Month: February 2016

Through the ice crystals on my window this morning.  Unfortunately, the camera just couldn’t capture the brilliant beauty of it, but it gives an idea.

E.J. Lefavour

www.hobbithousestudio.com

Folly Cove Designers and Feminist Social Change
An illustrated lecture by Jennifer Scanlon

The Cape Ann Museum is pleased to present the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the Humanities in Gender and Women’s Studies and Associate Dean for Faculty at Bowdoin College, Jennifer Scanlon to give an illustrated lecture on Saturday, March 12 at 2:00 p.m. on everyone’s favorite topic: the Folly Cove Designers. However, Scanlon will be looking at this group of artists from a different angle. Scanlon’s article, “’The Space Between,’: Rediscovering the Folly Cove Designers,” published in the Massachusetts Review in June of 2015 will be the catalyst for this lecture on the role of the Folly Cove Designers (active 1938-1969) as a forerunner of the women’s groups and professional organizations that fueled feminist social change in the following decades.

Led and trained by illustrator Virginia Lee Burton, the Folly Cove Designers were a group of Massachusetts designer-craftsmen whose shared interests in craftsmanship, pattern, and New England material culture united them across class and ethnic backgrounds. Their artistic and commercial success printing their designs onto textiles energized and legitimized the group, both as a collective of primarily women and as an artist’s cooperative.

Christine Lundberg, producer of the award-winning film Virginia Lee Burton: A Sense of Place, will introduce Scanlon.

This program is $10 for CAM members / $15 for non-members (includes admission). Space is limited; reservations are required. For additional information/tickets, please call: (978) 283-0455 x10 or email info@capeannmuseum.org. Tickets can also be purchased online at Eventbrite.

Holy Mackerel

Megan Merlin submitted

Google took a bunch of random photos from my cell phone camera roll on our trip to Playa and made this stylized video on its own.

Cat Ryan photo

  

“No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.”
Hal Borland

Photo by Jeanne Blake

Sea smoke and Thatcher’s Island.

 

Photos by Anita Dziedzic

These pictures are taken in my backyard in East Hartford, CT. I have a weather station on the pole to the right by the garden and it is reading -23. Brrrrrr

My dog, Ozzy, didn’t waste any time doing his thing this morning.

 

Photo by Shannon O’Donoghue

Cold at Cox Reservation

 

Photos by  Vicki Gamage

Frozen Rockport Harbor

 

Photos by Lou Snitkoff

Greetings from Albany, NY. Here are a couple of images from Cape Ann (Lane’s Cove and Bearskin Neck) from late February last year. Cheers!

 

Photo by John Wheeler

Cold Duck

Valentine’s Day is a time to celebrate romance and love and kissy-face fealty. But the origins of this festival of candy and cupids are actually dark, bloody — and a bit muddled.

Though no one has pinpointed the exact origin of the holiday, one good place to start is ancient Rome, where men hit on women by, well, hitting them.

Those Wild And Crazy Romans

From Feb. 13 to 15, the Romans celebrated the feast of Lupercalia. The men sacrificed a goat and a dog, then whipped women with the hides of the animals they had just slain.

The Roman romantics “were drunk. They were naked,” says Noel Lenski, a historian at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Young women would actually line up for the men to hit them, Lenski says. They believed this would make them fertile.

The brutal fete included a matchmaking lottery, in which young men drew the names of women from a jar. The couple would then be, um, coupled up for the duration of the festival — or longer, if the match was right.

The ancient Romans may also be responsible for the name of our modern day of love. Emperor Claudius II executed two men — both named Valentine — on Feb. 14 of different years in the 3rd century A.D. Their martyrdom was honored by the Catholic Church with the celebration of St. Valentine’s Day.

Later, Pope Gelasius I muddled things in the 5th century by combining St. Valentine’s Day with Lupercalia to expel the pagan rituals. But the festival was more of a theatrical interpretation of what it had once been. Lenski adds, “It was a little more of a drunken revel, but the Christians put clothes back on it. That didn’t stop it from being a day of fertility and love.”

Around the same time, the Normans celebrated Galatin’s Day. Galatin meant “lover of women.” That was likely confused with St. Valentine’s Day at some point, in part because they sound alike.

Shakespeare In Love

As the years went on, the holiday grew sweeter. Chaucer and Shakespeare romanticized it in their work, and it gained popularity throughout Britain and the rest of Europe. Handmade paper cards became the tokens-du-jour in the Middle Ages.

Eventually, the tradition made its way to the New World. The industrial revolution ushered in factory-made cards in the 19th century. And in 1913, Hallmark Cards of Kansas City, Mo., began mass producing valentines. February has not been the same since.

Today, the holiday is big business: According to market research firm IBIS World, Valentine’s Day sales reached $17.6 billion last year; this year’s sales are expected to total $18.6 billion.

But that commercialization has spoiled the day for many. Helen Fisher, a sociologist at Rutgers University, says we have only ourselves to blame.

“This isn’t a command performance,” she says. “If people didn’t want to buy Hallmark cards, they would not be bought, and Hallmark would go out of business.”

And so the celebration of Valentine’s Day goes on, in varied ways. Many will break the bank buying jewelry and flowers for their beloveds. Others will celebrate in a SAD (that’s Single Awareness Day) way, dining alone and binging on self-gifted chocolates. A few may even be spending this day the same way the early Romans did. But let’s not go there.

From www.npr.org