Tag Archives: New York City

Hiring Household Staff During the Pandemic

Written by Roxanne Carrion

I think we can all agree that 2020 will be well and truly the year that we all take a well earned deep breath! It will also be the year that forced us to reassess our lives amidst the chaos of what we could and could not control. It broke work commitments, projects, deadlines and family get-togethers. However, perhaps once the dust has settled, this year may be actually remembered as the making of us rather than the breaking of us. The year that took away our comfort, our freedom, our variety, but in return, gave us back the seclusion and space to explore new directions.

When our GPS discovers a problem up ahead, it simply re-routes to get us to where we are going. At British American Household Staffing we pride ourselves on being a navigation that can re-route you when lost or struggling to get to where you need to be.

At British American Household Staffing we make it our priority to find the silver lining in the cloud that has disrupted so many lives this year. Being one step ahead of the unpredictable nature of life, we have developed an impressive roster of reliable, responsible, and recommended staff to service your household at this crucial time more than ever.

View full post on www.bahs.com

UK’s The Daily Telegraph Features Anita Rogers and British American Household Staffing

The return of the governess… the lady’s maid… and the butler
by Celia Walden
The Daily Telegraph Saturday 28 November 2020
Anita Rogers, BAHS agency founder and CEO, invites you to take a glimpse into the strategies and success behind her premier agency and why the recent pandemic has given clients a new perspective and a desirable domain for a more manageable and comfortable life at home.

Of all the curious comebacks prompted by Covid – sourdough bread baking, pan banging (for the NHS), staycations and the expandable waistband – the return of the governess might be one of the most surprising, at least for the average Brit.

Yet according to Anita Rogers, founder and CEO of domestic staffing agency British American Household Staffing (BAHS), all any ultra-high net-worth family wants for Christmas this year is their very own stern-faced piece of Victoriana.

“We’ve always had a few governesses on our books,” says Rogers, whose 4,000-strong client base spans the globe (the majority of are in the United States, with around a fifth in Europe, mainly the the UK, Switzerland and Monaco).

“But then Covid happened, and suddenly everybody wants a governess! Which makes sense, when you think about the gaps in schooling and structure so many kids have faced over the past few months.”

If you’re conjuring up images of mature matrons in bustles, however, think again. The idea may come straight from the pages of Mary Poppins, “but 99 per cent of the time what we’re being asked for is not so much a traditional governess as a combined teacher and nanny, only with that old-school formality and maturity, and the accolades: the schooling in Switzerland or England, the previous employment in formal homes, and the emphasis on manners and etiquette.”

These days, there’s far more to being a governess than even that. “Many have either a degree in education or multiple teaching certificates in specific subjects, such as music, a language, and teaching English,” says Rogers. “Some families who hire governesses are not first-language English speakers. A governess must be able to teach written and spoken English at a high level, both for the native English speaking children under their care as well as non-native speakers.”

She continues: “Governesses typically look after school-age, preteen and teenage ranges. A governess is occasionally hired for an infant so the infant can get a head start, especially with a second language – this is not typical, though.”

So how on earth does one distinguish between nanny-teachers and the genuine article? “Let’s just say that governesses have an air about them.”

“We’ve seen an increased demand for nannies and governesses with a background in child psychology,” says Rogers. “That’s very, very popular now. It’s about checking a child’s development every step of the way and making sure that they’re hitting all the milestones.”

After more than a decade’s experience in pairing families with household staff, Rogers’s exclusive agency has earned a reputation for being able to meet every need and handle any situation.

Despite the closer bonds between key staff members and what Rogers calls “the host family”, any blurring of the lines is cautioned against. “The best nannies, housekeepers and butlers will know how important it is to become invisible. That doesn’t mean that you’re subservient, just that there are boundaries.”

A respect for those boundaries is one of the things BAHS is on the lookout for in the extensive interview and screening process their 6,000 jobseekers are forced to undergo, when everything from background to credit checks are conducted.

Oh, and should you wish to hire a light aircraft or a yacht – “hugely in demand right now because people can escape the pandemic that way” – BAHS can organise that, too.

The New York Times Features British American Household Staffing

Whom better suited to dispatch briskly with the demands of coronavirus-era child care?

by Ruth La Ferla. October 8, 2020

British American Household Staffing’s founder and CEO, Anita Rogers, as well as Kristen Reyes, BAHS’ Senior Recruiter & Estate Management Consultant, and Katherine Patterson, BAHS’ Senior Placement Specialist, were recently interviewed by The New York Times for an article on the role of governesses and nannies during COVID-19.

 

In her work as an estate manager, Kristen Reyes often finds herself fielding client requests for a special kind of child minder. “Callers will say to me, ‘Kristen, I need a modern Mary Poppins.’ Everyone knows what that means.”

It refers, Ms. Reyes went on to explain, to that old-fashioned paragon of patience, good cheer and decorum otherwise known as a governess. And, yes, she — most always a she — is back, a plucky hybrid of tutor and life coach in rising demand among affluent families scrambling to educate their offspring in the midst of a pandemic.

Excerpts below – click here to view the full article on NYTimes.com

Click here to contact us about hiring a governess for your family

 

School shutdowns and social limitations have lent their search a particular urgency. “For the past six or eight weeks we’ve been slammed with educator and governess requests, from all over the country,” said Anita Rogers, the founder and chief executive of British American Household, a domestic staffing agency.

Orders began doubling as families girded for a fall semester and the rigors of remote learning, Ms. Rogers said: “During the pandemic, we’ve done very well.”

…
The contemporary governess may work in a formal household, staffed with drivers, cooks, housekeepers and the like. But unlike a conventional nanny she is expected to provide a high-end version of home-schooling.

As often as not the job calls for a fancy pedigree that may include an advanced degree from an Ivy institution, a facility with languages, and manners that rival those of a marquise.

But the position has been democratized to some degree. ”It’s no longer exclusive to high-net-worth families,” Ms. Reyes said. During a health crisis that shows no signs of abating, two- career families will seek out a governess to function as a proxy parent to their toddlers or teenagers.
…
Ideally these days, the governess commands respect as a highly accomplished worker in a rigorously demanding job. “She is not just a stand-in for a fancy nanny, though nanny duties may be part of the job,” said Katherine Patterson, a placement specialist who worked as a governess early in her career.

“She is responsible for the child’s safety and welfare,” Ms. Patterson said. “But the role also dovetails with that of a teacher, an increasingly common scenario as the number of parents home-schooling their children continues to rise.”

Her position is nuanced, extending from a child’s education to that child’s social and emotional progress. No surprise, then, Ms. Reyes pointed out, that families now are requesting a background in child psychology or child development.

In this currently unstable climate, “kids have a lot more to learn about life at a younger age,” she said. “A governess can give a 5-year-old an outlet to talk about why they can’t see their friend or their grandparent. With Covid impacting everything, the governess is a kind of mini-therapist.”

…

Being a governess presupposes a very atypical work environment. “There’s a plethora of dos and don’ts that just wouldn’t apply to a corporate workplace,” Ms. Patterson said. She declined to describe those rules. “That,” she said elliptically, “is for another day.”

Mark Webber: Material Guy

Mark Webber: Material Guy

Making sculptural works from an array of mixed media

by Kelly Velocci

Mark Webber Anita Rogers Gallery Hamptons Cottages and Gardens
Mark Webber practices two very different kinds of work. His vocation: custom cabinetry fabricated for high-end Hamptons homes. His avocation: sculptures made with Hydrocal, a plaster-like material, and a mélange of found objects from construction sites and other sources. Although these two endeavors are vastly disparate, both are rooted in the art of fabrication. “There’s a craftsmanship aspect to cabinetmaking, whereas sculpture requires you to be more creative,” says Webber, a Connecticut native and longtime resident of Sag Harbor. “Sculpture does not have an inherent purpose, like a cabinet does. I have to think about different things when I’m making either one.”

Webber graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from SUNY Purchase in 1980, but soon shifted his focus to cabinetmaking to make a living. Around five years ago, however, he decided to “acknowledge my creativity again” and began experimenting with sculpture. He started working on wooden forms before transitioning to plaster and, more recently, Hydrocal, which he casts or shapes with hand tools, such as spatulas and knives. “All those years as a cabinetmaker gave me a solid base from which to start making sculpture,” Webber says. “It was like my springboard back into fine arts.” He has lately been pushing the boundaries of his pieces further, incorporating found objects— steel scraps, bricks, rubber—in order to bring a sense of tension and balance or create “an interesting compositional relationship.”

 

View PDF of full article
View on Cottages & Gardens website

William Scott: Abstracting and Appreciating the Everyday

William Scott: Abstracting and Appreciating the Everyday

by Chloë Ashby

 

William Scott: Abstracting and Appreciating the Everyday

Five Pears 1976
William Scott (1913–1989)
British Council Collection

 

Art UK:

To some art critics, the twentieth-century British artist William Scott’s kitchen-table still lifes are too timid – as Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times, they can be seen as ‘abstract paintings for people who don’t like abstraction’. Others, myself included, find them enticingly reduced and for the most part easily readable, which is part of their charm.

Scott’s compositions are striking in their simplicity, and somehow both pleasurable and puritan, sensuous and serene. A few boiled eggs, a couple of ripe pears, fresh mackerel on a plate, pots and pans, a bunch of grapes: these are his humble subjects. As he once said, ‘I find beauty in plainness’.

Born in Scotland in 1913 and brought up in Northern Ireland, Scott’s surroundings were grey and barren, his upbringing strictly Presbyterian. The objects he painted in an often-sombre palette were, he said, ‘the symbols of the life I knew best’.

After his father died trying to save some folk from a burning building, the local council raised funds to send the 15-year-old to Belfast College of Art. From there, he won a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where he bunked up with the poet Dylan Thomas and two other Welshmen and married fellow student Mary Lucas. In the Second World War, he was a cartographer, and in its wake, he was a pioneer of British abstraction.

 

Read the full article on ArtUK.org

Insider: Nannies who have coronavirus antibodies are in high demand

Anita Rogers quoted in Insider article:

As more parents return to work, families have to make touch choices about childcare. 

After months of balancing jobs and childcare — without school, daycare or private caregivers — parents across the US are now making tough childcare choices as cities reopen. Employed parents need childcare in order to work, but bringing a nanny into the home also means bringing in additional exposure to the coronavirus.

That’s why some parents are taking extra precautionary measures, which may mean paying a premium rate. Some families are looking to hire nannies who have already had the disease, but it’s not a guarantee of higher pay, said Anita Rogers, CEO and founder of British American Household Staffing, an agency that places caregivers in both the UK and the US. Hiring someone who tests positive is by no means a foolproof plan either, since it’s still unknown whether people who have recovered from COVID- 19 can get reinfected.

Other families are having nannies who test negative move in with them and aren’t allowing them to leave until there is a vaccine, Rogers said. For that, nannies may be able to command higher salaries.

“This kind of intense time away from home has sparked requests for a higher compensation from the nannies,” Rogers said.

Some families are requiring frequent testing to ensure that the caregiver is and remains healthy, an extra measure some caregivers can charge more for, said Katie Provinziano, managing director of Westside Nannies — a Los Angeles childcare agency. Provinziano said that nannies who are willing to get tested frequently can get about 10% more than the average rate. On average, nannies in Los Angeles make between $25 and $35 an hour, she said.

 

View full article on Insider.com

James Scott Films Streaming This Summer

James Scott Films Streaming This Summer

James Scott’s Summer Streaming continues with the following schedule:

July 6 – 12: The Great Ice Cream Robbery (1971) 40 mins
July 13 – 19: Coilin and Platonida (1976)  80 mins
July 20 – 26: Nightcleaners (1975) 90 mins
July 27 – August 2: ’36 to ’77  (1978) 85 mins
August 3 – 9: Fragments (2019) 43 mins

To view any of the films in the summer’s rotating schedule, go to https://vimeo.com/404435215/27ac239848.

In The Great Ice Cream Robbery (1971), which was proposed to the Arts Council as a two-screen film, the idea was to mirror the language and philosophy of Oldenburg towards temporality and ephemerality in the nature of the work: happenings, soft materials, impermanence. With two 16mm projectors and separate sound systems, its form of presentation would insure the potential of change every time the film was shown. Sadly, it meant that over the years, the film was rarely screened except by risk-averse and totally dedicated curators. Now for the first time in the digital age, it is actually possible to see this as a two-screen presentation as close as possible to how it was originally intended to be seen. We suggest using headphones or a stereo sound system for viewing.

As we were editing The Great Ice Cream Robbery, I also started to work with my friend Marc Karlin on a political documentary about janitors (mostly immigrant women of colour and Irish women) who worked through the night, cleaning office buildings. Little did we realize that we had embarked on a five-year project. We were joined by Humphry Trevelyan and Mary Kelly and called ourselves the Berwick Street Film Collective. Nightcleaners came out in 1975 at the Edinburgh Film Festival.

After the intensity of Nightcleaners, I wanted to move to a completely different kind of film and in 1975 began Coilin and Platonida for German television. This was to be a silent narrative film set in a remote part of Ireland at the turn of the century and based on a Russian short story by Leskov. I had come across the story in Walter Benjamin’s essay on storytelling. This essay very much influenced my filmic approach using 8mm refilmed to 16mm. I found local non-professionals to play the parts as well as using my two young children.

Upon completing Coilin and Platonida, Marc drew me back once more into the Nightcleaners story.  It had been a struggle without an end. The victory strike at the Ministry of Defense had come too late to be included in ‘Part 1’ and so the new film, ‘36 to ‘77 (1978) was to take this victory, and through the eyes of Myrtle, one of the janitors, look back on the campaign and reflect on how it had changed her life.

We end up with my last film Fragments, which in some ways connects to the first art film with David Hockney, Love’s Presentation. Fragments is a film about the painter Derek Boshier preparing for a new exhibition. Both Love’s Presentation and Fragments are films about process, but separated by over 50 years. Derek and David first met at the Royal College of Art and remain friends to this day. Both started as ‘pop’ artists and then followed very different trajectories.

Fragments was completed at the end of last year and premiered in January 2020 at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

– James Scott

Visit james-scott.com/

Discussion Between Anita Rogers and Robert Szot

On June 4, 2020, gallery owner Anita Rogers and painter Robert Szot sat down on Instagram Live to discuss art-making during quarantine, the gallery/artist relationship and the pandemic’s effect on the art world.

The Lyman Allyn Art Museum Acquires Work by Jan Cunningham

We are pleased to announce that the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, CT has added a drawing (right) by Jan Cunningham to their permanent collection.

ABOUT LYMAN ALLYN ART MUSEUM:

The Lyman Allyn Art Museum is located in New London, Connecticut and was founded in 1926 by Lyman Allyn’s daughter Harriet Upson Allyn. The collection includes European and non-Western art as well as American fine and decorative art, 17th-century European works on paper, 19th-century American paintings, and contemporary art. The museum also conducts educational programs.

Lyman Allyn’s permanent collection consists of approximately 10,000 objects. Much of this collection was developed by the Museum’s first Director Winslow Ames, who acquired works dating from the 16th through the 19th centuries. It includes works by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, as well as works by Frederic Leighton, François Boucher, Nicholas Poussin, Gustave Courbet, Charles LeBrun, and Tiepolo. Featured artists include Rembrandt Peale, Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart, John Trumbull, Thomas Cole, Frederick Edwin Church, and Albert Bierstadt.[

ABOUT THE WORK:

Jan Cunningham

Untitled (abstraction)
2000
Charcoal and thread on paper
7.5″ x 7.5″

Visit the museum’s website

Gordon Moore Featured in Hyperallergic

Artists Quarantine With Their Art Collections

Gordon Moore in Lauren Henkin’s Collection

BY STEPHEN MAINE

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Continuing my inquiry into the ways that artists look at the work they live with, I’ve been asking the following questions: In the context of rampant disease, do you look at your personal collection differently now, and which works in particular? Is there one that especially resonates with you at this weird, frightening moment? And does it take on new meaning?

Lauren Henkin (Rockland, Maine): I first saw Gordon Moore’s work in an exhibition at Betty Cuningham Gallery in 2014. The show included paintings and photo emulsion drawings. Both were compelling, but the drawings struck a chord. There is a lushness to the grounds — beautifully printed photographs toned in warm yellows and grays — which, combined with marks of ink and gouache, suggest a velvet canvas scorched by electricity. It was as if the artist had formed a wire sculpture and then tracked its slow progress of shadow-making across a concrete surface, his hand creating furcated markings of time passing.

Quarantine has forced on me a strange relationship to time. One moment is filled with reflection and pause; the next, a casual glint of thought tossed into the wind. Mon-day, Tues-day, Wednes-day are no more. All that remain are day and night.

One of Gordon’s drawings hangs on the wall beside my desk. I see it whenever l look up from my computer. Throughout the day, I can see how light engages the work. In the morning, the sun buoys the light areas of the drawing. At night, the dark tones recede deeper into space.

The drawing has replaced my clock. It’s a beautiful and needed reminder that time can be measured not by seconds, hours, or days but by marks, tone, and depth.

To view the full article, visit anitarogersgallery.com or Hyperallergic.