Exhibits

James Tissots Life of Christ Watercolors Exhibit

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The exhibition James Tissot: &#8220The Life of Christ&#8221 will include 124 watercolors selected from a set of 350 that depict detailed scenes from the New Testament, from before the birth of Jesus through the Resurrection, in a chronological narrative. On view from October 23, 2009, through January 17, 2010, it marks the first time in more than twenty years that any of the Tissot watercolors, a pivotal acquisition that entered the collection in 1900, have been on view at the Brooklyn Museum.

The exhibition has been organized by Judith F. Dolkart, Associate Curator, European Art, and will travel to venues to be announced. It will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue of the complete set of 350 images, to be published by the Museum in association with Merrell Publishers Ltd, London.

Born in France, James Tissot (1836-1902) had a successful artistic career in Paris before going to London in the 1870s, where he established himself as a renowned painter of London society, before returning to Paris in 1882. He then began work on a set of fifteen paintings depicting the costumes and manners of fashionable Parisian society women. While visiting the Church of St. Sulpice in the course of his research, he experienced a religious vision, after which he embarked on an ambitious project to illustrate the New Testament.

With the same meticulous attention to detail that he had applied to painting high society, he now created these precisely rendered watercolors. In preparation, he made expeditions to the Middle East to record the landscape, architecture, costumes, and customs of the Holy Land and its people, which he recorded in photographs, notes, and sketches, convinced that the region had remained unchanged since Jesus’s time. When he returned to his Paris studio he drew upon his research materials to execute the watercolors, concentrating on this project to the exclusion of his previous subject matter.

Unlike earlier artists, who often depicted biblical figures anachronistically, Tissot painted the many figures in costumes he believed to be historically authentic. In addition to the archaeological exactitude of many of the watercolors, the series presents other, highly dramatic and often mystical images, such as Jesus Ministered to by Angels and The Grotto of the Agony.

Tissot began the monumental task of illustrating the New Testament in 1886 and first presented selections at the Paris Salon in 1894 (before the series’ completion), where they were received with great enthusiasm. Press accounts on both sides of the Atlantic reported emotional reactions among the visitors: some women wept or kneeled before the works, crawling from picture to picture, while men removed their hats in reverence.

In May 1901 the 350 watercolors, newly mounted in gold mats and reframed, went on view for the first time on Eastern Parkway- records seem to indicate they remained on nearly continuous display until the 1930s. Since then, in part because of conservation concerns, they have only rarely been shown, and then only small portions of the series, most recently in late 1989 through early 1990.

Photo: James Tissot. Jesus Goes Up Alone onto a Mountain to Pray, 1886-94. Brooklyn Museum

Lincoln and New York Opens At New York Historical Society

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From the launch of Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 Presidential campaign with a speech at Cooper Union through the unprecedented outpouring of grief at his funeral procession in 1865, New York City played a surprisingly central role in the career of the sixteenth President—and Lincoln, in turn, had an impact on New York that was vast, and remains vastly underappreciated.

Now, for the first time, a museum exhibition will trace the crucial relationship between America’s greatest President and its greatest city, when the New-York Historical Society presents Lincoln and New York, from October 9, 2009 through March 25, 2010. The culminating presentation in the Historical Society’s Lincoln Year of exhibitions, events and public programs, this extraordinary display of original artifacts, iconic images and highly significant period documents is the Historical Society’s major contribution to the nation’s Lincoln Bicentennial. Lincoln and New York has been endorsed by the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.

Serving as chief historian for Lincoln and New York and editor of the accompanying catalogue is noted Lincoln scholar and author Harold Holzer, co-chairman of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. He has also organized the Historical Society’s year-long Lincoln Series of public conversations and interviews. Serving as curator is Dr. Richard Rabinowitz, president of American History Workshop and curator of the exhibitions Slavery in New York and New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War at the New-York Historical Society.

Lincoln and New York brings to life the period between Lincoln’s decisive entrance into the city’s life at the start of the 1860 Presidential campaign to his departure from it in 1865 as a secular martyr. During these years, the policies of the Lincoln administration damaged and then re-built the New York economy, transforming the city from a thriving port dependent on trade with the slave-holding South into the nation’s leading engine of financial and industrial growth- support and opposition to the President flared into a virtual civil war within the institutions and on the streets of New York, out of which emerged a pattern of political contention that survives to this day.

To begin this story, visitors follow the prairie lawyer eastward to his rendezvous with “the political cauldron” of New York in the winter of 1860. Visitors will learn something of his background and of the rapidly accelerating political crisis that had brought him to the fore: the battle over the extension of slavery into the western territories.

Then, in the six galleries that follow, visitors will discover the interconnections between these two unlikely partners: the ambitious western politician with scant national experience, and the sophisticated eastern metropolis that had become America’s capital of commerce and publishing.

Campaign (1859—1860) immerses visitors in the sights and sounds of the city, then the fastest-growing metropolis in the world, while re-creating Lincoln’s entire visit in February 1860 when his epoch-making address at the Cooper Union and the photograph for which he posed that same day together launched his national career. The displays will cast new light on the lecture culture of the antebellum city, the political divisions within its Republican organization, the strength of its publishing industry and the bustling, somewhat alien urban community that Lincoln encountered. The video re-creation of Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech, produced on site with acclaimed actor Sam Waterston’s vivid rendering of Lincoln’s arguments, brings that crucial evening to life. Visitors will re-enact for themselves how Lincoln posed for New York’s—and the nation’s—leading photographer, Mathew Brady, whose now-iconic photograph began the reinvention of Lincoln’s public image. As Lincoln himself said, “Brady and the Cooper Union speech made me President.”

Objects on view will include the telegram inviting Lincoln to give his first Eastern lecture, the lectern that he used at Cooper Union, the widely distributed printed text of his speech, photographic and photo-engraving equipment from this era and torches that were carried by pro-Lincoln “Wide Awakes” at their great October 6 New York march. Also on view will be a panoply of political cartoons and editorial commentary generated in New York that established “Honest Abe” and the “Railsplitter” as a viable and virtuous candidate, but concurrently began the tradition of anti-Lincoln caricature by introducing Lincoln as a slovenly rustic, reluctant to discuss the hot-button slavery issue but secretly favoring the radical idea of racial equality.

The next gallery, Public Opinions (1861—62), registers the gyrating fortunes of the Lincoln Administration’s first year among New Yorkers—especially the editors and publishers of the city’s 175 daily and weekly newspapers and illustrated journals, who wielded unprecedented power. In the wake of his election, and the secession of the Southern states, the New York Stock Exchange had plummeted and New York harbor was stilled. Payment of New York’s huge outstanding debts from Southern planters and merchants ceased, and bankruptcies abounded.

Scarcely one docked ship hoisted the national colors to greet the new President-Elect in February 1861 when he visited on his way to Washington and the inauguration, and eyewitness Walt Whitman described his welcome along New York’s streets as “ominous.” Mayor Fernando Wood proposed that the city declare its independence from both the Union and the Confederacy and continue trading with both sides. Even New Yorkers unwilling to go that far desperately tried to find compromises with the South that in their words, “would avert the calamity of Civil War.”

Just two months later, though, in the wake of the attack on Fort Sumter, it suddenly appeared that every New Yorker was an avid defender of Old Glory. After war was declared, business leaders, including many powerful Democrats, pledged funds and goods to the effort. The Irish community, not previously sympathetic to Republicans, vigorously mobilized its own battalion in the first wave of responses to Lincoln’s call for troops to crush the Rebellion. But after the Confederate victory at Bull Run, the wheel turned again. From July 1861 onward for more than a year, the news was unremittingly bad. Battlefield mishaps, crippling inflation, profiteering among war contractors, corruption in the supply of “shoddy” equipment and clothing for the troops, the ability of Confederate raiders to seize dozens of New York merchant ships right outside the harbor, the imposition of an income tax and a controversial effort to reform banking, alarming New York’s regulation-wary financial institutions: all these led to relentless press and public criticism of Lincoln. New York’s cartoonists, as shown in the exhibition, found every possible way to caricature the President’s homely appearance and controversial policies. Even abolitionists and blacks despaired of the President’s reluctance to embrace emancipation and the recruitment of African-Americans into the Union war effort. Former allies such as Horace Greeley slammed Lincoln for putting reunification above freedom as a war goal.

In this gallery, the objects that tell the story will include colorful recruitment posters for the Union army, the great, seldom-lent Thomas Nast painting of the departure of the 7th Regiment for the Front, rare original photographs of the great rally in Union Square on April 21, 1861, and the bullet-shattered coat of Lincoln’s young New York-born friend, and onetime bodyguard, Colonel Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth, the first Union officer killed in the war.

Gallery 3, titled Bad Blood
(1862), illustrates the mutual animosity of New York’s pro- and anti-Lincoln forces by exhibiting bigger-than-life, three-dimensional versions of the era’s political cartoons. On one side are the Democratic Party politicians and their backers, caricatured by their opponents as bartenders in a political clubhouse, “dispensing a poisonous brew of sedition and fear.” On the other side, a caricature of Lincoln’s New York supporters—officials of the United States Sanitary Commission—shows them enjoying a sumptuous feast, celebrating the ethic of economic opportunity for the rich and the values of hard work, obedience, and self-discipline for the poor. Visitors will see how a powerful New York party of Peace Democrats, or Copperheads, portrayed Lincoln as a despot, warned against “race mongrelization,” and encouraged desertion and draft-dodging. At the same time, the gallery will show how some New Yorkers reaped the benefits of the war, given that their city was the principal home of many of the industries and services Lincoln needed: munitions, shipbuilding, medical supplies, food supplies, money lending and more. Interactive media in Gallery 3 will help visitors (especially of school age) explore the economic issues that so bitterly divided New York.

Gallery 4, Battleground (1862—1864), re-creates seven different conflicts in the city between 1862 and 1864. In each one, the visitor is invited to choose a side, listen to “the talk of the town,” and locate historic landmarks that survive from this era. Among the political and social flashpoints were Lincoln’s issuance of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation- the suspension of habeas corpus and press freedom- the institution of a military draft- the promotion (by Lincoln’s elite Protestant supporters) of a new ethic of civic philanthropy, industrial progress, and national expansion- and the bitter Presidential campaign of 1864. Visitors will be brought into the setting of Shiloh Presbyterian Church (on the corner of Prince and Lafayette Street) on “Jubilee Day,” January 1, 1863, when emancipation was proclaimed- re-live the four-day Manhattan insurrection of July 1863 known as the Draft Riots, which claimed more than 120 lives before they were put down by troops from the 7th Regiment, recalled from Gettysburg- glimpse the crowded pavilions of the loyalists’ Metropolitan Sanitary Fair of April 1864- and see a multitude of cartoons, engravings, pamphlets, flags, posters, lanterns, and campaign memorabilia.

The evolution of Lincoln’s image—from Railsplitter to Jokester to Tyrant to Gentle Father—is the subject of Gallery 5, Eyes on Lincoln. Four iconic portraits, all enormously influential, mostly from life, and none ever displayed together in such a suite—one by Thomas Hicks, one by William Marshall, and two by Francis Bicknell Carpenter (of Lincoln alone and of the assembled family)—anchor the investigation. Interactive programs allow visitors to learn more about the creation and re-production of these images, their iconographic roots in western art, and the artists’ biographies.

The last major gallery, The Loss of a Great Man (1865), takes the visitor from Lincoln’s victory in the 1864 election to his New York funeral procession, perhaps the largest such event yet held in world history, involving hundreds of thousands of participants and inspiring an outburst of mourning among whites and blacks, Christians and Jews, that signaled the transfiguration of the late president’s heretofore-controversial image. A video documents the triumphant events of March and April 1865: the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery, the delivery of the second inaugural address, and the surrender of the Confederate armies. In New York, a gigantic parade celebrated Lincoln on March 5, 1865. And then, after Lincoln’s assassination on April 15, the fierce political antagonisms surrounding Lincoln suddenly evaporated, and a new image emerged of a Christ-like, compassionate, and brooding hero who gave his life so that the nation would enjoy a “new birth of freedom.”

A superb collection of memorial material produced and distributed in the city is accompanied by artwork representing Lincoln’s apotheosis. Included will be the recently discovered scrapbook of a New Yorker who roamed the streets after Lincoln’s death sketching the impromptu written and visual tributes that sprung up in shop windows and on building facades in the wake of Lincoln’s murder. Perhaps the greatest memorial of all was New Yorker Walt Whitman’s poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

As a coda, the exhibition concludes with a brief tour of how New Yorkers have continued to memorialize Lincoln—in the names of streets and institutions- in the development of an egalitarian national creed- in a powerful sense of nationhood- and in a constantly evolving sense that this is the most representative and inspiring of all Americans.

Catalogue

The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated, full-color catalogue edited by guest historian Harold Holzer, who has also contributed an introductory essay and a chapter on the city’s publishers and the making of Lincoln’s image in New York. Additional essays have been written by historians Jean Harvey Baker, Catherine Clinton, James Horton, Michael Kammen, Barnet Schechter, Craig L. Symonds, and Frank J. Williams, with a preface by New-York Historical Society President and CEO Louise Mirrer, all featuring seldom-seen pictures, artifacts, and documents from the Society collections.

Support for Lincoln and New York

Objects in the exhibition come from the New-York Historical Society’s own rich and extensive collections- from the Gilder Lehrman Collection, on deposit at the New-York Historical Society- Brooks Brothers- and from other major institutions including the Library of Congress, The Cooper Union, Chicago History Museum, John Hay Library at Brown University, Union League Club, New York Military Museum, Cornell University, the University of Illinois, and the New York Public Library.

In addition to generous funding from JPMorgan Chase & Co., the U.S. Department of Education Underground Railroad Educational and Cultural (URR) Program, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, additional project support for the exhibition and related programs has been provided by The Bodman Foundation, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Motorola Foundation, Brooks Brothers, Con Edison, and the New York Council for the Humanities. Thirteen, a WNET.ORG station, is media sponsor.

About the New-York Historical Society

Established in 1804, the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS) comprises New York’s oldest museum and a nationally renowned research library. N-YHS collects, preserves, and interprets American history and art. Its mission is to make these collections accessible to the broadest public and increase understanding of American history through exhibitions, public programs, and research that reveal the dynamism of history and its impact on the world today. N-YHS holdings cover four centuries of American history and comprise one of the world’s greatest collections of historical artifacts, American art, and other materials documenting the history of the United States as seen through the prism of New York City and State.

Photo: Print by Currier and Ives &#8220The Rail Candidate, 1860&#8243- Lithograph. New-York Historical Society.

Hyde Collection To Present Andrew Wyeth: An American Legend

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The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, Warren County, has announced that its major 2010 summer exhibition will be &#8220Andrew Wyeth: An American Legend&#8221 will be on view from June 12 through September 5, 2010. The exhibition, organized by The Hyde Collection, will cover a broad span of Wyeth’s work including sections devoted to early coastal watercolors and landscape paintings, as well as a look at Wyeth’s models, his interest in vernacular architecture, and his connection to both the Regionalist tradition and Magic Realism.

The exhibition will comprise approximately fifty works, with the core coming from the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. Featured in the exhibition will be examples of the artist’s works created in dry brush, watercolor, pencil, and tempera &#8211 including The Hyde’s own Wyeth watercolor – The Ledge and the Island, 1937- as well as works on loan from museums and private collections.

The exhibit will be curated by Hyde Executive Director David F. Setford and Deputy Director and Chief Curator Erin B. Coe and will be the first opportunity since the Wyeth’s death earlier this year to begin to critically reevaluate his contribution to American twentieth century art.

The Museum will produce a catalogue to accompany the exhibition and also hopes to collaborate with other arts organizations in the Glens Falls region in coordinating a series of lectures, exhibitions, and performances with Wyeth-related themes.

NYS Museum Photo Exhibit On Great Depression

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A new traveling exhibition opens at the New York State Museum on October 17 showcasing the works of a legendary group of photographers who documented the lives and struggles of Americans enduring the Great Depression. &#8220This Great Nation Will Endure,&#8221 open through March 14, 2010, features more than 150 images of America taken between 1935 and 1942 by the legendary photographic unit of the Farm Security Administration (FSA). This remains the largest documentary photography project ever undertaken. The photographs include some of the most familiar and powerful images of the nation to emerge from the Depression era. Many have reached iconic status in American culture.

Curated and designed by staff at the Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) Library and Museum in Hyde Park, the exhibition features images from every region of the nation, culled from the enormous FSA photography collection (numbering tens of thousands of images) at the Library of Congress. Included are photographs taken during the 1930s and
1940s by Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, Carl Mydans, Russell Lee, John Vachon, Marion Post Wolcott and Jack Delano.

The FSA was a New Deal agency created by President Roosevelt in 1937 to help American farmers and farm laborers who were confronting economic depression and natural disaster, including the ecological disaster known as the Dust Bowl. It developed out of an earlier agency called the Resettlement Administration (RA) for which its director, Rexford Tugwell, had established a publicity department to document rural poverty and government efforts to alleviate it. That department included a photographic unit called the “Historical Section,” administrated by former Columbia University economics instructor, Roy Stryker. To accomplish the agency’s goals, Stryker enlisted a group of men and women who today comprise a virtual “Who’s Who” of 20th-century documentary photography. The RA and its “Historical Section” were merged into the newly created FSA in 1937. Many of its
photographers later forged careers that helped define photojournalism at magazines like Life and Look.

Most of the photographs in the exhibition depict rural life and hardships but they also include many images of town and city life. The FSA created a very diverse
record of American life during the 1930s and early 1940s, including images of hardship, endurance, hope, recovery, migration, recreation and community life. The photographs provide visual affirmation of President Roosevelt’s bold assertion in
his first inaugural address, delivered at the lowest point of the Great Depression: “This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper … the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

The exhibition also includes a specially commissioned, short documentary film that explores the work of four of the most prominent FSA photographers. There also is a soundtrack of folk music sung by migrant workers that was recorded in migrant worker camps in California in 1940-41. An interactive computer program allows visitors to explore entire series of images shot by FSA photographers during individual
photo assignments. Also featured is a short silent video that depicts the ways in which FSA photography was used in newspapers and magazines of the 1930s and 1940s.

Photo: Lower Manhattan seen from the S.S. Coamo leaving New York, by Jack Delano.Courtesy Library of Congress

Thomas Edison Home, Laboratory Complex Reopens

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The National Park Service is welcoming visitors to the new newly renovated Edison Laboratory Complex at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, New Jersey. According to the site’s Superintendent Greg Marshall, “The original music recording studio, Thomas Edison’s private laboratory, and a photography studio will be open to the public for the first time in the history of the site.”

The renovation was a complex project to preserve the historic buildings and the artifact and archival collections at the Laboratory Complex and Glenmont Estate. The original historic furnishings and documents were beginning to deteriorate because of lack of adequate heating and cooling systems. They were at risk of loss or damage from fire because of old, outdated alarm and sprinkler systems. The vast majority of the artifact collection was inaccessible to visitors and researchers while stored on the upper floors of the historic main laboratory.

The original furnishings have been moved back into many rooms and the unique museum collections will be available to see, hear, and experience. Installation of a new elevator and stair tower adjacent to the main laboratory building allows new public access to the upper floors of the laboratory that now feature new exhibits. The Edison home at the Glenmont Estate has also been renovated. Other improvements include new fire detection system and upgraded fire sprinkler system, new heating and cooling systems, and exterior building repairs and an integrated drainage system.

The $13 million partnership project with the Edison Innovation Foundation and Charles Edison Fund of Newark, New Jersey also includes new heating and cooling systems, new fire detection and suppression systems, and structural repairs to the historic building’s roofs, foundations, and windows. The new Thomas Edison experience offers visitors self-guided audio tours, cell phone tours, films, grounds walks, school workshops and traditional guided programs.

Thomas Edison National Historical Park is a unit of the National Park Service that preserves and interprets the West Orange Laboratory and Home of inventor Thomas Alva Edison. Information is available at: www.nps.gov/edis.

The Edison Innovation Foundation is a nonprofit organization that supports the Edison Legacy and encourages students (including women and minorities) to embrace careers in science, technology and engineering and is committed to educating the next generation of great innovators while using Edison and his Invention Factory as the foundation. For information on the Foundation, visit: www.thomasedison.org.

Hyde Collection Receives Gift of Major Crockwell Painting

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The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, NY has announced that it has received a gift of a 1934 oil painting by Douglass Crockwell (1904-1968) entitled &#8220Paper Workers, Finch Pruyn & Co,&#8221 from Mr. and Mrs. Samuel P. Hoopes, of Bolton Landing, New York.

Douglass Crockwell was a founding trustee of The Hyde Collection, acted as its first director, and was famous for his illustrative paintings for such national publications as the Saturday Evening Post, Life, Look, and Esquire. His commercial illustrations were commissioned by such manufacturing and industry giants as General Electric, General Motors, Coca Cola, and Standard Oil. Crockwell lived and worked in Glens Falls from 1932 until his death in 1968.

“Although Crockwell is more widely known as a commercial illustrator, this painting is a remarkable example of his endeavor as a fine artist &#8212- long before he became the famous illustrator of the 1940s and 50s,” stated Hyde Chief Curator Erin B. Coe. The painting depicts two anonymous Finch Pruyn workers smoothing a massive roll of newsprint on a towering paper machine while in the lower left corner a manager supervises their work. Crockwell painted two nearly identical versions of this image of labor during the Great Depression, when many American workers were unemployed. “Crockwell is boldly presenting the primary industry of Glens Falls at the height of the Depression,” added Coe. The first version belongs to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C. and was created by Crockwell in 1934 for the Works Progress Administration. This second version, donated to The Hyde, was made by the artist for Finch Pruyn & Co. later that same year.

According to The Hyde’s Executive Director David F. Setford, the gift is a major acquisition for a number of reasons. “Sam Hoopes saw the opportunity to share with the Museum a piece of Glens Falls history. The image of Paper Workers, Finch Pruyn & Co. connects us with the industrial roots that allowed The Hyde Collection to begin.”

The painting joins two other works in the Museum’s collection by Crockwell. The first, acquired in 1971, is a painted illustration for the Saturday Evening Post and was gifted to The Hyde by Crockwell’s wife and son. The second is an unfinished portrait of Louis Fiske Hyde, which was donated to the Museum by Mrs. Crockwell and her family in 1979.

&#8220Paper Workers, Finch Pruyn & Co.&#8221 was presented by The Hyde’s Collections Committee to the Board of Trustees for approval at their meeting on September 21, 2009. The work will be sent to the Williamstown Art Conservation Center for conservation treatment, and when the painting returns it will be placed on public view.

Photo: Douglass Crockwell, American, 1904-1968 &#8220Paper Workers, Finch Pruyn & Co.,&#8221 Glens Falls, New York, 1934, Oil on canvas, 48 x 36 in.

Iroquois Museum To Present Haudenosaunee Artists

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On Sunday, October 4 at 2 P.M., the Iroquois Indian Museum in Howes Cave, NY will present a lecture by Dr. Robert Spiegleman entitled, “Spirits Return – Inspired Images by Haudenosaunee Artists.” Dr. Spiegleman’s talk centers around a 2008 exhibition that featured works by five Haudenosaunee painters &#8211 Peter Jemison, Carson Waterman, David Fadden, John Fadden and Tracey Shenandoah. The exhibition commemorated the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) historical, cultural, and environmental footprint in northeast Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna Valley. Some call the area &#8220The Southern Door,&#8221 a region, which contained and contains Haudenosaunee people and dependent and incorporated peoples from other tribes. It has a marginalized, rich history that needs to be re-integrated into an overall understanding of the Haudenosaunee legacy. Slides of the artist’s work from the exhibition will be shown and discussed at the lecture.

As a sociologist, multimedia artist and writer, Dr. Robert Spiegelman presents widely on New York, Iroquois, Irish and environmental themes. The founder of SullivanClinton.com and Derryveagh.com, Spiegelman revisits hidden histories that link past and present, and foster indigenous values of peace, democracy and nature-in-balance. A college teacher for 12 years, he holds a Doctorate in Sociology from CUNY Graduate Center.

For more information contact the Iroquois Indian Museum at: P.O. Box 7, 324 Caverns Rd. Howes Cave, NY 12092. E-mail [email protected], call 518-296-8949, or visit
www.iroquoismuseum.org

Free Admission to Nearly 100 NY Museums Saturday

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This Saturday, September 26, 2008, nearly 100 museums in New York State will participate in Smithsonian magazine’s fifth annual Museum Day. Museum Day is an opportunity for museums and cultural institutions nationwide to open their doors free of charge. A celebration of culture, learning and the dissemination of knowledge, Smithsonian’s Museum Day reflects the spirit of the magazine, and emulates the free-admission policy of the Smithsonian Institution’s Washington, D.C. &#8211 based museums.

Last year, more then 200,000 people attended Museum Day. All fifty states plus Puerto Rico were represented by 900 participating museums. This year, the magazine expects to attract over 1000 museums. Established New York institutions like the New York State Museum, the Adirondack Museum, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Museum of the City of New York, The Museum at Bethel Woods, The Iroquois Indian Museum, and more, will all take part this year. A complete list of New York museums that are participating is located here.

Museum visitors must present Smithsonian magazine’s Museum Day Admission Card to
gain free entry to participating institutions. The Museum Day Admission
Card is available for free download at Smithsonian.com.

Collegiate Church Exhibit, Lectures, in New York City

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Beginning tonight, there will be a series of events, lectures, and an exhibit realting to aspects of the Collegiate Church. The events feature an exhibit about far east trade curated by Marybeth dePhilippis of New-York Historical Society, lectures on Everardus Bogardus (1607-1647) (the second minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in New Amsterdam), the role of women in 17th Century Dutch culture, the archeology of new Amsterdam, and Leisler’s Rebellion and the Collegiate Church. The West End Church and the Marble Collegiate College were both founded in 1628 by Dutch settlers.


Events At Bard Graduate Center, 38 West 86th Street, NYC:

Exhibit: (at 18 West 18th Street) “Dutch New York Between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick (September 18,2009 &#8211 January 3, 2010), curated by Marybeth dePhilippis of New-York Historical Society. Catalogue available.

Lecture: (September 24 at 6 p.m.) “A Dutch Mystic in the New World: Reverend Everardus Bogardus (1607-1647) and His Callings”. The second minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in New Amsterdam, Bogardus will be reprised by Prof. Willem Frijoff, Emeritus professor of history at Free University (Amsterdam) who has written the definitive biography of Dominie Bogardus, and Dr. Firth Haring Fabend, fellow of the Holland Society and author of Zion on the Hudson (about the Reformed Church after the English occupation).

Lecture: (October 1 at 6 p.m.) “Women of the Dutch Golden Age”, a talk on the role of Women in 17th Century Dutch Culture by Els Kloek, Associate Professor at Utrecht University and editor-in-chief of Dictionary of Dutch Women.

Tickets for the lectures are available ($25 general, $17 students and seniors) online at [email protected] of by calling (212) 501-3011. For Collegiate Church members, call Ken Chase at (212) 799-4203.

Events at Marble Collegiate Church, 3 West 29th Street:

Lecture: (November 14 at 1:30 p.m.): “Digging New Amsterdam”, a talk by Archeologists Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana Wall, authors of “Unearthing Gotham”. Co-Sponsored by New Amsterdam History Center and the New York Society of Archeologists. Free: call Ken Chase at (212) 799-4203 or email at [email protected].

Lecture: (November 21 at 1:30): “Leisler’s Rebellion and the Collegiate Church Charter”, a talk by David Voorhees, Editor of De Halve Maen, the Holland Society journal and preeminent expert on Jacob Leisler, and Francis Sypher, Jr., translator of the Collegiate Church archives. Free: call Ken Chase at (212) 799-4203 or email [email protected].

Hudson River Brickers Focus of New Exhibit

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There will be an opening reception of the Haverstraw Brick Museum’s new exhibit, Moving Bricks on the Hudson, on September 20, 2009 between 1 and 4 pm at the museum at 12 Main Street in Haverstraw, Rockland County, New York. In celebration of the Hudson River and the Hudson Fulton Champlain Quadricentennial, the exhibit highlights sloops, schooners, towboats, tugs, and barges that transported bricks on the Hudson in the 19th and early 20th centuries. At its peak the brick industry was the dominant industry on the Hudson River and diverse boats carried one billion bricks annually. Visitors will learn about the brick boats and their boatmen and women, the dangers of river transport, and the shipyards that built and repaired the “brickers.”

The exhibit was inspired by the donation of the papers of the Reilly & Clark brick company to the museum. This collection, along with documenting the manufacturer, contains extensive records for the schooners that carried the firm’s bricks to market between 1885 and 1905. Items range from hundreds of receipts for tows, dock fees, and night watchmen to detailed accountings of the number of bricks carried each trip. The exhibit’s curator, T. Robins Brown, has a personal connection to cargo-carrying sailing ships as her great-grandfather, William T. Robins, was the owner and captain of the schooner Ella Worden on the Chesapeake Bay.

Moving Bricks on the Hudson is open on Sunday, September 13 from 11 am to 4 pm for the Annual Haverstraw Street Fair and until January 31, 2010 during the museum’s regular hours Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 1-4 pm. It is also open by appointment by calling 845-947-3505 or emailing haverstrawbrickmuseum.org.

The mission of the Haverstraw Brick Museum is to collect, preserve, research and exhibit materials and cultures of the brick making industry within the Hudson River Valley.

Photo: On Minisceongo Creek, a “bricker,” a brick-carrying schooner, awaits its cargo of bricks from the Shankey brickyard. On board are brickyard workers as well as the brick boat’s crew. The two women, the wives of the captain and first mate, were likely part of the boat’s crew. They lived aboard and cooked, watched tides, pumped bilge water, and performed other tasks that required less strength. Photograph from de Noyelles, Within These Gates.