As the mountaintop slowly awakens from it’s winter slumber, another fabled sleeper makes an appearance once more!

Through the joint efforts of the Community of Windham Foundation, the Hunter Foundation and the Windham Arts Alliance, the villages of the mountaintop will be home to a number of painted cement Rip Van Winkle statues this 2010 spring season as a part of the efforts to increase tourism to the area. The 28-inch tall statues have been painted by a collection of recruited artists and will be placed throughout the towns on the mountaintop, including Windham, Hunter, Tannersville and Ashland. It is the hope of the involved committees that this project will inspire all of the towns of the Catskill Mountains to work collectively toward improving the tourism industry for our area, instead of competing against one another.

The success of other such projects inspired the aforementioned committees to tailor the  model to fit with the locale. Catskill had cats, Cairo had bears and Hudson had dogs, so it seems only fitting that the land that inspired Washington Irving’s tale should also be the home to the statues that memorialize the protagonist’s homecoming.  Here at the gallery, we were lucky enough to have one of our very own artists participate in this project! Here is a sneak peak of Kim Do’s Rip Van Winkle!

For more information and a calendar of events related to this project, please visit the Rip Lives! website at http://web.mac.com/riplivesinfo/Site/Welcome.html. The statues are slated to be installed in time for Memorial Day weekend.