Community celebrates Adirondack artist Ted Cornell

Participants can try out new trail from Edward ‘Ted’ Cornell’s storied Art Farm to a new exhibit in Whallonsburg

By Tim Rowland

One more time, artist Edward “Ted” Cornell will unite his beloved Essex-Westport community. On June 1, his fans, friends and neighbors will hike 4.5 miles from his farm to a celebration of his work in a new exhibit at the Whitcomb’s Garage gallery in Whallonsburg.

Cornell, now 80 and residing at Elderwood in Ticonderoga, became enchanted with the Champlain Valley after a storied career in New York City where he helped Joseph Papp found what became Shakespeare in the Park.

There was little in his background to suggest an affinity for a land where the nearest gallon of milk — unless it came straight from the cow — was a dozen miles away. But not only did he make a successful transition, he fostered cooperation in community projects by listening to, and respecting, one and all.  

“He believed in being a steward of the land, but also a steward of the community,” said Margaret Gibbs, who is curating the Cornell exhibit, which will run from May 4 to June 29.

Many artists came to the Adirondacks to dutifully record the spectacular beauty, but only a few, such as Rockwell Kent and Arto Monaco, stayed and spent appreciable parts of their careers, making art, but also building and enriching their communities.

Establishing the Art Farm

At a time of stress and change in the Adirondacks, Cornell managed to unite disparate interests and attitudes, building up the Whallonsburg Grant cultural center, the Wadhams Library and setting the table for what became a blossoming of Community Supported Agriculture farms in the Champlain Valley. 

With no pre-existing connection to the Adirondacks, Cornell — a New York City actor, director and painter — bought a chunk of a defunct dairy farm, including its old farmhouse and peg-built barns, that had once spanned more than 600 acres.

This became Crooked Brook Studios, more commonly known simply as the Art Farm.

Instead of harvesting wheat, Cornell began harvesting rusting relics — including a McCormick Deering grain binder that had prowled the fields between the Industrial Revolution through World War II — and fabricating them on the Sayer Road hillside into the farm’s signature sculptures.

“One man’s eccentricity,” Cornell called it, although it represented something more. “It is more vividly understood as a complex collaborative effort of many creative, skilled people,” he wrote, “just like putting on a play, which I used to do, or running a farm, which I have never tried.”

After some initial puzzlement, neighbors warmed to the project, and began dragging their own spent farm implements to become immortalized in Cornell’s collection.

Most visible from the road is the first of the sculptures, created in 2002, featuring the mangled dome of Dave Sayre’s old silo, entitled “Phoenix of Wadhams,” representing the rebirth of farming in the Champlain Valley.

But along with an optimism for the future, it is also a tribute to the past, particularly those who came before and left their mark on the land, even if today that mark is only represented by a few scraps of rusting metal and fading fences of stone.

“He shows us the appreciation we can have from places, not just because of how isolated or pristine they are, but from the people who came before,” said Mary-Nell Bockman, manager of the Whallonsburg Grange.

And his art became a bridge that connected traditional agriculture and new, community-focused farms and cooperative cultural projects.

“In the 1990s, there was nothing replacing the farms — they were just dying,” Bockman said.

At the same time, landowners saw Adirondack Park Agency rules limiting development as an attack on the one asset they had left, even as conservationists understood the long-term benefit of protecting wide open spaces. “You wouldn’t necessarily have been able to find too many groups of like-minded people at that time,” Bockman said. 

Yet somehow the artist from the big city negotiated these turbulent waters  by understanding both the needs of the wild lands and the people who lived on them. That’s what, to his friends, makes Ted Cornell the person as compelling as Ted Cornell the artist. “He had these visions for the community,” Gibbs said. “And Ted had a way of bringing people together.”

Arising incongruously from the fields of a narrow country road, it’s Cornell’s curious sculptures that get an outsized share of attention, but his best work was in his painting, community activism and theatrical missionary work that pushed the envelope of what the rural community was used to.

“Ted never had this idea that there was some limit to what he could do,” Bockman said. “He would put on plays that were controversial and not easy.”

But even as a self-described eccentric, “he was so inclusive in his attitudes and views,” Bockman said.

Community and Creativity: The 4.5 Mile Hike Celebrating Cornell’s Work

Part of that inclusivity includes the Art Farm Trail that winds through the sculptures before ascending a ridge with a broad panorama of the Hurricane and Jay Mountain wildernesses. From there, the trail follows an old logging road through a cedar wood before opening up again to farm fields and connecting to a wide range of footpaths connecting the communities of Wadhams and Whallonsburg.

Those wishing to hike in celebration of Cornell’s legacy will be able to walk 4.5 miles on existing trails — and one new one — from the Art Farm to the doorstep of Whallonsburg, said Chris Maron, executive director of Champlain Area Trails.

“Scenery is of the valley from the parts of the trail in the fields, of nice mature forests while in the woods, past beaver ponds, and then a nice walk near the Boquet River while walking on Cook Road into Whallonsburg,” Maron said.

Those not wishing to do the full hike will be able to take a shuttle back to the Whitcomb’s Garage gallery.

Gibbs said it’s hoped Cornell will be able to make the trip from Ticonderoga to see his old friends and make new ones, all while celebrating the legacy of the art and the man. “We want to let people have a closer look at who Ted is,” she said.