Marbles can make music, marbles can tell stories using movement and sound. Playing with marbles helps us embark on a musical journey of our own making. Join our marble musicians to create music making mazes that you design and compose to your own liking. Taking inspiration from the “audiokinetic” ball machines of artist and sculptor George Rhoads, you will make rhythms with unlikely instruments, inventing unpredictable cadence and tempo.
Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.
- Water Rat, Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Gramme 1908
Sometimes, the simplest of things can create the most complex outcomes.
Take a week to play with a series of custom drawing machines, mechanical creations that use simple movements to create intricate and beautiful patterns. Discover how small tweaks can have huge importance. Explore the seemingly never-ending complexity of harmonics. Make shapes that no human has ever seen before.
During the Viking Age (roughly 793-1066 CE), North Germanic people were seafaring raiders, conquerors, traders, and explorers from modern-day Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland. They traversed the world, venturing as far east as Baghdad and as far west as North America.
April 26, 2022 marks the two-hundred-year anniversary of the birth of Frederick Law Olmsted, lauded as the father of American landscape architecture. In 1857, Olmsted designed New York’s Central Park, and many years later, Olmsted’s sons formed the Olmsted Brothers, a landscape architecture firm. Then, in 1898, Donald Grant Mitchell of Norwich, Connecticut, partnered with the Olmsted Brothers to design and create East Rock Park. Their objective was to preserve nature within an urban setting.
Please Note: This is a four day class: Tue, Wed, Thurs, Fri.
Mon, July 4th we are closed.
Vikings and other explorers of the ancient world were self-sufficient and able craftspeople who solved and succeeded with the tools at hand. Mästermyr chest is a Viking Age (793–1066) tool chest found on the island of Gotland, Sweden. The trove contained the essential tools of a blacksmith and carpenter – the essentials required to make nails, wright a wheel, build a vessel. Build your own tools and use them to construct your own Mästermyr chest to hold them (and any other essential tools you need).
Please Note: This is a four day class: Tue, Wed, Thurs, Fri.
Mon, June 20th we are closed.
In Greek mythology, civilization begins with Prometheus’ gift of fire. This workshop will introduce fire as we present every tool: with respect for skill and safety. A celebration fitting for the summer solstice.
Major projects:
Ceramics: Shape and burnish pinch pots to be transformed in an oak fire that will reduce minerals into elegant colors.
The world is an Open Studio
If you want to find yourself, you will have to travel. This week: Five adventures to discover arts, customs and materials of the world....and to make them your own.
Clay
Museum Director and Ceramics Curator, Ryan Paxton, will take you to civilization's beginning: hand shaped clay prepared for pit firing. He will add small projects to introduce clay arts from around the world.
Food. Shelter. Water. Three resources essential for survival. Throughout human history one of the most amazing feats of human cleverness has been the many ways that water has been harnessed, harvested, and utilized as a resource. Eli Whitney chose the site for his Armory along the banks of the Mill River so he could use its current to power his machinery. Going beyond the banks of the Mill River we will explore how different cultures and civilizations utilized water.
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