Did you know that the coffee plant was discovered in Ethiopian forests at least 1,000 years ago? Or that plants use caffeine as a natural pesticide to paralyze and kill destructive insects? The Yale Peabody Museum’s latest temporary exhibition explores the powerful influence of coffee on the environment, human culture and economies worldwide - from coffee cultivation in Africa and South America to coffee culture in the United States. This $60-billion-a-year global industry connects the richest countries in the world with some of the poorest. Through selected artifacts, films and photographs, this exhibition illuminates the fascinating stories behind the coffee we drink, enabling us to become informed consumers.

The Philip Johnson Glass House, a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, launches its 2010 tour season on Saturday, May 1. The season, which runs from May through November, offers six levels of site experience and tickets are currently available at all levels. Ticket orders may be placed online at www.philipjohnsonglasshouse.org or by calling 866.811.4111.

Event: Summer Play Readings

Dates: Thursdays, July 8, July 29, August 5, and August 19 Times: 6pm-8pm

Location: Shakesperience Studio 117 Bank Street Waterbury, CT 06702

Cost: FREE

Contact: www.shakesperience.org 203-754-2531 info@shakesperienceproductions.org

Details: Offered for adults, these evenings give guests the opportunity to hear and perform play readings with our resident actors and Artistic Director Emily Mattina. Guests are then invited to join us for coffee and conversation at John Bale Book Company just down the road.

Ark Woman’s Support Group is a Peer-to-Peer counseling group which focuses on coping with health issues, illness management and other life challenges, building healthy relationships, and developing an effective recovery network. 

Immerse yourself in a world of jellies. From the outside, this new exhibit at Mystic Aquarium resembles a 20-foot-tall sea nettle floating on water. Under its dome, special lighting showcases the fascinating features of six very different jelly species, from moon jellies, often spotted in Long Island Sound, to unusual upside-down jellies and comb jellies, which look like they have electrical currents running through them. Guests can also see how moon jelly polyps are being cultured right at the aquarium. Trickling water from a two-sided water wall inside the exhibit adds to the experience. The wall, sponsored by Aquarion Water Company, features streams of water running over hand-blown glass fish and jellies created by renowned local artist Jeffery P’an of Prescient Studios in Stonington.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Henry Carter Hull Library, the Library and the Clinton Historical Society have joined together to mount an exhibit in the Museum Room at Andrews Memorial Town Hall. The exhibit chronicles the library's history using photographs, text, and a variety of memorabilia, as well as reminiscences about the people who played key roles in the library’s growth over the years. Open 5-7 pm on Thursdays or happily by appointment. Free on-site parking.

Established in 1975 and based in Cooperstown, New York, Glimmerglass Opera offers approximately 40 performances of opera and works of music theater in rotation during the summer. The 2010 Festival runs from July 9-August 24 and will feature four new productions: Puccini’s Tosca, Copland’s The Tender Land, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and the U.S. professionally staged premiere of Handel’s Tolomeo. For performance times and ticket prices refer to www.glimmerglass.org or call the Glimmerglass Opera Box Office at (607) 547-2255. Also, visit our website for more information on available discounts as well as free backstage tours, recitals, opera previews and more.

11:00 am AND 2:00 pm

Come on over and meet some the world’s most fascinating animals!  Explore exotic places like deserts, rain forests, wetlands and even Connecticut’s backyard forests while learning about the amazing adaptations that allow animals to call those places home.  Presented at the Zoo's Learning Circle, this event is FREE with Zoo admission.

1:00 pm

Visit us for story time, a special craft and even an animal encounter each weekday.  All activities are free with the purchase of Zoo admission.  Families with children under age 6 are welcome.

Saint Joseph College and The Bank Street Center for Social Entrepreneurship will present a one-day workshop “A Taste of Social Entrepreneurship” on Thursday, August 19 from 8:30 a.m. - 3:00 p.m. in The Crystal Room located in Mercy Hall on Saint Joseph College’s West Hartford campus. This workshop is designed as an overview of how entrepreneurs can convert their passions and energies into sustainable businesses that help solve vexing social problems. The fee for this workshop is $99; registration deadline is Thursday, August 12, 2010 and may be completed online at: http://www.sjc.edu/continuingstudies.

For more information, including our new full Certificate in Social Entrepreneurship program that will be offered this coming October, please view the Saint Joseph College Web site at: http://www.sjc.edu/continuingstudies or contact Dr. Cheryl Braxton, director of Continuing Education & Community Outreach, at 860.231.5227 or cbraxton@sjc.edu.

About The Bank Street Center for Social Entrepreneurship:

The Bank Street Center for Social Entrepreneurship provides real-world-based education in how to evaluate, plan, launch and grow a small business in a complex world.  Add to that platform the “social” aspect of encouraging learners to design their own job and future, while helping to solve vexing social problems in a sustainable manner. The Center partners with like-minded colleges and universities to provide this content in local communities. View our Web site at http://www.bankstreetcenter.org.

The magical and heart-warming tale of a naïve young woman who eagerly joins a traveling circus. Surrounded by a riot of acrobats, jugglers, and clowns, she is dazzled at first by the troupe’s manipulative magician. In the end she finds happiness with a disillusioned puppeteer who can only express himself through his delightful puppets. Based on the film Lili, Carnival! casts a romantic spell over the entire audience.

A lively discussion with the cast is offered after the Thursday evening performances on August 5, 19 & Sept 2.

 Sunday evenings: end Aug 8

Recent Works: Edith Borax Morrison and Lisa Hess Hesselgrave
Exhibition Dates: August 19 – September 26, 2010
Opening Reception: Sunday, September 12, 3-6pm; Artist Talk, 3pm
Location: Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Avenue, New Haven CT 06515
Gallery Hours: Thursday – Friday, 11am - 4pm; Saturday – Sunday, 10am - 4pm.

Thursday, August 19, 2010 - 6:30 pm
Henry Carter Hull Library, Clinton, CT

photo caption: Patti Smith, Credit: Steven Sebring

 Dinners at the Farm is an open-air celebration of Connecticut's farms, food, and community. This is its 4th year and for 12 nights in August, River Tavern (Chester, CT) chefs will prepare a lavish multi-course feast of Connecticut grown ingredients on two Connecticut farms, White Gate Farm in East Lyme and Barberry Hill Farm in Madison. Guests will savor course after course of incredible dishes which will be cooked from scratch on the back of our vintage Ford farm truck kitchen. Because sourcing and eating local is the cornerstone of Dinners at the Farm, $10,000 of the event proceeds goes to benefit our non-profit partners City Seed, Connecticut Farmland Trust, and Working Lands Alliance. These organizations are dedicated to ensuring that our local traditions of farming and fishing and the value of eating fresh food, grown by a farmer you trust, remain a viable and vibrant part of our lives.

EVENT:    School of Art Faculty Exhibition

Still Life Territory, a juried exhibition with Bob Lenz will be the focus of The Silo Gallery’s next art exhibit at Hunt Hill Farm’s Henderson Cultural Center.  The still life exhibition is a competition organized by The Silo Gallery Director, Valerie Culbertson with guest juror, painter Bob Lenz that runs from August 7^th through September 12^th.  The main gallery will feature twenty-two painters who were selected for the show including Paul Batch, Willard Lustenader, Elizabeth MacDonald and Jill Sarver.  In the New Talent Gallery, works by Escape To The Arts students from Danbury, will be on display.  The exhibition’s awards presentation and opening reception will take place on Saturday, August 7^th from 3 to 5 p.m. at 44 Upland Rd., New Milford, CT. 

As a painting and Fine Arts major at the University of Illinois, Bob Lenz exhibited oil and watercolor landscapes and still life’s throughout the Chicago area during the late fifties and early sixties.  Upon graduation he migrated to New York and began a successful and award winning career as an advertising creative director responsible for numerous major, memorable campaigns.  Thirty-five years later, in 1998, he returned to his first love, painting.  Since then he has studied at the Silvermine School of Art in New Canaan, CT., the Washington Art Association in Washington CT., the National Academy of Design and the Art Students' League in New York City.  Now living in South Kent, Connecticut and New York City, he is exhibiting again and has resumed a committed and prolific career as a painter and printmaker.

For Paul Batch, painting in the Tonalist tradition, a distinctive style of low-toned atmospheric landscape painting, allows the artist to interpret the landscape into poetic imagery.   Mr. Batch will be teaching an en plein air painting workshop at Hunt Hill Farm on Saturday, August 21^st.   Willard Lustenader, originally from Rochester, NY, received his B.A. at Vassar College and an M.A. at the University of London’s Courtauld Institute of Art.  Lustenader’s formal training was originally in art history, but today the artist completely devotes himself to painting at his studio in New Haven, CT while teaching at Albertus Magnus College during the academic year and Choate during the summer.

 Elizabeth MacDonald’s work can be seen in many private, corporate and museum collections, and her murals have been commissioned by hotels in Tokyo and Hong Kong.  She lives in Bridgewater, CT, and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Governor’s Arts Award in visual arts in 1999.  Jill Sarver is presently studying in Italy and a recent MFA graduate from Western Connecticut State University.  She will be exhibiting at The Silo Gallery for the upcoming PastPresentFuture exhibition and will also exhibit at the gallery in 2012.   The opening reception for The Silo Gallery’s juried exhibition includes wines by Hopkins Vineyard and light appetizers by The Silo Cooking School with Chef Mary Kravec.  The opening reception and exhibition are free.  Hunt Hill Farm hours are Wed. through Sat., 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. and Sunday’s noon to 5 p.m.   For more information please call Valerie Culbertson, Silo Gallery Director, at (860) 355-0300 or visit www.hunthillfarmtrust.org. 

Drawing on the creative legacy of Skitch and Ruth Henderson, the Henderson Cultural Center at Hunt Hill Farm, which is associated with the Smithsonian Institution, is a vibrant and unique regional resource, offering the public the opportunity to explore music, art, cuisine, and permanently protected historic open space.

2,973 people died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Among those victims, 153 were Connecticut’s own. The Connecticut Historical Society presents a special traveling exhibition that looks at how Connecticut’s citizens have responded and reflected on this contemporary tragedy. The exhibition includes the “Connecticut Remembers” Memorial Board, photographs, and Connecticut’s 9/11 Memorial Library.

The White Silo Winery is pleased to present a Multi-Media Art Exhibition featuring:

Jack Feldman, Fine Art Photography, Marcia Korotkin and Ellen Lazarus, Monotype/Collage and Justin Perlman, Sculpture. 

This exhibit brings together artists whose work is as diverse as the artists themselves. Jack Feldman sold his first photographs at age 14. Now 17 years old, this marks his second public art exhibition. Justin Perlman is an established, award winning sculptor who has studied widely both within the US and abroad. His work is highly regarded and collected for it's evocative imagery and technical precision. Marcia Korotkin and Ellen Lazarus are abstract, mixed media artists. Their unusual works are intriguing both for their unique construction and for their striking visual impact. 

The Exhibition opens Friday, August 13th. The Public is welcome to the Artists Reception On Saturday, Aug. 14th from 2 - 4 PM. where you can also enjoy the wines of White Silo Winery.

For directions and Gallery hours please visit: www.whitesilogallery.com

Creative Arts Workshop’s August Installation returns, featuring the work of Boston-based artist Melanie Rose Peterson. Using entirely synthetic materials, the artist recreates the colors and textures of human tissue and membrane with startling accuracy. Is it a mouth? Come find out! The installation will be on view 24 hours a day through August 31 and may be viewed from the sidewalk outside the Workshop’s Hilles Gallery.

Join us for an opening reception on Friday, August 6, from 5 to 7 pm.

Join us for the next in our series of exhibits by members of Black Rock’s thriving arts community.

Frank Iovino is a local Black Rock artist who works with pastels and colored pencils to create jovial drawings that depict the ordinary and the extraordinary of everyday life.  Frank is known for drawings of his baseball heroes.  The set of drawings on display in this exhibit are smaller pieces that Frank takes great pleasure in showing for the first time.

Black Rock Branch Library

A Gathering Place for the Entire Community

Part III of Project 35 is currently on view at the Saint Joseph College Art Gallery. Videos may be seen at the gallery through October 24.  In addition, an evening screening of all nine videos will take place on Wednesday, September 8, at 7:00 p.m., accompanied by light refreshments.

An exhibition of single-channel video works selected by 35 international curators, each of whom has chosen a single work, Project 35, demonstrating the global reach that video has achieved as a medium of contemporary art. Saint Joseph College Art Gallery is among the first to host Project 35 in its entirety, concluding with the final installment from October 26, 2010 through January 23, 2011.

The nine video works in Part III of Project 35 continue the stimulating variety seen in the previous two installments. For example, in The Other, Tracey Moffat creates a provocative montage of images from popular culture, exploring issues of identity, gender, race and “the longing for escape from social restraint.” Pioneer video artist Beryl Korot creates a hauntingly abstract visual sequence from the words of Florence Nightingale cascading across a backdrop woven from video footage of snowstorms and waterfalls. Anja Medved’s Smuggler’s Confessionary captures the personal import of a border crossing, gathering memories and images of the divided city of Nova Gorica, which was split in two by the post-1945 border settlement between Italy and what was then Yugoslavia (now Slovenia). For more details, including a complete listing of artists and curators in Part III of Project 35, view this link: http://www.sjc.edu/student_life/arts_and_culture/art_gallery/exhibitions/current_exhibition.html#Project%2035

Project 35 is a traveling exhibition organized and circulated by iCI (Independent Curators International), New York. The exhibition and tour are made possible, in part, by grants from The Cowles Charitable Trust; Foundation for Contemporary Art; the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; The Toby Fund; and iCI Benefactors Agnes Gund, Gerrit and Sydie Lansing, Jo Carole Lauder, and Barbara and John Robinson.

The Saint Joseph College Art Gallery is located in The Bruyette Athenaeum, part of The Carol Autorino Center for the Arts and Humanities. The Art Gallery presents regular exhibitions drawn from its permanent collections as well as loan exhibitions of historic art or of contemporary work by artists of national and international prominence.

The Art Gallery is open Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday: 11:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.; Thursday: 11:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m.; and Sunday: 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.; closed Monday. Admission is free of charge. For more information or if you have any questions, contact the Art Gallery at 860.231.5399 or artgallery@sjc.edu.

Connecticut’s Beardsley Zoo announces “Everyone is a Kid” pricing from August 16 through August 31, 2010. This special admission promotion allows every adult Zoo visitor (12 and older) to pay the children’s admission price of just $9.00 per person.

SoBoBo Art Gallery & Consortium is bringing an unexpected change to its exhibit space by introducing “Artist for the Month.” Beginning this month of August, Jan McLean, artist/teacher, will be exhibiting her mixed media pieces. She uses gel image transfers, textures, and acrylic faux encaustics to create a world one is drawn into. You find yourself engulfed with the warmth of her creations, wanting to touch them, to feel each piece.

I am a storyteller. Whether the motif is houses, fish and moons or something more abstract, my work is always a narrative. Houses carry on conversations, learn to dance or how to become transparent. Fish teem in cosmic seas, weaving tales from many moons ago. The story may not always be evident, even to myself, but it is inevitable.

My intent always is to connect in whatever way is possible. My aspiration is to engage the viewer at one or more levels, be that physical, intellectual, emotional, visceral or even spiritual. My hope is to touch them in some way, to say:

To see and experience this wonderful world, Jan McLean’s artwork will be on display for the month of August at SoBoBo Art Gallery, where unique meets sublime. A reception will be held at SoBoBo on Friday, August 27^th from 7pm to 9pm, the public is invited.

SoBoBo Art Gallery is located at 17 Broadway – Walnut Beach, Milford, CT. Gallery hours are Thursday and Friday from 11am to 4 pm; Saturday 12 pm to 7 pm and Sunday 12 pm to 6 pm. If you wish to view her work Monday through Wednesday, please call 203-906-8945 to make an appointment.