First Guest Artist Exhibition Installed at Renovated Trail Conference Headquarters

The newly renovated Trail Conference headquarters opened with a number of bare walls at the ribbon-cutting ceremony in April 2015. An art selection committee has since been formed, led by volunteer Glenda Haas and composed of fellow volunteer Diane Stripe and a staff liaison, with the goal of utilizing the arts to connect to environmental appreciation. Additionally, the stories of the Trail Conference and Darlington Schoolhouse come to life through photographs and artwork in the historic foyer’s double staircase. The building’s main conference and training room will display a rotating art exhibit, chiefly composed of local artists, in order to attain the committee’s mission of partnering the Trail Conference with the local community and artists to promote public trails. An art display system has been installed, and the Trail Conference is hosting its inaugural art exhibition.

The first guest artist is Richard Kirk Mills. His work comes to the Trail Conference as a satellite exhibition of “Ode to Earth,” a larger exhibition sponsored by the Blue Hill Art and Cultural Center at the Blue Hill Plaza office complex in Pearl River, N.Y. Barbara J. Sussman and Joanna Dickey, the curator and art administer of the Blue Hill Plaza Cultural Center, guided the Trail Conference Art Selection Committee in making the first exhibit happen. It was discovered that the Mills’s studio in Bovina, N.Y. was designed by Walter Aurell, the architect for the Darlington Schoolhouse renovation. Mills has also been involved in environmental artwork and restoration, primarily at the Teaneck Creek Conservancy and Hackensack River Stories Project. Mills’s background includes working as a master print-maker and as an art professor at Long Island University.

End of Main Street. Credit: Richard Kirk Mills.

Four of Mills’ interpretive graphics will be on display in the former schoolroom as well as with nine of Mills’s lyrical landscape paintings of Catskill locations.

The Richard Kirk Mills exhibition will be open to members and the public through Thursday, April 14 during regular Trail Conference office hours Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The paintings are offered for sale with 20 percent of the proceeds benefiting the Trail Conference.