Edward Hopper all Around Gloucester: Edward Hopper. Haskell’s House. 1924. Watercolor. Gift of Herbert A. Goldstone. National Gallery of Art. Washington, DC. Exhibited at Rehn Gallery (for more about Rehn Gallery, scroll down past cat. 92) and bought by George Bellows.
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A Cape Ann Holiday Tradition Returns! Happy news from Heidi Dallin!
“The Cape Ann YMCA presents Holiday Delights on stage in Gloucester, the beloved holiday production. Registration is now open for young people age 5 to 18 to perform in Holiday Delights.
Set in Gloucester, Holiday Delights is a festive evening of stories, music and dance recounting the special traditions that other cultures and families experience as seen through a young child’s magical journey on Christmas Eve to discover what is really important during the holiday season.
Young people can learn the basics of professional theatre as well as be a part of a Cape Ann Holiday tradition.
“There are terrific roles for young actors of all ages! All actors that register will be cast in the production and we welcome all levels of experience,” says YMCA of the North Shore Theatre Coordinator and Holiday Delights Director Heidi Dallin.
Rehearsals begin in October at the Cape Ann YMCA and the schedule is flexible. Performances are December 11 at 7pm; December 12 at 2pm and December 13 at 2pm at Annisquam Village Hall. To join the cast, go to www.northshoreymca.org and search for Cape Ann YMCA Theater Programs. For further information and questions, contact Heidi Dallin at dallinh@northshoreymca.org or 978-729-1094.”
Long Beach update, high tide: The rip rap is exposed along the Long Beach seawall: the August shelf of sand is gone. (compare Thursday views to today’s). All staircases intact. The tides met the wall but with little splash over. Front row cottages’ yard furniture, umbrellas, planters and the like appear unbothered– and the pea stone pathway did not wash every which way. The prevailing blusters remain monodirectional. Accordingly, walkers’ vista one way is blurry white and the other clear and warmer. Seagulls tucked behind the popple berm and atop its ridge. The surf exhausted three off on their own.
SUNDAYTHURSDAYSunday 830amSunday 8:30amSunday 630AM (across MA 9573 outages. 5 in Gloucester)Long Beach sand on ThursdayFRIDAY
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“Due to weather conditions, the Cape Ann Symphony has moved The75th Fantastique! Concert, the opening concert of its landmark 75th Diamond Anniversary season to Sunday, October 4 at 2:00 PM at Manchester-Essex Regional High School auditorium on 36 Lincoln Street in Manchester-by-the-Sea, MA. Tickets for the originally scheduled September 27th concert will be honored at the October 4th concert. Please bring your original tickets to the concert on October 4. Tickets are on sale now for the new concert date : Single ticket prices are $65 for adults, $60 for senior citizens, $20 for students of any age with valid Student ID; $5 for youth 12 years old and under. For information and to purchase subscriptions and single tickets, call 978-281-0543 or visit www.capeannsymphony.org
“A Nor’Easter won’t stop the Cape Ann Symphony from launching our year-long celebration of three-quarters of a century of Cape Ann Symphony bringing world-class orchestral music to Boston’s North Shore, ” says Cape Ann Symphony Board President Tom Mannle, “The75th Fantastique! Concerthas been moved to Sunday, October 4 at 2:00 PM. When we received the news that the Manchester schools, including our concert venue, would be closed due to the weather conditions, our Orchestra Manager Earl Powers and Maestro Yoichi Udagawa, sprinted into action reaching out to our musicians to determine availability for October 4. Thank you to our dedicated musicians for their flexibility, Manchester-Essex Public schools for making the venue available and Earl and the Maestro for their diligence in putting it all together ! This will truly be an historic concert!”
The75th Fantastique! Concert features an all-French masterworks program spanning from Lili Boulanger’s shimmering D’un matin deprintemps (Of a Spring Morning), a luminous impressionistic gem by one of the first women to win the prestigious Prix de Rome; to Claude Debussy’s evocative three-movement seascape La Mer , painting the ocean from dawn to noon, the play of waves, and the dialogue of wind and sea in glorious orchestral color; and the program culminates with Hector Berlioz’s groundbreaking Symphonie Fantastique.
The Cape Ann Symphony Diamond Anniversary Season Opening Concert, The75th Fantastique! Concert is now Sunday, October 4, 2026 at 2:00 pm at the Manchester-Essex Regional High School Auditorium on 36 Lincoln Street, Manchester-by-the-Sea, MA. Manchester-Essex High School Auditorium is handicapped accessible. Ticket prices are $65 for adults, $60 for senior citizens, $20 for Students of any age with a valid student ID, $5 for Youth (12 years old and under). Season Subscriptions are available. For information or tickets, call 978-281-0543 or visit www.capeannsymphony.org“
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September storm photos 9/26/26. “It’s a LOT harder this way!” passing walkers oft repeated, heading from Glouc. to Rockport end of Long Beach. At 7:30 AM ribbons of wind whipped dry sand failed to pick up. Rain began 8:30. Next high tide about 11:30. Forecast estimates 5-8pm as greater impact.
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The random conspicuous yet unused digital display signs by St. Peters were removed.
AFTER photos: Sept. 25, 2026
The new city wayfinding signs express a little bit of the original Gloucester Harbor Walk design (Cambridge Seven Assoc.), which gave a nod in part to famous subway maps/color legibility. Not sure how/where the eventual site design may land for the current iterations. If the “subway” stop signs were integrated and situated next to parking meters and a HarborWalk marker — and mindful of not blocking sitelines– it might help.
The original Gloucester Harbor Walk design
iconic chris beck London map 1930s
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High tides: Thursday 10 AM. Friday 11AM (white foam has reached the wall). Saturday noon. Sunday 1PM.
photos: Sept. 24, 2026. Storm prep bustle was light because so many had cleared out ahead of Labor day. The footbridge to Cape Hedge is removed. The seawall stairs have not been removed for the season.
photos: Sept. 25, 2026. Surfers out.
video: Sept. 25
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“Opening at Jane Deering Gallery is Katherine Downey Miller | Waterborne on Saturday September 26th with a reception from 3-5pm. For Katherine Downey Miller, a renowned New England artist known for her work that moves between landscape and abstraction, this exhibition is a homecoming. It was at Halibut Point, less than five miles from the gallery’s door, that she first absorbed the raw energy of the Atlantic as a child; and it is that coastline—its beauty, its violence, its vast unknowability—that she has spent a career translating into paint. The exhibition brings together works on canvas and paper in oil and acrylic, tracing the arc of a practice rooted in landscape and drawn, inevitably, toward the sea.
Gallery hours: Fri & Sat 1-5pm; Sun 1-4pm; and by appointment at 781-405-5050.
images:
Jacob’s Pond 2025 . Oil on canvas . 36” x 48”
Lake 2024 . Acrylic on canvas . 72x72inches
The Falls 2 2026 . Acrylic on Yupo paper on board . 12″ x 9″
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Expecting this to be a life changing look at the art of David Hockney, and Bing McGilvray, with revelations big and small, rare and personal, shedding light on artist friendships, critical art history and core themes of both artists, especially Hockney’s ways to create, share and distribute art.
And two more shows not to miss right here right now:
On view now–not overlapping with the above show) Jeff Weaver at North Shore Art Association (thru Aug 30)
and
Cape Ann Museum’s –overlapping a few days!–Avery, Gottlieb & Rothko (thru Sept. 27th)
RIP David Hockney 1937-June 2026. June! 😦
and big sympathy to Bing 🍒 who has also written a three part series ahead of the exhibition, “Hockney Reproduction(s): A Celebration of the Life and Art of David Hockney (1937–2026)”, and published on Cape Ann Cosmos, Part 1, 2, and 3.Read Part 1. The 1980s: A life in pictures by Bing here
THROWBACK. A selection from a piece I wrote about David Hockney and shared on GMG back in 2013:
“…DC, NYC, and more: Armory Centennial shows from New York Historical Society’s Armory Show at 100 and Washington DC’s Phillips and on line too for the Archives of American Art; do yourself a favor as they are worth engagement. Many of the artists had Gloucester ties. I always paused whatever I was doing for any of Sarah Fishko’s analysis on WNYC, usually Morning Edition or All Things Considered, and syndicated through other outlets now, too (Studio 360 and On the Media). Her extended radio documentary for the Armory anniversary, Culture Shock 1913, continues to be re-broadcast through outlets. Like a painter using color to move our eyes across a surface, Fishko’s pieces are brushed with pauses and impeccable ambient sound and audio moments–mini Lubitsch sound banquets. Art to savor.
San Francisco, de Young Museum, 2013: A major retrospective of David Hockney’s work completed over the last decade, A Bigger Exhibition (closing this month), has generated voluminous press and praise, mostly for his legacy of embracing new technology. Oh, and how old he is now, somehow compelling him to create before time runs out. The latter opinion grates and not just because of repetition. (See a good overview of the de Young exhibit on Newshour but listen at 4:24 dispensing this cliché while introducing another. When hasn’t Hockney investigated any series, media or pursuit without daunting and constant focus? He’s always testing and the mastery and means to do so, and often exuberant.) It’s also in the news because of Vermeer, but more on that below. Reactions to this Hockney exhibit are reminiscent of a 1980s traveling retrospective for his earlier work, not regarded universally with favor, but ample discussion. I recall moving along that crowded exhibit, a chronological layout with each room different series, artistic intentions, styles & techniques– and a log jam most at the space featuring his monumental collaged Polaroids (1988 at the MET). Hockney print shows were also traveling (for MA both the MFA and the DeCordova). I didn’t think about Hockney then as a trailblazer for artistic pluralism. Lightbulb memory next: I do remember the Hockney New Yorker article everyone was talking about in January 2000, The Looking Glass, by Lawrence Wechsler. I remember where I was when I first read it, the first contemporary artists who spoke with me and who I turned to for opinions, curators and friends. “Vermeer and the Delft School” at the MET was coming up; it had been since the 1995 National Gallery/Hague exhibit when we last had a fresh chance to see Vermeer paintings en masse. Not to be overly dramatic but it continued as a white hot ‘what is art topic’; enjoy a dishy 2001 New York Times article covering one charged symposium filled with memorable quotes by curators, Susan Sontag, and Chuck Close (”some scientists are just as annoying as some art historians”) maybe on the same day you listen to that Fishko audio doc, Culture Shock 1913 (the near riot at the premier for 1913 Ballet Russes Stravinsky’s Rights of Spring). An optical debate symposium 15 years later might be worth an anniversary, current thoughts from Close, Hockney, and others involved and so much that has happened since. Photographer Joseph Pennell is thought to be the first to write (1890s) about optical lenses and Vermeer. There are many others but I’ll just list one because of the Gloucester connection. A. Mayor Hyatt, the eminent print curator for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, wrote The Photographic Eye in 1946. (Gloucester’s Joan of Arc WW1 memorial was created by his “favorite person in the world”, his aunt, Anna Hyatt Huntington. This brilliant family spent summers in Annisquam for nearly 100 years.) People will always be fascinated by virtuoso technique, the ultra exceptional DIY. Artists I’ve worked with consider tools of the trade in myriad ways: inspiring, a challenge, filtering, but decidedly unfixed as they’re about process and exploration of ideas throughout all iterations of their art. Art and magic–themes of mastery, obsession, even “it’s all done with smoke and mirrors”—seems fittingly matched in the Penn & Teller documentary, Tim’s Vermeer …and a visit with Hockney is included…”
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Sharing audition opportunity news from Cape Ann Symphony:
Auditions will be held at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Lanesville, the rehearsal home of the CAS chorus on : Saturday, August 22 from 9am-1pm; Wednesday, August 26 from 4pm-7pm; and Saturday August 29 from 10am-2pm. Contact Choral Director Betts at brittanybetts@gmail.com for further information or to set up an audition appointment.
Mark your calendars for these biggies
Vocalists selected as part of The Cape Ann Symphony Chorus to be featured in the fall and spring Cape Ann Symphony Concerts during the orchestra’s Diamond Anniversary Season.
Cape Ann Symphony’s wildly popular annual Holiday Pops Concert on November 28 at 2:00 pm and 7:30 pm and November 30, 2026 at 2:00 pm features The Cape Ann Symphony Chorus. The 75th Season Finale Concert on May 9, 2027at 2:00 pm features Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and a world premiere symphony from internationally acclaimed Gloucester based composer Robert Bradshaw written especially for the Diamond Anniversary Season.
Cape Ann Symphony Chorus Director Brittany Betts
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Throwback 2017 photo of Art Haven murals (begun in 2015) on Parsons inspired by Gloucester iconography — with the monumental HarborWalk Fishnet mural by Jamie Calderwood, 2012 –appear to have inspired some of these 2026 temporary works.
Gloucester Mural Map | Public Art
Gloucester murals | Public art map Gloucester, Massachusetts.
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The Cape Ann Symphony’s 75th Season opens on Sunday, September 27, 2026
Heidi Dallin shares news from Cape Ann Symphony on the eve of its diamond anniversary!!
Cape Ann Symphony, a non-profit orchestra fostering and promoting symphonic music to deepen the musical enjoyment and knowledge of audiences on Cape Ann and Boston’s North Shore, proudly announces the appointment of new members to its Board of Directors: Beverly’s Colleen DeBeasi, Gloucester’s Joanne Hamel and Gloucester’s Kathleen Piaggesi. These incoming board members bring a diverse mix of experience in arts administration, financial planning, global leadership, community outreach, and civic engagement, to further strengthen CAS leadership as it enters its Diamond-Anniversary Season. The new Board Members join current Board members : Thomas Mannle, President; Barbara Cox, Director of Marketing; John Bjorlie, Secretary; Hank Betts; Lynne M. Khambaty; Robert Y. Ellis; Richard Einhorn, MD; Ann Morrison; Stephanie Stathos; Joanathan Stringer; John Todd; Lisa Watt-Bucci and Robert K. Whitmarsh, Jr.
“Cape Ann Symphony is governed by a volunteer Board of Directors — neighbors, professionals, musicians, and longtime patrons who give their time so the music keeps playing” , says CAS Board President Thomas Mannle, “We are absolutely thrilled to welcome these extraordinary leaders to our Board. Their unique perspectives and professional acumen are vital to sustaining and growing our musical impact on the community. These new Board members come to Cape Ann Symphony from vastly different backgrounds but they all share a passion for music, and an unswerving dedication to preserve and advance Cape Ann Symphony’s musical heritage.”
The newly appointed board members include:
Colleen DeBeasi is a senior operations leader with over a decade of experience scaling complex initiatives and driving excellence within global organizations. Ms. DeBeasi brings that same strategic energy, enthusiasm, and lifelong love of music to the Cape Ann Symphony Board. Though she grew up (begrudgingly!) listening to classical music on WCRB at her mother’s behest, somewhere along the way, that forced listening turned into a genuine passion. Today, Colleen loves music that tells a story and is deeply committed to connecting the symphony with new and nontraditional audiences, believing fervently that classical music is for everyone. A North Shore resident for a decade, Colleen currently calls Beverly home with her husband and their rescue dog, Finn. Beyond her professional work, she is an avid cook, an enthusiastic traveler with over 20 countries stamped in her passport, and a dedicated explorer of the region’s many Trustees properties.
Joanne Hamel brings nearly four decades of healthcare experience, with a career grounded in compassionate care, patient advocacy, and service to others. Following her transition to semi-retirement, she has dedicated her time and energy to strengthening the Cape Ann community through volunteer leadership and civic engagement. Since making Gloucester her home in 2014, Joanne has become an active community leader and passionate advocate for the arts. She volunteers with the Cape Ann Symphony, The Open Door Food Pantry, and the Cape Ann Chamber of Commerce, supporting initiatives that enrich cultural life, promote community connections, and enhance quality of life for residents and visitors alike. As a member of the Cape Ann Symphony Board, Ms. Hamel is committed to advancing the Symphony’s mission, expanding access to the arts, and fostering appreciation for the vital role that music and culture play in a thriving community.
Kathleen Piaggesi was a sole practitioner who served clients as a Certified Financial Planner and Registered Investment Advisor in Scarsdale, New York for over 30 years. While living in Scarsdale she served on the boards of the Scarsdale Woman’s Club and the Scarsdale Family Counseling Service. Now semi-retired, she has lived in Gloucester, MA for 12 years. A Rotarian currently serving as Assistant Sergeant at Arms Ms. Piaggesi joined the Rotary Club of Gloucester in 2014. After enjoying a number of Cape Ann Symphony concerts and expressing an interest in supporting its efforts, Ms. Piaggesi accepted an invitation to join the CAS Board.
CAS Board President Thomas Mannle has been a fan and supporter of CAS since 1981. He was introduced to CAS when his son studied saxophone at Gloucester’s O’Maley Middle School with David Benjamin, the former CAS Business Manager. After the Mannle family moved to Washington, D.C in 1993, they returned to Cape Ann for holidays and vacations and made sure to catch a CAS concert! In 2009 when the Mannle family moved back to Gloucester, Thomas Mannle joined the CAS Board of Directors. During his time on the Board he has served as Treasurer and President. A fan of all styles of music, Board President Mannle is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, the Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University, and has been a healthcare consultant, particularly focused on the unique planning requirements of the Federal Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, since the early 1990s.
The Cape Ann Symphony’s 75th Season opens on Sunday, September 27, 2026.
“We have planned a full season of orchestral and chamber music across our spectacular Cape Ann venues plus a few surprises to celebrate 75 years onstage making music,” adds CAS Board President Thomas Mannle, “I am thrilled to be working with this CAS Board of Directors, musicians and our Music Director and Conductor Yoichi Udagawa as we celebrate this important milestone.”
–News Release from Cape Ann Symphony
Founded in Gloucester in 1952, the Cape Ann Symphony began as a volunteer group of 30 musicians and is now a professional orchestra of over 70 players from throughout the New England area under the direction of Maestro Yoichi Udagawa. Season tickets are available for purchase at www.capeannsymphony.org. For further information, call 978-281-0543
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Heidi Dallin, Director Anthony Prestigiovanni, Music Director Sarah VanDerpool , Choreographer Matthias Kostecki , Stage Manager
“The Cape Ann YMCA brings Alice’s travels through the curious world of Wonderland to life. In this charming updated retelling of the classic Lewis Carroll stories, Alice encounters the ever-tardy White Rabbit; 3 grinning Cheshire Cats; a cool Caterpillar; the wacky Mad Hatter; Tweedle Dum & Tweedle Dee; a temperamental Queen; the King, her henpecked Husband; and many more beloved Wonderland characters. This new musical adaptation includes beloved Disney songs—I’m Late,” “The Unbirthday Song,” and “Painting the Roses Red”—as well as music from the 2010 Tim Burton live-action film. Whether this is your first experience with Alice or your hundredth, you’ll lose your head (and your heart) for this new Alice in Wonderland JR. performed by the Cape Ann YMCA actors!”
“July 18 and 19th. I have a special guest artist Kevin Paul Hayes, one of the founding members of two time Grammy award winning band the old Crow medicine show. Hayes will be bringing to Gloucester his new folk art paintings inspired by his recent visit.”
-Stephen LaPierre Meet the artists!~ Saturday July 18, 2026 4-8 pm and Sunday July 19 3-5pm with music to follow
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