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Candlelight Evening at The Farmers’ Museum Brightens Holiday Season
One of the region’s best-loved holiday traditions, Candlelight Evening at The Farmers’ Museum, is set for Sunday, December 20, from 2:00 to 6:00 p.m. For eighteen years, this festive event has captured the holiday spirit in a celebration of friendship, family, and community, with caroling, sleigh rides, winter games, and wassail.
During Candlelight Evening, The Farmers’ Museum takes on a magical appearance, decorated in greenery and illuminated by hundreds of candles. Visitors can enjoy the enchanting experience of riding through the museum’s 19th-century Village in sleighs pulled by draft horses with full sets of harness bells. The evening also features caroling around a bonfire, led by singers from community groups. Complementary wassail, warmed in kettles over campfires, is served throughout the evening. Saint Nicholas, dressed in 1840s costume, will greet visitors and tell stories in the museum’s Main Barn.
Activities include traditional 19th-century winter games, such as Fox and Geese. Saint Nick will read Christmas Times, the poem written by Dr. Clement C. Moore in 1822 and known today as ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. Musical programs include seasonal favorites at Bump Tavern by brass ensembles and seasonal songs and organ music in the Village’s historic Cornwallville Church.
Hearty chili, cornbread, and cookies, provided by the museum’s Herder’s Cottage Restaurant, will be available for sale in the heated Louis C. Jones center of the museum’s Main Barn. Candlelight Evening visitors should dress warmly, wear boots, and bring flashlights. Visitors are also encouraged to bring non-perishable food items to place in containers at the museum’s entrances; these donations will be distributed by local food banks to assist area families.
Candlelight Evening is made possible in part by Wilber National Bank, which has generously supported the event for the past 14 years. Admission is $3 for adults and free for children 12 and under and members of the New York State Historical Association.
Masterpiece Basket Highlights New
Exhibition at Fenimore House Museum
Beacon Lights," the masterpiece work of acclaimed artist Louisa Keyser (1850-1925), are showcased in a new exhibition at Fenimore House Museum. Art Baskets of California and the Great Basin features approximately one dozen baskets from the museums Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Art, including the newly-acquired "Beacon Lights." Also on display will be another recent acquisition, "Fern," by Scees Bryant (1858-1918), as well as baskets by Tootsie Dick Sam (d. 1928) and Elizabeth Conrad Hickox (1873-1947).
"Were very pleased to be able to offer the public examples of work by four of the greatest American Indian basket makers in North America," said Dr. Gilbert T. Vincent, Director of Museums. "This is a rare opportunity for people to see the highest endeavors of the basket makers art."
The baskets in the exhibition range in date from the mid-1800s to the 1930s, one of the most productive periods for basket making in this country and a time during which Native American women began to create work specifically for non-Native audiences. These art baskets were derived from earlier forms, and they became more colorful and stylized as demand for them as decorative objects grew.
From the 1880s to the 1930s, basket enthusiasts amassed collections of one hundred or more baskets. Their desire to acquire the finest examples created a patronage system for several outstanding basket makers that was unparalleled in the history of American Indian art. Native American women of exceptional talent were freed them from financial concerns so that they could pursue their art.
It was in this atmosphere that Louisa Keyser created "Beacon Lights." A laundress in Carson City, Nevada, Keyser was supported by Abram and Amy Cohn. Their support enabled her to devote her time to basket making. Keyser, who is also known as Datsolalee, worked on "Beacon Lights" from July 1904 to September 1905. The basket, acknowledged to be the finest work by the greatest basket maker in history, is woven from willow and decorated with red and black motifs. The basket is sixteen inches in diameter and composed of approximately 80,000 extremely fine stitches. When the Cohns sold the basket in 1914, it commanded a price unheard of for Indian art and quickly became the worlds most publicized basket.
Art Baskets of California and the Great Basin also includes work by another of the Cohns protégées, Tootsie Dick Sam, who was inspired by Keysers example. Sams basket, completed in 1919, is also woven of willow with black and red accents. Scees Bryants "Fern" is made from western redbud, bracken fern, and willow, and was completed around 1905. Elizabeth Hickox, a Karuk Indian from Northern California, created twined baskets with fitted covers with intricate knobs. Her "Fancy Basket," one of the smallest baskets she produced (it is four inches in diameter and less than four inches tall), is made of bear grass, maidenhair fern, and hazel and pine or alder root. Its design is woven of the finest porcupine quills in a black and yellow pattern.
These baskets and other examples are on view in the American Indian Wing of Fenimore House Museum through December 31.
Exhibition of Niagara
Falls Photographs Opens at Fenimore House Museum
One of America's most famous and magnificent geographic features, Niagara Falls, is the subject of a series of recent works by photographer John Pfahl, now on view at Fenimore House Museum. The exhibition, entitled Niagara Sublime, features largescale color prints that capture the power, terror, and beauty of Niagara Falls, often in elegant abstraction. The exhibition opened August 8 and runs through December 27.
Pfahl is a contemporary photographer working in Buffalo, New York, but his prints evoke the aesthetic of the 19th-century Romantics. These writers and artists used the word "sublime" to describe the awesome power of Nature and the emotional responses that magnificent landscapes elicited. In America, the group of painters known as the Hudson River School championed the beautiful scenery of their country and celebrated the sublimity of Nature's splendor. Because Niagara Fans so perfectly symbolized the sublime, it became especially popular among these artists, who helped to make the site an American icon.
Pfahl's work is informed by an appreciation for the detailed landscapes of the Hudson River School and the poetry of the sublime. Even the titles of his photographs are taken from works by William Blake and William Wordsworth, two Romantic poets. Yet Pfahl brings his own, fresh interpretation to the Falls. He reduces this monumental geographic feature to its most simple elements-light, water, air, and rock-providing not only spectacular abstracted views of Niagara Falls but successfully evoking the sublimity of Nature itself.
Pfahl was born in New York City in 1939. He attended Syracuse University as an undergraduate and graduate student, receiving his master's degree from the Newhouse School of Communications in 1968. His work has been exhibited at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Exhibition of Rare Coverlets on
Display at The Farmers Museum
The Farmers Museum in Cooperstown, one of the countrys oldest living-history museums, is showcasing more than 40 rare coverlets from its extensive collection of woven textiles in an expanded version of its 1997 exhibition, Sleeping Beauties: New York State Coverlets, 1790-1860. The exhibition, which runs through November, explores the designs and histories of these decorative and functional bed coverings, which were once woven throughout rural New York. Ongoing weaving demonstrations and special events throughout the season will complement the exhibition.
Sleeping Beauties: New York Coverlets, 1790-1860 is curated by Rabbit Goody of Thistle Hill Associates, Cherry Valley, New York. Goody is one of the countrys foremost coverlet and woven-materials scholars. She has worked extensively in the museum field, studying and documenting historic textiles and technologies, recreating authentic cloth patterns, and establishing the important role the textile industry played in early America. "The making of coverlets was part of the American desire to be industrially independent," said Goody. "Family textile production often combined locally-produced fibers and yarns with trained weaving skills. The design of coverlets frequently integrated political slogans or personal statements and were a beautiful status symbol for the home."
During the last century, coverlets were a functional version of the bedspread. While they were highly decorativerich with geometric or floral designsthey were also used for warmth. Coverlets differed from quilts in that the designs were produced in the weaving process. They differed from blankets in that they were meant to be seen. The popularity of coverlets in New York was due in part to their affordability. They were often made using products and labor from the farm, combined with locally-available services.
Adjacent to the exhibition area, weavers from The Farmers Museum will demonstrate daily the process of weaving while working on reproductions of selected coverlets. The coverlet exhibition will also be the inspiration for special events at The Farmers Museum throughout the season.
New
Gallery Opens at Fenimore House Museum
Fenimore House Museum, the museum showcase of the New York State Historical Association has opened a new gallery on its second floor. The Scriven Gallery, named in honor of Cooperstown philanthropist Elizabeth Scriven Clark (1848-1909) and the Scriven Foundation, replaces five small rooms on the second floor and provides the museum with a large, state-of-the-art exhibition space. The new gallery has environmental controls which will enable it to be used year-round for exhibitions of the Association's collections and for significant travelling exhibitions.
Designed by Stephen Saitas of New York City, the gallery was built within the existing interior walls of the museum, so that no changes were made to the facade. The gallery's design incorporates elements of the original, neo-Georgian house but in simplified form. The resulting 1400- square-foot gallery complements the interior architecture of other rooms in Fenimore House Museum while distinguishing itself as new space.
The inaugural exhibition in the Scriven Gallery, was The Bard Brothers. -- Painting America Under Steam and Sail. Organized by The Mariners' Museum in Newport News, Virginia, the exhibition presented approximately, 40 examples of the work of John and James Bard, twin brothers who painted the steamships and sailing vessels that traveled New York waterways in the 19th century. The exhibition, the first major showing of the Bards' work in 20 years, was on view until September 20, 1998. Since October 1, the Scriven Gallery has been the backdrop for works by master printmakers Currier and Ives.
Construction of the Scriven Gallery began in December 1997, and was completed in May 1998, by Charles A. Gaetano Construction of Utica, New York. The new gallery was made possible by a grant from the Scriven Foundation, a philanthropic organization created in 1937 by Stephen C. Clark, the son of Elizabeth Scriven and Alfred Corning Clark of Cooperstown. The Foundation was developed to continue giving support to public-service projects in the same spirit for which Elizabeth Scriven Clark was known in her lifetime; today the Scriven Foundation supports charitable work and projects throughout Otsego County.