Classes offer firsthand experience of the entire pottery-making cycle. Beginning emphasis is placed on working with one of the fifteen potter's wheels.  Beginning as well as advanced students are welcome. Sets of eight week classes are offered Tuesday or Thursday evening 6 to 9 p.m.,  year-round. Sign up now to reserve your place.

Call or go to the website for more information. 860-528-6090, www.greenleafpottery.net

Please join us on Sunday, March 17 at 3 p.m. for the Simsbury Community Band's annual March concert! The concert is free and will be held at the Covenant Presbyterian Church, 124 Old Farms Road in Simsbury. Come enjoy a mix of classical music and classic rock!

Celebrate the approach of spring with beautiful music at the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra concert on Saturday, March 16 at 8 p.m. at the Garde Arts Center in New London. ECSO Music Director, Toshiyuki Shimada, conducts a program which includes: Barber’s Overture to the School for Scandal; Rouse’s Flute Concerto played by guest soloist Nancy Chaput, and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5.  Nancy Chaput, Eastern Connecticut Symphony Principal Flute, is well known throughout the area. Don’t miss this concert sponsored by Connecticut Light & Power/Yankee Gas! Tickets priced from $27-$60 through the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Office or on the Internet at www.gardearts.org. Rush seats for $12 are on sale the evening of the performance for students and active military. The audience is invited to a free reception post-concert.

Greek actors wore masks to be seen from afar.  Today a persona is a speaker who talks or tells a story.  In this workshop we will study famous persona poems by Browning, Hughes, Machan, Shakespeare, and Yeats; use workshop writing prompts to build a character and story; and finally, create a unique persona poem – art from our imagination as well as our life experience.

Jim Kelleher has an MFA and teaches literature and composition at Northwestern CT Community College.  Antrim House published his Quarry in 2008 and Mick: A Celestial Drama, in 2011. Mick is a linked narrative of sixty-four persona poems in eight voices, to be read as a novel in verse or performed as a verse play.

Admittance to the workshop is $30 for museum members, $35 for members-to-be. For information or to register, contact Sarah Wadsworth at 860.677.4787 ext 134 or wadsworths@hillstead.org. Workshops fill fast – reserve your spot today!

This free event provides a day of workshops, classes and presentations for intellectually curious students in grades 3-12 and their families, who are looking for opportunities designed to support their unique needs. 

High school and college students are challenged to write a 500-word short story about the painting of the iconic Avanti sports car "THE WHISPER AND THE ROAR" by Don Wieland. Champion wins $500 and has the story posted on Stellar Scholars e-magazine Cum Laude, The Scholarly Evening Post.  

http://stellarscholars.com/2013_avanti_and_aurora_awards

Google: stellarscholars.net

Join Franklin Street Works on Thursday, March 14 from 5:30 - 7:00 p.m. for a casual tour of the contemporary art space’s current exhibition, Your Content Will Return Shortly. Those in attendance will walk through the show with three of its exhibiting artists, Jeff Ostergren (New Haven, CT), Catherine Ross (Brooklyn, NY) and Siebren Versteeg (Brooklyn, NY). While walking through the three galleries, artists will discuss their works, including how videos and installations reflect themes in the exhibition and relate to their larger practice. The evening will end with an open discussion and reception in the café. Please join us for this free event that is open to the public – a unique opportunity to explore the current show with some of its artists that are emerging figures in contemporary art today!  This event program is made possible in part through the support of the Community Arts Partnership Program awarded to Franklin Street Works by the City of Stamford and a two-year grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. 

Your Content Will Return Shortly, curated by Franklin Street Works’ Creative Director, Terri C Smith, explores television as both medium and subject. Rather than taking a comprehensive view of television as inspiration in contemporary art, the exhibition explores works that highlight televised elements tangential to the main narrative arc. The artists take their cues from the physical and functional qualities of television and a variety of elements associated with broadcasting. They touch on phenomena that include: advertising; laugh tracks; the effects of VHS, DVD and remote control devices on viewing habits; public service announcements; and nuances observations of the relationship between spectacle and cable news. Exhibiting artists are: Christopher DeLaurenti, Eric Gottesman, Jonathan Horowitz, Sophy Naess, Jeff Ostergren, Lucy Raven, Martha Rosler, Catherine Ross, Emily Roz, Carmelle Safdie, and Siebren Versteeg. Your Content Will Return Shortly is on view at Franklin Street Works through March 24.

 ABOUT PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

Jeff Ostergren is a New Haven, Connecticut, based artist who focuses on the raw materials of culture itself: advertisements, synthetic chemicals, and language, to explore our contemporary states of embodiment. His work explores the libidinal space of anxiety, violence, and desire that activates and consumes us all. Ostergren’s video practice draws inspiration from the work of Sturtevant and Gretchen Bender, who use appropriated footage not merely as image but as object itself. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at Soi Fischer, Vancouver, Canada; Greene Park Gallery, Los Angeles; Artspace, New Haven; West Cove Studios, New Haven; Galerie Califia, Horazdovice, Czech Republic; and Shneider Museum of Art, Ashland, Oregon.

Catherine Ross works in video and photography, framing instances that often go unnoticed in their original context. Isolating the movements of humans and/or objects, her videos create new sequences that reveal an inseparable relationship between motion and sound. Here she finds that movement reveals an inherent awkwardness, a humor that echoes our own vulnerabilities. Her work has been presented in exhibitions and festivals internationally, including venues in Brazil, Finland, France, Ireland, England, Canada and the United States. Ross attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2002, the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2003 and received a 2005-06 residency from The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation. Ross was awarded “Best International Short Award” at the 2006 Darklight Festival (Dublin, IRELAND). She received her BA in studio art from Dartmouth College in 1994.

Siebren Versteeg is a Brooklyn based multimedia artist who critically engages with the systems and technologies used to create images in our culture.  Born in 1971, Versteeg explores the digital reality and our global culture, and the human spiritual condition in relation to the advancement of technology. He has had solo exhibitions at the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita Kansas; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; the Museum of Art at Rhode Island School of Design, and has exhibited in group shows at the Hirshborn Museum, Washington, DC; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the National Museum of Art, Prague.

How does one live, knowing that death is imminent? Three residents in a California hospice take the journey to answer that question in Michael Cristofer's Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play "The Shadow Box."  A play as much about living as about dying, "The Shadow Box" deals with love and loss, smiling in the face of pain, and finally saying the things that need to be said. Fridays & Saturdays 8 p.m., Sundays March 17 & 24, 2 p.m. Hole in the Wall Theater, 116 Main Street, New Britain, CT.

In Ephemerals, Wolfe explores the momentary nature of photography through relationships among objects, structures, place, opportunity and atmosphere, frequently discovering poetry.