On Sunday, October 11, 2026, The Putney School will come together with food, music, crafts, games and good cheer for Harvest Festival, our annual fall celebration. Activities will take place from 10 a.m. — 3:30 p.m., rain or shine, and include a bounce house, face painting, vendors, games and more.
Harvest Festival is a tradition that dates back to the school’s founding in 1935.
The ceramic work of Putney alums Paula Shalan ’81 and Richard Foye ’65 will be on display this spring in the Currier Center. Foye’s work is inspired by 12th-century Persian glazes and a Japanese Raku style he will demonstrate during Parents Weekend, smoking the pieces in an old-fashioned washing machine drum in order to produce his stunning finishes.
Shalan also smoke-fires her work and hand-builds each piece based on observations gleaned from the smallest details found in nature, “in order to distill and highlight the astounding beauty and quiet wisdom of fields and forests.”
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The Putney School has received a $2 million endowment gift from alumna Carol Stein ’61 to establish the Norwood Hinkle Faculty Chair in Music, honoring the legendary educator who shaped the school’s music curriculum for more than three decades. The endowment will support the position of Director of Music, ensuring long-term stability for a program that has been central to Putney’s identity since its founding.
Norwood Hinkle served as music director at The Putney School from 1939 to 1972, developing a program defined by exacting standards and musical excellence. He created a culture where students experienced music as an integral part of their education and lives. His imprint on the rhythms of the school lives on in traditions such as Community Sing.
“Music was one of the most important things about Putney when I was there and it continues to shape my life,” Stein says. “I want music to be a significant feature of the school going forward, and hope others will join me in making this the strongest program we can build.”
Income from the endowment will support competitive compensation, professional development, and program resources for the Director of Music.
The Michael S. Currier Center Gallery at The Putney School will present “The Architecture of Silence: Meditations on the Anthropocene and the Search for Belonging in the Natural World.” The exhibit runs from September 5 — November 20, with an Opening Reception on Friday, September 12, from 4:30 — 6 p.m.
The exhibit features artists Eric Slayton and Elena Lyakir, who explore the intersection of place and belonging, creating a dialogue between the inner and the outer. Elena, born in Ukraine, creates layered landscapes and photographs of birds in flight, which seek to unravel the trauma of dislocation she experienced as an immigrant, restoring a sense of wholeness and continuity aligned with the natural world. Eric’s brutalist architectural structures evoke the urban horizons that nature eventually reclaims, as he believes that nature is the ever-present principle. His work is a meditation on resilience, time, and transformation. World travelers and longtime city dwellers, Eric and Elena now live and work in Marlboro, Vt.
Eric Slayton Artist Statement:
Eric’s attraction to a pallet of industrial materials, combined with the Japanese practice of process with intention, articulates an organic modernist and even brutalist approach in the formation of his works. From conception to actualization, and then the eventual patina, the story reads as “nature into art toward time.”
He celebrates the beauty of imperfection and incorporates the time-marinating created during the aging process. Unrefined surfaces contained within percipient proportions, merged with an understanding of bio-centric processes, accurately describe his path and practice.
The symbolism of these monoliths is as conspicuous as is the simplicity in form. The applied principles are gingerly gleaned from the iconic shapes of contemporary architecture that proliferate urban horizons of this geologic epoch now labeled as the Anthropocean.
Scale and proportions are crucial to the integrity and esthetic, yet the walls of each side provide the canvas where the piece’s story unfolds. Even the top, which may be too high to see, is an underutilized opportunity.
For Eric, the “beauty” in his works comes from the belief that in the end nature is the ever-present principle. Confirmed in that all efforts are conceived of knowing that those reclamation forces of time are guaranteed.
Elena Lyakir Artist Statement:
As an immigrant, I am perpetually searching for a place that feels like home, and my creative expression stems from this longing. Although my work is not a direct commentary on my experiences as a refugee, it serves as a metaphor for emotions that crystallize within when we search for our place in the world. The ethereal, poetically layered landscapes and bird photographs I create symbolize the complexities that shape and color our perception of reality, as we all perceive the world through a unique and individual lens.
Through my work I explore themes of memory, perception, belonging, and nostalgia, gently unraveling the trauma of displacement. Layer by layer, I seek to rebuild the fragmented soul by filling in the gaps left by upheaval and disruption, restoring a sense of wholeness and continuity aligned with the natural world. I attempt to ignite a dialogue between internal and external landscapes, transcending the boundaries of reality and imagination. My work is a meditation on the poignant duality of beauty intertwined with a sense of nostalgia, which the dislocated, like myself, are destined to inhabit.
My practice is often informed by site-specific work. The preparation for a new project involves immersing myself in a landscape, spending many hours listening, contemplating, and investigating. To capture the dreamlike landscapes, I employ a range of techniques, including tilt shift lenses, makeshift filters, and in-camera multi-exposures. The intuitive nature of my creative process is a means of transcendence, healing, and revelation of the extraordinary.