Melissa Auf Der Maur speaks from a lifetime lived at the intersections of music, visual art, and performance, yet never entirely within any one of them. Auf Der Maur is a traveler between worlds — Montreal, New York, Cape Cod, Hudson Valley — and between selves: artist, musician, curator, and activist. What threads through the story is an insistence on vision, on integrity, and on the small revolutions that shape a life. Even now, decades into her career, she moves with purpose, carrying the weight and freedom of having always followed her own beat.

“We like to text message more than to hear the voice of somebody talking. So you isolate yourself and technology becomes your friend, which never can replace the human touch.”

To cross paths with Stephanie Cavalli is a precious thing. She is one of those rare people who emanate the kind of lived-in beauty that instantly makes you feel as though she has a story to tell. There is an enviable self-assuredness to her— a comfort in her own skin that somehow manages to strike just the right balance of wise and carefree. Perhaps, it is her Italian Caribbean roots at play, or, maybe, she has just done enough to recognize the beauty that resides in the un-doneness. For most of her twenties, Cavalli traveled the globe as a fashion model. Today, she is a mother to two boys and a shopkeeper of a vintage clothing boutique in Callicoon. Though at first, these two lives seem in total opposition, it’s precisely in this ability to walk the line between the exotic and the familiar where Cavalli’s magic lies. She’s statuesque but warm, seasoned, but grounded, and she believes that there is just as much beauty to be had in a simpler life as in any other.

After fulfilling big goals in Los Angeles food media, Alexis Deboschnek moved back home to her family’s hundred-acre farmhouse in the western Catskills. There, among her mother’s gardens and her childhood kitchen, is where things really started to click.

These musings played in my mind as I meandered from Bovina, where I call home, to Stamford, where Remy Holwick has made hers. A quietly inspiring morning that pulled us closer to winter also brought me into conversation with Holwick, a multi-disciplinary artist, activist, and mother who has made a home here in the Catskills since 2022. We talked about her nomadic upbringing, the ways in which this town of 2,000 has inspired her career, and what it means to contribute to community in a meaningful way. 

Taylor Foster has moved through many worlds: first Miami, then New York City, and now the subtle expanse of Upstate New York. She began with pastry, slipped into modeling, and later built a small café called Heaven, a gathering place as much as a business. Today she lives in a cabin, where her attention has turned to holistic skincare.