Mixed Media

"Traditions In Action" at Hartwick College

"Celebrating the Earth: Traditions in Action" will take place from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, April 19, the Yager Museum of Art & Culture at Hartwick College in Oneonta and will feature guest interpreters and presenters from the Hawk Circle in Cherry Valley.

The program will feature a series of interactive wilderness education programs, including the Native traditions of boiling maple sap, drum making and use, flint napping, rope making, and beaded necklaces. The program will provide a sense of immersion and reality, connecting visitors with how Native Americans used the materials at their disposal to create objects for use and beauty.

The event will also feature "Containers of Belief," a Yager Museum special exhibition exploring Native American objects made and used by Native people in their everyday lives. The exhibit considers the spiritual dimensions of the showcased objects from creation through use. Activities will take place in The Yager Museum and on Frisbee Field. Refreshments will be served, including foods using ingredients available to Native Americans.

The program has been created by the museum education course, a part of Hartwick College’s Museum Studies Minor. Four students in the class have worked together to create a program that will capture the imagination of their peers and the community. The students have planned virtually every aspect of the project, from creating the program of activities, developing a marketing plan, considering menu choices, and establishing a Facebook page for the Yager Museum on which current activities can be shared.

Hawk Circle Wilderness Programs began in 1989 as a one week camp experience for teens, in the Upper Hudson Valley. After eight years in the Upper Hudson Valley, they moved in 1997 to Cherry Valley where they offer camps and programs focused on making authentic crafts and sharing in wilderness experiences that can awaken a passion for learning, teaching and inner growth.

This program is free to all and is sponsored by The Yager Museum of Art & Culture, the office of Academic Affairs, and the office of Student Success. For more information, visit their website or call The Yager Museum at 607-431-4480.

Telephone:     607-431-4480
Web Site Address:     http://www.hartwick.edu/museum
Email Address:     museums@hartwick.edu

82 and Still Painting

"We're living in a total illusion here on earth for better or worse, but whatever is beyond, that's where I'm looking... to the reality behind it all," says George Rhoads (pictured, right). He's talking about his landscape oil & acrylic paintings, his "chosen profession" as he puts it. But isn't he most famous for his huge moving sculptures, which appear at the Corning Museum of Glass, the ScienCenter in Ithaca, the Port Authority in NYC, and around the world? "In the 60's is when I started making the sculptures, and that provided me with kind of a living from then on, so I was able to paint quite a bit." Those paintings hang in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in the collections of Leonard Bernstein, and Lawrence Tish, among others. "Commercially, that hasn't done me a lot of good," says Rhoads. But painting is his first love. His rare solo exhibit, Landscapes of the Fingerlakes, is at Ithaca's Community School of Music and Arts through March 28.

Rhoads moved to the Ithaca area in 1970, in part because he was tired of living in New York. "I paint what's around me, and I was tired of painting the city," he says. Now his adopted home has named the month of March in his honor. In proclaiming March to be "George Rhoads Month," Ithaca mayor Carolyn Peterson cited, among other things, Rhoads' "international reputation as a painter, sculptor, and designer of kinetic art as well as being one of the first North American origami masters, and a yoga teacher." Rhoads says of the proclamation "it's rather gratifying, but strange... It's fun. I feel that I really belong here in Ithaca."

A few years back, the late Fred Rogers brought a crew to Ithaca to film an episode visiting George Rhoads' studio and looking at his fanciful rolling-ball sculptures. "That was a great day when he and his crew came to do the show, really unforgettable" says Rhoads. "Mr. Rogers was exactly as he seems on TV, a marvelous character."

The area landscapes in Rhoads' rare solo exhibition were all completed within the last three years, some of which had languished for years before being completed for this exhibit. (Pictured, left: Lake Afternoon, up for a raffle to benefit CSMA.)

He'll give an artist's talk Sunday, March 9 at 2pm at the CSMA gallery. He says he'll ask those attending what they want to know about... his career in general or the specific creation of the landscapes on display.

The exhibit's "gala opening" 5-8pm tonight (3/7) is timed to coincide with Gallery Night of Ithaca. Landscapes of the Finger Lakes runs  through March 28 at the Community School of Music and Arts, 330 E. State Street, Ithaca. Gallery is open Monday through Friday, 10am - 8pm.

LISTEN AGAIN: Hear my interview with George Rhoads online.

Read an article by Peggy Haines about George Rhoads in Life in the Finger Lakes magazine.

Visit George Rhoads' website.

--Gregory Keeler
gkeeler@wskg.org

 

Underground Railroad Exhibit on display in Binghamton

The Underground Railroad Exhibit is now on display in the 2nd Floor Gallery at City Hall in Binghamton. The exhibit, which is organized by the Freedom Trail Project Foundation, features artifacts and other visual portrayals of enslavement, resistance to it, and the paths many took to freedom.

“This exhibit allows us to examine a difficult part of our country’s history,” said Binghamton Mayor Matt Ryan. “In moving our community forward, it is important for us to reflect the experience of enslavement, the legacy of racism, and the continuing struggle to achieve equality and justice for all people.”

Using a variety of materials, the exhibit takes audiences through the history of enslavement in North America, emphasizing that it was both a personal experience and a government-sanctioned institution.

“Slavery was a system of oppression,” said George Sands, the exhibit’s curator.  “Our exhibit displays how that system dehumanized all those who were affected by it. It is a lesson that ideologies of hate and social supremacy can gain wide-spread acceptance, and result in violence. As the exhibit suggests, we must keep that lesson in mind, and learn from it.”

At the exhibit’s beginning, diagrams illustrate the methods with which slave-traders packed ships past capacity with captives, which resulted in many deaths. Reprints of 19th-century newspaper articles on “runaway slaves,” and the rewards for their re-capture, demonstrate how people of African heritage were classified as property. Near the exhibit’s conclusion are short biographies of prominent abolitionists. And along the way are examples of the quilts whose designs served as a code for the Underground Railroad, the network of clandestine routes and safe houses used by the enslaved to escape to free states, or as far north as Canada, with the aid of abolitionists.

The exhibit also highlights the Southern Tier’s role in the anti-slavery movement. Binghamton and nearby cities were home to “stations” for the Underground Railroad. One of these places was a house located where City Hall now stands. The house’s owner, Dr. Steven Hand, had an instrumental role in the organization and operation of the Underground Railroad throughout the Southern Tier.  A plaque commemorating such local efforts to abolish slavery was installed at City Hall’s Hawley St. entrance in 2005.

With its grand opening on February 1st, the exhibition will kick off Black History Month, and then stay on display through March 28th. For more information on the Underground Railroad Exhibition visit the Freedom Trail Project Foundation or call 607-265-3441.