CATTARAUGUS COUNTY
Tour involves 42 artists, artisans
ALLEGANY — It’s almost as if Cattaraugus County has been designated as one big artists’ colony. Come Saturday and Sunday, 42 regional artists and artisans, including 11 from the Seneca Nation of Indians, will open studio doors in the Cattaraugus Region Open Studio Tour, Routes to Art.
The free, self-guided tour is a larger version of the inaugural event in 2008, which saw huge crowds braving monsoon rains and $4-a-gallon gasoline prices in search of art. True to its theme, “Infinite Possibilities,” visitors who embark on this odyssey may find it impossible to see everything in just two days.
But it won’t be difficult to find because the tour’s producers, the Cattaraugus County Arts Council, has provided travelers access to each studio in several ways.
The Arts Council distributed 28,000 high-quality brochures to the key day-trip tourist origins like Cleveland and Toronto, providing a detailed map of the county, a numbered informational artist guide and sponsor details.
The Cattaraugus County Tourism Department helped plan the event, linking the Arts Council with high-tech tools and other resources. This made it possible for visitors with GPS navigational devices to follow the coordinates listed in the brochure. All the coordinates can be downloaded for each studio’s “Point of Interest” coordinates, found at www.enchantedmountains.com . Studio tourists also can visit artist Web pages and download a brochure at www.routestoart.com , to plan visits to studios they find most appealing. The Arts Council is excited about the collaboration with the Seneca Nation’s economic development and tourism officials to recruit the Native artists, such as internationally known painter Carson Waterman of Salamanca and storyteller and bone and wood sculptor Marvin “Joe” Curry of Lawtons. Four of the Native American artists will display work at the Seneca-Iroquois National Museum in Salamanca and two others at the Cattaraugus Branch of the Seneca Nation Library in Irving.
Travelers will view other cultural influences in the artists, many of whom are located near each other along the route. For example, contemporary painter Richard Thompson of Alfred Station will be set up in Dina’s Restaurant in Ellicottville, not far from the Dublin Meadows studio of painter Gerlind Dubey and the Maples Road studio of watercolor artist Barbara Fox.
In Allegany, the Arts Council has offered artists lacking their own studios a spot for the weekend in its headquarters in the old Allegany High School on North Fourth Street. A group of potters calling themselves the Allegany Mud Club will show work there alongside the tile mosaics of Marsha Van Vlack of Whitesville and the photographs of Jill St. Ledger- Roty of Franklinville and the modern paintings of Joan Pingitore of Allegany, among others.
The more isolated rural studios are worth a peek, too, such as the forested work space of oil painter Todd Plough on Sawmill Run south of Little Valley.
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