The New York Times: 2 Art Havens in the Hudson Valley Offer Nature Indoors and Out

RBack in 1967, Arte Povera artists in Italy, the radicals of their time, hung out at the Piper Club, a discothèque of, by and for the avant-garde in Turin. During one nocturnal happening, young women danced in tunics made of polyurethane birch logs and ponchos studded with foam rocks to look like riverbeds. Like nature sprites, the dancers gamboled over “nature carpets,” rugs crafted of foam by the Turinese artist Piero Gilardi. Guests sipped their Camparis reclining on simulated cabbage patches.

In the radical cheek of a disco decked out as a forest glade, Gilardi delivered a serious message, embodying the ecological lesson of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” written a few years before: Chemicals were poisoning the earth. Nature starts in the home. Live with it, respect it, protect it.