Some folks consider the beginning of daylight saving time to be the end of winter, others think maple season is the start of spring – here we are in the muddy weeks between, and I know my dog, Bruce, is excited to start chomping on grass again and drive me crazy.
I’m also looking forward to Maple Weekend later this month: More than 60 maple producers across New York will offer tours and tastings (it’s actually two weekends – March 22-23 and March 29-30), everything from maple syrup to maple spread, maple cotton candy, maple coffee, maple tea, maple coated nuts, maple barbecue sauce, maple hot sauce, maple fudge, and maple mustard!
According to a release from the Western New York Maple Producers Association, New York producers made 829,000 gallons of maple syrup in 2025. They also say it takes approximately 44 gallons of maple tree sap to make one gallon of syrup, so that would be more than 36 million gallons of sap that our New York maple trees gave us last year.
To find participating farms with such names as Pierce’s Sugar Spigot, Skinner’s Sugarbush, and Candy Mountain, check out the official Maple Weekend map.
In this issue: I spent some time with the Hudson-based artist Sita Gómez, surrounded by her paintings from a career spanning 75 years. We talked about a few of her works, but her life was interrupted by not one but two major political upheavals, and so I spent our time together raptly listening as she told me what it was like when her father was summoned by Hitler, forcing them to flee Nazi-occupied Paris in a tiny convertible Cadillac with help from Albert Einstein. Our interview is below.
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Sita Gómez, Staten Island, New York, 2012. Photo credit: Michaelangelo Di Nonno. Courtesy Hudson Hall
‘I’ve had so many lives.’
Sita Gómez paints women – only women, it’s important for you to know – because men are boring.
“I depict women because that's what I know best. You know, and men aren't fun. I take men more seriously. They're my father, they're my husband and my sons. But with women, I can have fun – with jewelry, with hair, with makeup, with the clothes. It opens a whole world for me.”
Sita’s portraits of women (she says she paints “the glamorous stars, the poor old bag ladies, the infamous, the ordinary, the ‘every day’ women that cross our lives”) are luminous, fluid, confident, funny, cheeky. These are cosmic women with presence.
“Duchess of Windsor and Her Jewels,” (1998)
They’re very much like Sita. Born in Paris in 1932 to a Cuban father and Norwegian mother, Sita has lived through the rise of Hitler, Castro's Cuba, and is now witness in her lifetime to another period of political upheaval.
And after a 75-year career, she’s finally getting much-deserved recognition in a retrospective at Hudson Hall, curated by Nancy Cobean of Rose Gallery, on view through April 4.
I’d originally wanted to talk with Sita about three of her pieces that might represent a different chapter of her adventurous life, but as we sat under the giant “Sarah Bernhardt,” and we talked about her childhood, I became completely absorbed in her story about fleeing Paris as a schoolgirl and how she ended up in the U.S.
Here’s her story from our conversation, edited for clarity:
This is where free ends.
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