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!