-ghostly inhabitants is the Frelinghuysen Morris House & Studio in Lenox," writes Berkshire Eagle reporter Milton Bass. "The art that George L.K. Morris and his wife, Suzy Frelinghuysen, incorporated into the very essence of their home gives you the feeling that at any moment one of them may step in from an adjoining room.

"For a culture vulture, whizzing through the Hudson River Valley and across the Berkshires in Massachusetts en route to somewhere else can be frustrating," writes Post-Gazette reporter Mackenzie Carpenter. Read the full article