Here's our mission statement:
The Housatonic Valley Art League (formerly known as the Sheffield Art League) is a collaborative association of artists and art supporters organized for educational and charitable purposes in order to foster the creation and appreciation of the visual arts in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, and nearby Connecticut and New York, and to cooperate with other area organizations on projects that promote the artistic, historical and cultural heritage of the Upper Housatonic Valley region.
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Recent years have seen the League grow in numbers and in geographic distribution; as a result, in addition to our shows in Sheffield we now host shows in other towns in our region.
Our community project Housatonic River Summer 2004 was hugely successful at bringing together organizations in our region in the realms of art, environment, education, history and religion. The book Art and the River, which we published as part of that project, is still available in its soft-cover edition.
Our most recent community collaboration took place in 2010. "Images from the Fields" was organized together with the Sheffield Land Trust and the Egremont Land Trust to highlight the land in the corridor between the two towns, which is the focus of an ongoing preservation effort. We held numerous on-location "paint-outs" at farms and other properties in the region, and in the fall held a very successful two-day show of paintings inspired by the corridor lands.
