Last Day Jitters

Today is my last day! When I left home this morning, I had everything all set: a sandwich packed for my last-day lunch that my boss had invited everyone to, plans to meet with the Norman Rockwell Museum archivist about a research project I'll be working on into the fall, and a grocery list of things to pick up for our event tonight. Oh, I had everything all planned out for a perfect last day. And then my plans went way off track!

I made it all the way out to Stockbridge, where the museum is, and was going to continue on to Great Barrington to pick up the food. As I've mentioned here before, I take the backroads to get there on what is usually a beautiful drive. But today there was construction--and a lot of it! The police officer directed me to follow the lady in front of me through a lenghty detour--which I did successfully, winding through gravel mountain roads until I found my way back to the highway. After grocery shopping I headed back, turning off at the place the detour had dumped me out before. And then...I was lost. With no lady in front of me to follow, I didn't know which of the unlabeled dirt roads was which, and ended up on an unfamiliar highway in a town I didn't know.

So at 12:30, when I was supposed to be sitting down to a lovely goodbye lunch that my boss had planned for me (with cake and everything!) I was driving down Route 41, headed straight back (though I didn't know it at the time) to Great Barrington. Thankfully the people I work with are supportive and forgiving, and eventually with the help of Joseph, the manager of Visitor Services, I was able to find my way back to the museum--an hour late for lunch and my meeting afterward!

Everything worked out--the cake was still delicious, and I'm here in plenty of time to set up for tonight. But sometimes things just don't go according to plan. Overall my summer here went so well--our programs seemed to run remarkably smoothly, and I think we left lots of happy kids and parents in our wake. I suppose something had to go wrong eventually! But speaking of those happy kids, I took some adorable pictures the past few days that I wanted to share with you as my "last word" here:





Thank you so much for following my blog. If you're reading it because you're interested in interning at the NRM, you can find more information here. Enjoy, and consider visiting the Norman Rockwell Museum sometime soon!

An Educating Summer

In my last couple of days at the museum before I go back to school, I volunteered rather masochistically to prepare our art supplies for the coming fall season. This means sharpening pencils and colored pencils and disinfecting markers while discarding the old and broken for the fresh and pristine (just after typing this I trashed four stubby inch-long pencils that have probably seen better days). Not only is this noisily endearing me to all my coworkers, it's also a bit tedious (we make a lot of art!) But I'm actually really enjoying it. Not only is it consistently satisfying to see the tip of a pencil become pointed and ready for use by some young artist, it's also feeding my nerdy love for school supplies.

This week I've definitely got education on the brain. But not just the type of education that takes place in a K-12 classroom--I'm talking about what goes on in the education departments of art, history and science museums everywhere.

Part of the reason I took this internship is that I knew I was interested in museum work and had taken classes in art, history and the ideology of museums. But I wanted a real-world experience to see how this one specific cog in the machine of the museum works. As it turns out, I love the emphasis on interactive learning and public outreach in museum education. Most of all, though, and even though we have lots of programming for adults, I love working with kids. One day after a Creating Together class where we looked at Rockwell portraits in the gallery and then drew self-portraits with chalk (one of our messiest projects), I was helping a little girl who was about four years old wash her hands with soapy water. Her mom turned to me and said, “if you haven’t thought about becoming a teacher, you definitely should.” Well, now I’m considering a career in museum education, with this hands-on summer experience to thank.

I'll post again on Thursday, which is my last day--but after that, I'm heading off into the sunset (which is to say my senior year of college). Here's a little doodle I did today in our Summer Sketch club, where we were cartooning up a storm:

Turning the Tables

Today I experienced what it's like to be a visitor at the Norman Rockwell Museum, turning the tables a little bit on one of my last few days here for the summer. Since my time is winding down I decided to bring my boyfriend to see the galleries and help with my weekly food shopping. He's also staying for our event tonight, when New Yorker Cartoon Editor Robert Mankoff will speak as part of our American Storytellers series. I think it's going to be a great talk--why not come out and join us if you're in the area?

When I arrived at work, rather than winding my way around to the staff parking lot and entering at the loading dock, I parked in the visitor area and followed the steady midday stream of people heading through the front door and into the sunny lobby. We checked in at admissions and visited the Rockwell Studio together, taking a nice stroll through the grounds and sitting on a bench overlooking the Housatonic River. After the lecture tonight we're going to dinner in the area, so we asked the lovely people at Visitor Services for a recommendation. They obliged, suggesting we drive a few minutes up the road past Tanglewood (where the Boston Symphony Orchestra spends their summers) up to Lenox.

Right now he's in the galleries while I get some work done and prepare food for the event tonight. But today I got to be a visitor (I even got a handy map of the Berkshires!) and I have to admit, it's a pretty cushy gig. Hey, maybe I'll stop by the museum store on my way out. And I definitely want to get a picture with my guy in front of the white and red Norman Rockwell Museum sign to remember the great day we had here.

Laugh Out Loud!

Last Saturday we had yet another fun-filled Family Day at the Museum, only this one was truly Rockalicious (read on...). The theme for the day was the laugh-out-loud comic genius of William Steig, who created the character Shrek--little did Steig know, his imaginatively disgusting ogre would one day be a bonafide movie star!

We did several art projects throughout the afternoon, beginning with Steig-inspired cartooning in the galleries. Kids drew their responses to Alpha Beta Chowder, creating alphabet-inspired characters, and to Steig's series "The Kids are Alright" about children who literally save the day.



Later in the afternoon we painted with watercolors out on the terrace. One little boy did his own rendition of Norman Rockwell's Main Street, and I would not hesitate to call it a modern-day urban masterpiece. Talk about perspective...this kid should be giving me lessons!



I have to say, though, that my favorite part of our afternoon was a fantastic performance by the groovy husband-and-wife musical duo Rockalicious!. Their motto is "never too young to rock", and they defintiely proved that on Saturday. I for one spotted some very tiny tots headbanging to their set list of classic rock. Best of all, they played "I'm a Believer", made re-famous as Shrek and Fiona's wedding song in the first blockbuster movie of the series.



What a fun family day...those little babes jamming out (their demand for rock was eventually sated by cupcakes, apple juice, and the arrival of naptime) definitely had me laughing out loud. If all this has you intrigued, you should know that our Shrekalicious Steig exhibition is on display through October 31st.

Cover Stories

My time here at the Norman Rockwell Museum is winding down--I have two more weeks in front of me, and I intend to make the most of them! Just yesterday I finished a project I've been working on for just about the whole summer, squeezing it in whenever I didn't have a more pressing assignment. Back in June, my bosses asked me to spend some time in the Stockbridge Room, which houses all of the over 300 Saturday Evening Post covers that Norman Rockwell painted. These are framed magazine covers, mind you--not Rockwell's original oil paintings, which are exhibited upstairs. They asked me to look at the covers, and find prominent authors and/or public figures that wrote for or were featured in the magazine.

Now, this project is interesting for a couple reasons. First of all, one of the most frequent comments our visitors make is that they're surprised by the size of Rockwell's originals! They walk into the galleries expecting to see magazine-sized artwork and are frequently blown away by the canvases that are two, three, and four feet wide (you can read about one visitor's experience at her personal blog here). But working at the Museum, I've found that an opposite phenomenon occurs. It's easy to forget that the huge paintings in the galleries were made to be printed and reproduced, and sometimes even covered with text describing the Post's stories that particular week.



Now, Rockwell rarely painted a cover that actually related to the articles inside the magazine--they were self-contained stories on their own part. The exception to that rule was when he painted politicians on some later covers--Dwight D. Eisenhower, who Rockwell claimed was his most expressive model of all time, and later John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon during their contentious 1960 presidential race.

So throughout the summer I spent an hour or so whenever I could hunkered in the Stockbridge Room, scanning names and finding celebrities in the Post like Agatha Christie, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Ford, Groucho Marx, Katharine Hepburn, and even Norman Rockwell himself (the Post did a retrospective on his work in 1955). I also wrote down a lot of names that sounded familiar but who I had no idea who they were. I learned that Boris Karloff, who always sounded like a politician to me, was actually the actor who played Frankenstein, and that Jack Lemmon, who I had in my mind as a prominent golfer, was a (very famous) actor. I think Rockwell or anyone of his generation would be sorely disappointed in me!

The good news, though, is that now with this information we can develop tours that incorporate the content of the Post with the art of Norman Rockwell. And as an added bonus, my knowledge of mid-20th century American pop culture is at an all-time high!

Summer Sketching

Today, with clouds looming in the distance, teacher Monika and I led with slight trepidation a group of thirteen kids out onto the grounds--to a patch of apple trees--for our Summer Sketch Club. The projects have been getting increasingly complex as July and August wear on, and today the kids had a particularly challenging one. We were talking about perspective, which is often hard even for adult artists to fully capture. In my one and only studio course in college last fall (required for my Art History major), I listened fuzzily as my professor explained vanishing points again and again. Half the time I couldn't even tell if a line in whatever I was trying to draw went up or down. I drew buildings as if I was floating above them and often arrived at the middle of a sketch to discover that all the different elements were grossly disproportional. Once while drawing outdoors, when I thought I wasn't doing too terribly after all, an old man stopped in his tracks and started coaching me on how to draw a straight line. It was that bad.

So I have to admit, I was a little worried for these thirteen kids. Their assignment was to pick a view--of the historic Linwood house, or perhaps a bench off in the distance, or a flowery bush--or Norman Rockwell's very own, very red studio. They were to do one drawing "zoomed out" of their view, another a little closer, and a third picture very "close up," like of the window at Linwood, the details of the flower, or the siding and shrubs of the studio. Their materials were paper and pencil, both graphite and colored. We explained the project and sent the kids out to find a special spot, visiting their concentrated hunched-over heads every so often to see how things were going.

All I have to say is, these kids really could have taught me something while I was plodding away in my painting class last fall, drawing a line only to go back and erase it right away. They plunged ahead, fearless as they pressed pencil to paper to make dark purple and green lines for the Linwood roof and the deep scarlet of a flower in the back gardens. Two little girls who were sisters began so far away and wished to get so close to their subjects that by the end of the class for their final drawing they were sitting near a gravel Museum service road, furiously sketching the reedy flowers that line it on either side while Monika and I watched on.

I always get sad when people leave this class early, because they miss the final fifteen minutes when each child gets to share what they made. Many are shy at first, like Coby today who scampered away in the middle of circle time to get some reassurance from his mom, then came back to share the beautiful drawing he had done of Linwood house, with the multicolored slate roof and unpolished marble walls drawn to perfection. Evan had done a similar drawing of the house, then a closer one with just that marble wall and a bench and flowers, and a final one--so creative!--of a giant red flower, as if he was hovering under it while sketching. He definitely got the whole "zooming in" part!

As people who work with kids often say, they have just about as much to teach us as we have to teach them. Today I learned that my pesky perfectionism might be getting in the way of my art, because these kids didn't need to know what a vanishing point was in order to make expressive drawings that gave the rest of us the visceral experience of focusing in on one delectable detail.

Monument Mountain

It's been "one of those days" here at the Norman Rockwell Museum. It's storming outside and the computers are down, so the great people at Admissions have been doing everything by hand. I went to the store for our Thursday night event (Combat Artist and Marine Chief Warrant Officer Michael Fay is speaking), driving there over slick backroads (okay I'll admit, that's a dramatic way to explain my outing to purchase cheese and crackers). Our terrace cafe, normally a charming spot for visitors to eat their lunch, is sauna-like as steam rises off the stone floor and our kind patrons roast in 100% humidity. At about 12PM, with the rain coming down in sheets outside, I checked weather.com to see when it would stop. The website kindly informed me that it was actually partly cloudy with a 10% chance of precipitation.

But in fact, it is strangely appropriate that today is so rainy. Remember, faithful readers (hi Mom), when I mentioned the historic property tour last week? Well, we never fail to stop and mention Monument Mountain, which is just visible in the distance. The mountain is a popular place for hiking and biking today, but there is also a legend associated with it that literature geeks love to tell. Purportedly, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville picnicked on the mountain in 1850. While they were still climbing to the top there was a big thunderstorm (like today!) and they were forced to take cover under a rock. While they were there, Melville showed Hawthorne a story he'd been working on called "The Great White Whale" and asked for his advice.

Well, I'm not sure if Melville ever did get to writing that book, but isn't it a great story? I'm kidding, of course, he would go on to write Moby Dick right down the road in Pittsfield. And do you know what day they ventured onto Monument Mountain and had that fateful discussion?

August 5th.

You are my Sunshine

Last Thursday night as part of our American Storytellers series, we enjoyed a fantastic performance by the Berkshire Ramblers including Alan Chartock and friends. To hear more on their renditions of folk favorites (including lots of Pete Seeger), read Chartock's column for the Berkshire Eagle. And for a short clip of the Ramblers in action on our terrace with everyone singing along to a truly beloved tune, just press play:

Alpha Beta Chowder II

A few weeks ago I wrote about the interactive display I made for our Creativity Center on Jeanne and William Steig's book Alpha Beta Chowder. The response throughout the month of July was truly phenomenal as we filled the board several times over with different characters for each letter of the alphabet. Here are some pictures of the display in action:







And some of my all-time favorite characters:

-Cookie the Crazy Cook who Cooks Corn on the Cob, Cookies, Cupcakes and Crabs
-Henry the Hippo who has Huge Hips
-Ian, who takes an Irate Interest in his Ipod
-Paola, the Pretty Penguin who loves to Pretend that she is Picking Peppers and Paprika in Peru. She also loves to Perform as a Pop diva (whew!)
-Wendy, the Winking Waterhorse who Wants to be Wonderful

Sadly, we had to take Alpha Beta Chowder down yesterday. Not without good reason, though--we are welcoming the Multicultural BRIDGE program to our Creativity Classroom for the month of August, which I will definitely write about here as I work with them on a daily basis. But clearing the classroom for BRIDGE meant taking a staple remover to my beloved display.

"Oh no!," I bet you're thinking, "I've been carefully planning my Norman Rockwell Museum visit based exclusively on the contents of this blog and desperately wanted to see the Alpha Beta Chowder display while it was up!" I for one wouldn't expect anything less than for visitors to make a beeline past Norman Rockwell and William Steig's art and head downstairs to see my construction paper, staple-mounted "exhibition."

BUT WAIT. You didn't miss it at all!! In fact, I spent the better part of today making the truly creative doodles that our visitors created throughout July into a book for future musuemgoers to see. I can give you a sneak preview, but I'm afraid you'll have to come to Stockbridge to see the whole thing!

Time Travel

Every Tuesday and Thursday at the Norman Rockwell Museum, we offer our visitors the opportunity to travel through time, going back about 150 years (you can't beat the deal, either--free with museum admission). Maybe that's overselling it a little bit, because to be perfectly honest (and corny) your "time machine" is a nifty combo of your imagination to picture the stories we tell and your feet to carry you around the museum grounds. It's not exactly Back to the Future (we don't have a Delorean in the garage), but did I mention it's free?

To be clear, either I or one of my bosses gives a historic property tour, talking about the museum building (a 1993 design by Robert A.M. Stern), sculptures by Norman Rockwell's youngest son Peter that are on the grounds, and the historic Linwood House (c. 1859) which now houses our administrative offices but was once the Berkshire cottage of prestigious New York lawyer Charles Butler.

Visitors on this tour always have a lot of questions. It's understandable, because though the history of this place is truly fascinating, it doesn't have very much to do with Norman Rockwell. He never lived here, and though his studio is on the grounds today, it was moved here from downtown Stockbridge after Rockwell died, so he never did paint on this green hillside with mountains in the background. That said, the story of Charles Butler, his law partners, and their quaint little cottages in the Berkshires (they're really mansions--Linwood houses has 16 rooms and 14 fireplaces) is definitely intriguing.

I'll share some anecdotes about Butler and the history tour in coming weeks, but today I have questions on the brain, in particular one that I got on Tuesday during the tour. We always talk about Butler Road, which Charles Butler had built so he could easily travel from the train station in town to his house a mile away. The only (tiny) problem was that the Housatonic River was in his way. His solution was to build Butler Bridge over it, which still stands as a pedestrian walkway. One of our visitors understandably asked me how to get there and what it was like, to which I had one of those sputtering intern moments: "uh, uh, I think, I'm pretty sure..." The sad truth? I'd never gone down to see it with my own eyes!

When I went back to the offices and told my boss, we hopped on the golf cart and she drove me down to see Butler Bridge myself. It's so beautiful! You'll find it less than a ten-minute walk from the Rockwell Studio down a mown pathway. Standing on the middle of the bridge it's quiet and peaceful, and the views of the Housatonic really can't be beat. Plus, now when anyone asks me a question (well, this question), I won't have to have an intern answer!

Truly Inspired

Yesterday, as I was uploading a batch of photos from recent events onto the computer, I noticed just how much the Museum itself factors into the art projects that people end up doing in our programming.

Last week in our Summer Sketch class we were teaching chalk pastels, the technique for which is all about layering colors and putting light shades over dark to create the illusion of light. The forecast called for rain, so we had class on the terrace rather than out on the museum grounds as we had planned. One boy in the class was inspired to draw the terrace's bright pink and yellow lanterns hanging above the gray stone floor and silver metal tables. He layered white onto gray onto black, creating a picture with some real depth and beauty of what's really simply a place for visitors to eat their lunch:



Then on Saturday we had a Steig-themed family day that included a tour of the Love and Laughter exhibit, a dramatic reading of some of his books (including Shrek!) and an art workshop making wooden figurines in the style of Jeanne Steig. This last part was so interesting--most families had had a chance to see her sculptures, which are made out of found objects, in the galleries. Their projects were both inspired by her and also went in completely different directions--one girl made an adorable wooden pig, and a little boy set about the task of building an entire (miniature) house.

One of my favorites was this grandmother, who worked with her (camera shy) four year-old granddaughter to make this figure. Can you see the striking resemblance?



I'm getting to the point in my internship here where I find myself breezing through the galleries on a beeline to whatever piece I need to look at for a certain project, or helping the kids in an art class (which can always be a little chaotic) without paying attention to where I am. So it's exciting to see visitors who are inspired by the art they see around them, both inside the galleries and out!

P.S. There will be another Steig-themed family day on August 14th...and this one promises to be Shrekalicious!

Thursday Nights

I've mentioned before that Thursday nights in July and August comprise our American Storytellers summer series of lectures and performances. Thursdays mean I get to come in to work late and stay late. Of course the highlight of the day is sitting in on, for instance, Curator Joyce Schiller's talk on our Rockwell and the Movies exhibition, or a performance of a cappella group Quintessential.

I'll tell the truth though--I definitely don't mind the extra sleep! The picturesque drive I take through the Berkshires to Great Barrington to pick up refreshments for the evening is a wonderful way to spend Thursday morning, and we usually have leftovers of the fancy finger food and seltzer water that I can take home to appreciative friends. I feel a little ridiculous bringing a Tupperware container to work in which to pack my pirate's booty when the event is over, but I'm a poor college student so I have very little pride.

Shopping for these events is a little like playing dress-up when I was little--I get to pick out the nice cheeses, crackers and fruit for a fine cocktail hour, but then put it on the Museum's account. I arrange the goodies carefully on a plate, a skill I learned one summer in high school when I worked in food service making fruit and cheese platters (a talent that at this job has proved shockingly relevant; my boss jokingly asked why it's not on my resume). After Martha Stewart-ing it up all afternoon with the help of Rick, a Museum volunteer who has been doing these events for ages, we sit back and let the performer do their thing, much to the delight of Museum visitors (who don't care quite as much about the platters as I might). You, dear blog reader, should definitely consider coming out one of these Thursdays--5:30 P.M sharp!

Love and Laughter

Today we had the second of four weekly performances courtesy of the Berkshire Choral Festival, a group of choir singers from Sheffield, Massachusetts, who have been and will be singing for us during July and August. They have an impressive lineup that they call "A Musical Celebration of Love and Laughter" in an homage to one of our current exhibitions, a show on New Yorker cartoonist and illustrator William Steig. Songs like "Can't Help Falling in Love" and "Seasons of Love" are followed by a comedic mashup of "Be a Clown" and "Make 'Em Laugh".



Somewhere in the middle of running around making sure everyone had a Museum button and finding an extension cord, passing out programs and setting out camp stools, I had to stop and really listen. I'll admit, I'm kind of a sucker for sentimental music. But Berkshire Choral really puts on a performance, and the looks on the faces of random museum passerby say it all. They ducked out to the terrace for a quick popsicle, and all of a sudden a choir of forty experienced singers descends with a full lineup of songs closely related to what they just saw in the galleries. What a treat!

Lessons in Photography

One of my projects for the summer has been to resurrect the Museum's Education Department camera to capture images of the various programming that's almost always going on at the Museum. It's one of those "easier said than done" things, because the camera itself is pretty ancient--it uses AA batteries and eats them up like crazy. It's always an adventure when the batteries die in the middle of some event and I've gotten, lets say, 10 pictures of the refreshment table (which I just may have set out myself--my photography tends toward the self-serving) and zero of the keynote speaker.

But the times of the week that I am so glad for the camera is when I take pictures of our Summer Sketch Club on Tuesday mornings and Creating Together class for parents and children on Wednesday mornings. Last week our Summer Sketch Club, which is for ages seven and up, met to do pencil drawings outside on the hillside overlooking Norman Rockwell's studio (which has, by the way, been on the Museum's property since 1986 when we loaded it onto a truck and drove it here from the middle of Stockbridge a couple of miles away).



After explaining the different levels of hardness for the pencil sets and giving examples of line drawing, the teacher let the kids in the class roam the hillside to find a subject that jumped out at them. Brother and sister Sam and Sarah parked themselves under a huge tree and drew an elaborate imagined fairy battle taking place over its craggy roots. Meanwhile three girls arranged their stools around Rockwell's studio, drawing the old carriage barn where he created masterpieces like The Golden Rule. I snapped some pictures--maybe not the best or most focused, I am still learning--of these kids discovering the magic of storytelling through art, Rockwell's very own specialty.

Got Bacon?

As a follow up to my entry on our Got Ink? comic workshop for teens, the office is abuzz today as copies float around of a little booklet the class made with individually-stylized comics exclusively about bacon.

Entitled "An Epic Bacon Comics Collection," it includes a comic about bacon being our saving grace when aliens come to earth, one about how Bacon Bits are made, a story of how the Breakfast Avengers (including Super Egg n' Toast Girl, Bacon, Fakin' Bacon, and a Banana) were born, and a compelling advertisement for Baconnaise, the Ultimate Bacon Flavored Spread. You can read the whole thing here: Panel Discussion: The Bacon Strips.

The man responsible for our bacon craze? Andrew Wales, who we have been fortunate to have teaching the comics class for the last two days. For the next three we'll have Tim Callahan, a graphic novelist and editor who authored "Grant Morrison: the Early Years" and edited "Teenagers from the Future." The class is still open on a pay-per-day basis to any and all for the rest of the week!

Alpha Beta Chowder

Last week I made my first interactive display for the Creativity Center here at the Museum. We wanted something to get visitors excited about this summer's William Steig exhibit upstairs in the galleries. The Steig show, called Love and Laughter, displays more than 200 drawings from the New Yorker cartoonist's 70-year career, including his original drawings of the character Shrek, who we now know as a multi-million dollar blockbuster movie star, but who was once just a fleeting idea of Steig's about a misunderstood ogre.

So I was charged with the mission of putting something up on the walls that would help people think as creatively as Steig, who made notorious drawings where he would begin with five random lines (some straight, some squiggly, drawn wherever on a page) and force himself to make a picture out of them. I learned this at last week's iteration of our Thursday night American Storytellers series during the summer, where Chief Curator Stephanie Plunkett led a fascinating gallery talk about Steig. She explained that William Steig was something of a "master doodler," as opposed to Norman Rockwell whose working style was more precise. Rockwell was famous for his meticulous to-scale drawings and mock-ups--he would spend weeks finding the perfect raggedy mutt to model for his paintings. If I was putting up an interactive display about Rockwell's work in the Creativity Center, I might have people draw the same person five times, just barely changing their facial expression--a raised eyebrow here, a downturned corner-of-the-mouth there. Those are the expressive nuances that Rockwell lived for.

But for Steig I wanted people to doodle. I was very tempted to do something with Shrek, because it seems so timely--Shrek Forever After, the fourth movie, just came out, and plus, my generation was all about Shrek (the first one came out when I was in sixth grade, just to reiterate my young'un status). But there are so many gems besides Shrek in Love and Laughter, and I decided to focus in on the wonderful book that William Steig and his wife Jeanne wrote together, Alpha Beta Chowder. In this they created characters for each letter of the alphabet, like Ken, the killer kangaroo who knows karate and plays kazoo. There's also Noisome Naomi, a numbskull nuisance who is nervy as a newt, and Penelope, a provoking pianist who pointlessly plummets from her piano stool. I wanted to see if we could make our own Alpha Beta Chowder--so I posted all the letters of the alphabet and asked people to create their own characters.

The results have been fabulous! A couple of my favorites are Evan the elegant Englishman who eats enlarged eggplants and Melvin the monstrous moving moose with the mind of a meticulous merry mouse. I love going into the Center everyday to check the new ones. So far the only letters we don't have any characters for are T and V. Can you think of any good ones?

Baseball Day

I got an email in my newly-minted Norman Rockwell inbox this morning saying that this July 4th weekend (Friday-Monday) we had a record 3,182 visitors! Wow!!

Almost a third of that whopping number were here Saturday for our 5th annual Play Ball! All-American Festival, which celebrates baseball. It was my first major event at the museum, and also one of their biggest programs all year. This means that it was trial by fire for me but I also learned so much in a very short period of time--from how to greet speakers and visiting artists to where we keep the extra extension cords.

One of my responsibilities here at the Museum is taking care of the Creativity Center, a place for Museum visitors to do hands-on art during their visit. This weekend it underwent a major makeover, temporarily becoming a high-end art gallery displaying the work of Graig Kreindler and Charles Fazzino (who both use baseball as a subject in their artwork). We took down all the kids' drawings that usually decorate the walls and put up glass display cases to show off Fazzino's incredible 3D painted baseballs and helmets and easels for Kreindler's impressive oil paintings. Museum geek that I am, I really enjoyed this "behind the scenes" look at hanging a show, especially because I got to meet both artists and talk about how they wanted their works displayed. We went in search of the extension cords for lights that Charles Fazzino brings whenever he displays his work, which is done in three dimensions--shine the lamp a certain way and the printed cutouts and inlaid Swarovski crystals in his pieces really pop.

Museum visitors enjoy Charles Fazzino's 3D artwork

We were also fortunate on Saturday to have Linda Ruth Tosetti, Babe Ruth's granddaughter, speak. She tours the country sharing stories about Babe from a personal, family-oriented point of view and trying to get his uniform number (it's #3) retired from all of major league baseball. What an amazing woman--she was at the Museum all day, offering in an aside to me that she's just not the kind of girl who would leave a party early! Makes sense to me.

Linda Tosetti signing autographs

So as I said, trial by fire--but it was all worth it to see the looks on the faces of all the baseball fans (all thousand of them!) who came through our doors on Saturday.

Got Ink?

My first few days have been a whirlwind, mostly because we have a chock full schedule for the next couple of weeks, from a Cartoon Network-sponsored afternoon event for kids on sports and movement (Move It!) to an opportunity to meet Rockwell model Eddie Locke, who posed as the little boy in the famous 1958 painting The Runaway (Meet Rockwell’s Models). One that I’m particularly excited about is our upcoming Teen Art Workshop on drawing comics and graphic novels.

My mind has only recently been opened up to the world of comics and graphic novels. When I studied abroad last year my Italian language teacher introduced me to the work of Dino Buzzati, who is probably most famous for his novel The Tartar Steppe but who also created a graphic novel, Poem Strip, in 1969 (English-language version published in 2009), which tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice through a contemporary Cold War dreamscape. His haunting images and sparse words had an elegant simplicity that my minimal Italian language skills could just barely grasp. When I arrived back stateside, a comic-obsessed friend at college learned of my budding interest and ushered me down to the stacks where our graphic novel collection lies. He gingerly slid several tomes off the shelf and piled them in my outstretched arms. “Read this,” he whispered, handing me Jack Kirby’s The Incredible Hulk. “You will love this.”

So while I’m no aficionado, I do recognize that here at the Norman Rockwell Museum we are very lucky to have graphic novelists Andrew Wales and Tim Callahan here July 12th-16th to educate teenagers (13 and up) about this truly expressive art form. These teens will learn hands-on the art of visual storytelling, effective layouts, and character drawings—and they could not have better teachers than Andrew, an elementary school art teacher who encourages his students to “always make time in their lives for creativity,” and Tim, who writes profusely for Comic Book Resources. We look forward to welcoming them to the Museum and hope that you will take a peek at our website and think about signing you or the teenager in your life up for Got Ink? Drawing Comics and Graphic Novels!

Hello!

Hello, Norman Rockwell Museum enthusiasts! My name is Angela and I’m interning with the Education Department at the Museum this summer. I’m the new kid on the block—I just started work on Tuesday and, now that I have my very own locker and gave my first official introduction (for the Pneuma Brass Quintet, who gave a fantastic performance in the main gallery on Thursday evening as part of our summer American Storytellers series), I feel like I’m settling in.

I’ve been a fan Norman Rockwell for just about my whole life—I discovered his paintings in a giant (or at least it seemed so at the time) coffee table book that my grandma had proudly displayed in her home. I would lie on her white-carpeted floor paging through the oversized images, a tradition that had been passed down to me by my older cousins. I developed a reverence for Rockwell and a genuine interest in the stories he paints that stayed with me as I became engrossed in U.S. History in high school and declared an Art History and American Studies double major in college. I’ll be starting my senior year in the fall (eek!) and I know that, somehow, those hours spent studying Rockwell’s images of American life have carried me through to where I am today.

I'm so happy to be here and I encourage you to leave comments for me! You can also reach me at apratt@nrm.org. Happy Fourth of July!