Venue: Maverick Concert Hall
Town: Hurley, US

Maverick Concert Hall was built in 1916 and was part of the Maverick Artist Colony in Hurley, New York. The Maverick developed out of the Maverick Festival, an early 20th-century communal arts gathering near Woodstock that combined music, theater, and outdoor performance in a rustic woodland setting. Contemporary newspaper accounts described the Maverick Festival as a rustic outdoor arts community near Woodstock where music, theater, and dance were staged in converted woodland performance spaces. The concert hall hosts the Maverick Concerts, a summer chamber music festival. Alexander Platt is the current music director. The mainstay of the series, which runs from the end of June through early September, is to be found in the chamber music concerts performed by distinguished soloists and ensembles on Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons. The Maverick Festival, a precursor to the Maverick Concerts, was founded in 1915 by Hervey White, and by 1931 the festival suspended. Maverick’s early years portrayed the colony as an experiment in independent artistic living that drew prominent artists, musicians, and literary figures to Woodstock. “Maverick” is the name given to the collaborative colony for artists that Hervey White, a “freethinker, socialist, writer, and printer with a genius for friendship,” established on the outskirts of the town of Woodstock, on 102 acres he had bought in 1905. White's intention was to offer “young talent a chance to earn its living until its recognition.” Hervey White had been an early founder and worker at the nearby Byrdcliffe Colony and he was one of the first to leave and start a new colony independently. The Byrdcliffe Colony had been "well-financed and run somewhat autocratically" with a strong sense of designing and planning a legacy and Maverick was "scruffier, more truly communal and anarchic". The Maverick Festival's opening concert was in August 1915 to raise funds in order to build a well for the colony, and was patterned after