SAVE the DATE for HOST ’26: October 3 & 4

Save the Date!

On the first weekend in October (3&4), the 2026 Hilltown Open Studio Tour (“the Tour”) is ON

The festive weekend of open art studios is organized by a team of volunteer members of the Hilltown Arts Alliance. In 2025, the tour took a break for the team to regroup. Some of the longstanding sources of funding disappeared suddenly, like a lot of other funding for arts and humanities activities, and they weren’t sure how to move forward. 

The members of the team thought long and hard about the value of the Tour, to HAA members, to the hilltowns, to the public, and not least to themselves. They decided it was too important an event to let go. With some concerted effort, they say, the Tour can go on, at least every other year, and it will benefit the artists as well as the public.

But, creating this event is a lot of work. Some changes were made in what they ask from the participating artists. It will be a greater commitment, which, the organizers say, gives a generous payback in various ways. 

Artists are notoriously in retreat from public life to be able to focus on their art. In many ways, they have to be. Some say that, to be able to seriously make art, it is necessary that you have some support structure that stands between you and the world. Elsewise the dishes and the need to be “nice” take over from the sometimes uncomfortable honesty at the basis of artmaking. So why is organizing this Tour so important to these artists? How is participating in organizing this event different from doing just any show or just any volunteer work?

The team recently sat down for a conversation about the value, to them, of opening their studios to the public, and also the rewards of this particular volunteer commitment. It was a spirited conversation, but they were largely in agreement. The Tour, said Plainfield watercolorist and longtime hilltown resident Kathryn Jensen, “fosters an appreciation of this place to those who live here and those who might wish they did.” For artists, especially those who participate in organizing, the weekend represents a commitment, not only to art and the arts community, but also to the place where they live, which is central to their work. Opening art studios brings tourists, sure, but it also contributes to a hilltown way of life that differs significantly from life in cities and suburbs.

Not all of them had expected that. “I moved here,” says Chesterfield painter Valerianna Claff, “because I wanted to live closer to the wild.” Susannah White is in Huntington “to listen to the wind in the trees.” “I love this place,” added Jensen, who has been one of the leading tour organizers for the past few years, “the way the undulations of the landscape enfold buildings that have survived for several hundred years, it is art anchored in place.” Amulet-maker and jewelry artist Jen Parrish-Hill from Worthington dedicates a percentage of her sales to the protection of the pristine streams, old-growth forests, and the animals that rely upon them. From conversations with those who themselves do not make art, “it is clear we share a lot of feelings about the hilltown world in all its beauty and orneriness,” agrees photographer Pleun Bouricius, also from Plainfield, “I love it when someone recognizes their own love for our environment in my work. And they can share it with their friends!”

Opening art studios invites significantly more interaction between and among neighbors, other hilltowners, and artists, bringing conversations about art and a shared love, not only for the landscape and the closeness to the ecosystems, but also for communities like Cummington and Worthington. “Having our yearly Open Studio has been a joy to get the chance to meet neighbors old and new, and to share my love of the many animals that call this place home through my work and advocacy for them”, adds Parrish-Hill.  And that goes whether we are people who were born here, who have been living here for a long time, or those who have more recently chosen to perch in the Hilltowns of Western Mass. Claff notes that “I feel more rooted and connected to my [town] since joining the Arts Alliance and participating in the tour.”

The thing about living here, the artists seem to wholeheartedly agree, is that nature isn’t an abstraction. Whether you live in Chesterfield, Huntington, or Plainfield, nature is right in your face. That means beauty and wildness, but also seasonal chores, do-for-yourself culture, and relationships with people around you that focus on getting things done and on a direct way of being. “We all drink water from the ground and breathe in as the trees exhale,” says Pleun Bouricius, for whom moving to Plainfield in 1993 was “like coming home.” To fiber artist Kathy Ford, making her home in Worthington means serving on the Planning Board as well as being the president of HAA. The service sustains her art, in part because it provides connections with a community of artists.

Still Kathy says, “my interest in finding community is challenged by the solitary nature of being an artist in the hilltowns.” Cyndy Sperry argues, however,  that being part of the Open Studio Tour brings discipline to her year. Everyone nods in agreement. If solitude sustains, community galvanizes. “It makes me paint the walls, reach out to my Hilltown artist friends, get more active on social media, and think about myself and my work seriously. It is a weekend container for community and art and conversation that gives an energetic injection into the fading light and sets me up for the quiet of winter.”

To sum it all up, the artist-organizers agree, the Hilltown Open Studio Tour is a weekend in which they pay homage to our place, and the Tour pays them back in full. White sums it up for all: “I am as grateful for the humanity of the hills as I am for the nurturing wilderness that I have the privilege to live in.” They hope you will participate and let the Hilltown Open Studio Tour enrich your “hilltown artist” life.

[Featured painting by Susanna White]