Howard Mansfield and Ben Cosgrove: A Journey to the White Mountains

Tickets will be available at the door. Online ticket sales are closed.

The Monadnock Center is thrilled to welcome writer Howard Mansfield and composer Ben Cosgrove for A Journey to the White Mountains in Words and Music. For hundreds of years people have traveled to the White Mountains seeking something special in this elemental, powerful place – grandeur, meaning, or transcendence.

The show, based on a chapter in Mansfield’s latest book, Chasing Eden, is about how the discovery of the White Mountains affects us to this day. Pioneering artists in the 19th Century taught Americans how to look at the wilderness. Americans were eager for the lesson, and, with guidebook in hand telling them where to see the views in the famous paintings, they followed the artists. Their art created a market for the views, filled hotels with tourists, and laid the bounds for national parks across the country.
 
Today’s tourists to the White Mountains may not know it, but they’ve come in search of an Eden created by a legion of nineteenth-century landscape painters.

Howard Mansfield writes about architecture, preservation, and history in his quest to understand the soul of American places.  He’s written about the Monadnock region in many books, including In the Memory House, The Bones of the Earth, and Dwelling in Possibility. He edited the anthology about the region, Where the Mountain Stands Alone.  His most recent book, Chasing Eden, explores the ways Americans seek their Promised Land and inspired the collaboration with Cosgrove to create A Journey to the White Mountains.

Ben Cosgrove is a traveling composer-performer whose music explores themes of landscape, place, and environment. Ben has performed across the U.S. and held numerous artist residencies including with the National Park Service, the National Forest Service, the Schmidt Ocean Institute, and the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology. His latest album, The Trouble with Wilderness, is an expansive set of twelve new songs that consider the role of nature and wildness in the built environment.