“I’m proud of our city volunteers, students and residents who came together to help raise awareness of this American artifact that has history to our country and to our local community,” said Mayor Sefatia Romeo Theken. “With this SHRAB grant, as well as Awesome Gloucester and online fundraising monies, the education and heritage will live on for years to come.”
The Rocky Neck Art Colony (RNAC) and Backyard Growers will host FRESH, a six-week exhibition at the Cultural Center at Rocky Neck February 2, through March 12, 2017 and accompanying workshops and presentations.Â
This is an exciting collaboration by two inspiring non-profits—Backyard Growers, which cultivates an active relationship with food and the earth, and Rocky Neck Art Colony, which encourages and promotes excellence in the arts.
This partnership exhibit and events, are sponsored by Duckworth’s Bistrot, Short & Main, Artscope Magazine; as well as, Patty Knaggs Real Estate, Peter Dorsey North Shore Abodes and Neptune’s Harvest.
In this exhibition, artists from all over New England will present works that reflect on the theme FRESH, exploring the ways in which food connects us to the earth, nourishes us, and ties us to, warmth, family, friends, and memories. FRESH is the sense of new life that emerges as we leave the dark of winter for the optimism of spring. Contemporary, experimental and traditional art in all media will be on view. Artwork for the exhibit was chosen by juror, Dawn Southworth.
Backyard Growers is a Gloucester-based grassroots organization helping to reshape Gloucester’s relationship with food. They provide resources and support to establish vegetable gardens at homes, housing communities, organizations, and schools. Their mission is to create life-long gardeners inspired by the power of growing one’s own food.
 “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”—J.R.R. Tolkien
Rocky Neck Art Colony member artists and Backyard Growers volunteers have created lectures and workshops to accompany the exhibition. Lara Lepionka, an artist and Executive Director of Backyard Growers, will give an artist presentation at the Cultural Center at Rocky Neck, 6 Wonson Street, on February 9. Three workshops (February 16, March 2, and March 9), will be presented at the Backyard Growers headquarters, 271 Main Street. The closing reception on March 12, 2-4 p.m. will include a raffle of a wonderful basket of gifts donated by Gloucester and Rockport merchants.
FRESHÂ Exhibit Companion Events At A Glance:
Feb 4 – Opening Reception/Raffle Launch (6 Wonson Street) 5-7pm
Feb 9 – From Paper Pods to Pea Pods, an artist’s presentation by Lara Lepionka, Artist and Executive Director of Backyard Growers (6 Wonson Street) 7pm
Feb 16 – Pressed Flower Art Workshop and Free Seed Swap (271 Main Street) 7pm
Mar 2 – Seed Starting and Eco & Produce Printing Workshop (271 Main Street) 7pm
Mar 9 – Square Foot Gardening Workshop  (271 Main Street) 7pm
Mar 12 – Closing Reception/Raffle Event (6 Wonson Street) 2-4pm
To register for workshops please visit http://www.backyardgrowers.org/events/. Proceeds from FRESH  events will be shared equally by Rocky Neck Art Colony and Backyard Growers.
Cape Ann Museum Offers Adult Drawing Workshop with Gabrielle Barzaghi
 The Cape Ann Museum is pleased to offer a three week drawing workshop with visual artist Gabrielle Barzaghi. The workshop will be held on Thursday February 2, 9 and 16 from 10:00 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. in the Museum’s Activity Center and galleries.
Cost including materials is $85 for Museum members/ $100 for non-members. Space is limited, reservations are required. For more information please contact info@capeannmuseum.org. Tickets can be purchased by calling 978-283-0455 x10 or online at Eventbrite.
Drawing from still lifes and in the Museum galleries, participants will practice basic drawing skills such as visual measuring, line, value, composition and perspective. The class structure will remain flexible to allow for each individual’s drawing ability.
Gabrielle Barzaghi is a visual artist and former Senior Lecturer in Art and Design at Suffolk University. She is a Gloucester resident.
Gabrielle Barzaghi, Catbriers, pastel, 2012. Collection of the Cape Ann Museum.
Workshop Schedule:
Session One will meet in the Museum’s Activity Center. Basic observational drawing techniques will be covered by showing examples, demonstration, and practice.
Session Two will involve drawing in the galleries from sculptural forms focusing on structural line, value, and volume.
Session Three will include compositional analysis and the study and copying of a masterwork in the Museum’s collection.
 The Cape Ann Museum celebrates the art, history and culture of Cape Ann – a region with a rich and varied culture of nationally significant historical, industrial and artistic achievement. The Museum’s collections include fine art from the 19th century to the present, artifacts from the fishing, maritime and granite quarrying industries, textiles, furniture, a library/archives and two historic houses. For a detailed media fact sheet please visit www.capeannmuseum.org/press.
The Museum is located at 27 Pleasant Street in Gloucester. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and Sundays from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Admission is $10.00 adults, $8.00 Cape Ann residents, seniors and students. Youth (18 and under) and Museum members are free. For more information please call: (978)283-0455 x10. Additional information can be found online at www.capeannmuseum.org.
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To be clear Donna and I tried to reach out several times.
From TBT Post-
Hello and good morning GMG,
TBT Post Gloucester would like to enlighten you in reference to your Blog. We have always enjoyed a great business relationship with you. Therefore, surprised you did not contact TBT Post to verify the information m the Blog.
Please see the attached Blog below.
Mario and I are heart broken that the TBT Post Store in Gloucester is closed. The blog was like a stab in the heart.
The Blog has a picture of TBT Post Rockport Store “last month” and a picture for “this month” showing the new art gallery located their.
TBT Post Rockport Store closed in a great injustice to us and Cape Ann at the end of September 2016 and not last month.
The communications that TBT Post sent out on January 16, 2017 was 100% true that the store was not closing. What happened after January 16th 2017 was even more of a surprise to us than anyone.
TBT Post Gloucester, Rockport, Salem and Beverly did not closed the joint/s as mentioned. Instead we lost all of our stores in an injustice put upon us. Not only did we loose the stores we lost every penny the company owned.
I was in Gloucester this past Monday and was immediately surrounded by shop owners and customers asking us to please come back. Thank you to all of them.
As I have always said over and over again from the heart we love you Gloucester!!!
Mario and Richard had a meeting just yesterday discussing how to raise funds to come back. Including discussing other options to come back to Gloucester since we grew so attached to the community, business partners and our customers as well.
TBT Post had a great business plan for Gloucester 2017. We would like to mention a few as follows:
1. A marketing campaign entitled “Eat & Shop Gloucester Main Street.” TBT Post customers would be allowed to come into the store and receive a 10% discount off their entire order by showing a current day receipt from any restaurant and/or food & beverage establishment on Main Street. Once the pilot proved to be effective it would be expanded out to all of Gloucester food & beverage establishment and the new hotel.
2. TBT Post kicked off Christmas and the New Year 2017 by providing a 25% discount to all business owners and all their employees. This was working and was to be rolled out to Gloucester City Hall in 2nd Quarter 2017.
3. TBT Post had a third business plan as follows:
TBT Post was greatly concerned that Main Street did not have enough retail stores. Mario and Richard were discussing putting together two completely new clothing lines in 2017 that would open two more retail stores on Main Street fall of 2017. Two more additional clothing stores on Main Street would have been great for the community.
Note: The two new store on Main Street would have been open 7 days a week just like TBT Post was.
The reason TBT Post Stores were forced to closed was due to an unscrupulous person from Rockport who decided to swamp our business in legal proceedings to the point that the company had to close in order to regroup.
Why not make a change in your Valentine’s Day routine this year? Mix it up a little. Instead of a restaurant gift certificate, why not give your sweetie a Cape Ann Foodie Tour gift certificate? It’s a delicious way to spend 2.5 hours, gets lots to eat (tour includes 6 food stops), and learn about the seaport city of either Gloucester or Newburyport, MA.  You’ll be “full” of knowledge after this tour! And each tour comes with a free movie ticket! All for $50 total – a $20 savings!
Take Me I’m Yours! A FREE HOUSE! You Only Need To…
Many admire the Pink House that you see on the way to Plum Island and the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge, so much so that when it came time to demolish there was public outcry. The US Fish and Wildlife Service has agreed to preserve the house by either of these two conditions. Option number one: a person can take ownership if they are willing to move the house off the land, or option number two is that if you own several acres of comparable land near the refuge, you can exchange the land for the house. Option two allows the house to stay in its current location.
Perhaps the Pink House could become a community or art center. The building has been deemed structurally sound, although there is quite a bit of asbestos that needs removing.
The Pink House is the last house remaining on the refuge. All other homes and farms were either sold or taken by eminent domain; the very last on Stage Island was demolished just this past year.
Snowy Owls, Red-tailed Hawks, and other raptors like to perch on the cupola of the Pink House.
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At the GMG holiday party, I was admiring David Calvo’s photos of his son Leon’s school project. Leon is in the sixth grade and is studying Egypt. He has created a scale replica of the famous King Tutankhamun’s death mask. More than simply admiring, I am very impressed!
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The Cape Ann Artisans have set the schedule for 2017. The Spring Tour will be held Saturday and Sunday, June 3-4. The Fall Tour will encompass the entire three day Columbus Day Weekend, Oct 7-9. The tour time is 10AM-5PM. The Holiday Show will return during Rockport’s Main Street festivities on December 1 and 2nd.
The Artisans welcome back several members that were on sabbatical, Elizabeth Harty, Marcie Rae, and Bond Street Studio. One new studio will be on the tour, that of Deborah Gonet, a mixed media artist.
The Artisans thank the community for its continued support of its partner program that includes sponsorships on the brochure and online. Annually, the Artisans print and distribute over 12,000 brochures which are distributed throughout the region. A few of these coveted spots remain available if booked by February 6th. For information, please contact Sinikka Nogelo: snogelo@yahoo.com.
The Artisans have also launched a program called “CAA in the Community” where a small group of artisans will create an on-site display and mini-presentation to inform your group about the tour in more detail. It’s a chance to meet the artists and help share the story with your organization and to better inform both residents and visitors. To request a visit by the artisans, please send a note to Jackie via info@CapeAnnArtisans.com.
The Tour will include 20 studios and 22 Artisans. The 2017 Artisans are:
David Archibald
Cynthia Curtis
Rob Diebboll
Jacqueline Ganim-DeFalco
Deborah Gonet
Elizabeth Harty
Camilla MacFadyen
Anni Melançon
Sinikka Nogelo
Bond Street Studio: Terry DelPercio-Piemonte & David Piemonte
Marcie Rae
Margaret Rack
Mi Robertson
Pam Stratton
Bart Stuyf
Twin Lights Studio: Erin O’Sullivan & Scott Place
Mary Ann Wenniger
Beth Williams
Ruth Worrall
Sara Wright
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Voicing the Woods: Jeremy Adams, Instrument Maker Exhibit extended through March 5, 2017
The curator’s job sounds relatively simple: just surprise us. Show us something we haven’t seen before, or lately, or in such depth, or with such clarity. Try to avoid the predictable and familiar, the market approved or academically sanctioned, or what other curators have already done. Try to step outside your museum’s comfort zone or carefully manicured institutional persona with something eccentric, an intuitive leap. After all, there is plenty of art out there. —Roberta Smith, “Museums Embrace the Unfamiliar” New York Times, September 16, 2016
The current exhibition at the Cape Ann Museum would be music to Ms. Smith’s ears. Voicing the Woods: Jeremy Adams, Instrument Maker is the unpredictable, eccentric delight she calls for. Indeed, the Museum has leaped forward with its intuition that Mr. Adams’s peerless craftsmanship has exactly the genius and beauty for the rapture of an unsuspecting public. And from all accounts, its public has agreed!
A formal lyricism in this exhibition commands attention to more than one art form. From the fabrication of brass hinges to bone keys (not to mention the skunk-tail sharps and cow-toenail couplers!), to sculptural stands and the exacting, exquisite joinery that must move unerringly to create music, the show reveals the prodigious skill and artistry of Jeremy Adams, one of the most gifted musical instrument makers in the United States. Meticulously presented in the Museum’s largest gallery, the exhibition showcases an impressive selection of harpsichords inspired by Flemish and French designs of the 17th and 18th centuries, a chamber organ, a clavichord, a demonstration organ chest, and a beautiful, witty silent keyboard, all built in their entirety by Adams in his Danvers, Massachusetts atelier. Curated from over 40 instruments built since the 1960s, these works reside in public and private collections around the world. The exhibit’s centerpiece is the stunning French (Blanchet) double-manual harpsichord with its very modern stand, which emerged from the Adams workshop this summer and is featured in events for the duration of the exhibit, sometimes in tandem with other instruments in the room. Also in the gallery, Paul Cary Goldberg’s elegant photographs, commissioned by the Museum, document the Adams workshop—the tools, details, atmosphere and the droll, quirky personality from which the instruments come.
In addition to the keyboards in the gallery, the Museum displays a selection of Adams’s furniture in the adjoining 1804 Captain Elias Davis House, offering an interesting contrast to the period furniture in the House. The design and construction of Adams’s furniture and objets d’art derive, in part, from the refined casework of his musical instruments, and in part from a lifelong interest in painting and sculpture. Commissions for new pieces show an ever-evolving freshness to his work, liberating Adams from the stringent requirements of instrument making, and resulting in highly individual and sometimes quite humorous treatments of materials both found and made. One might say that Mr. Adams has left the academy behind.
We hope you will be inspired and hasten to Gloucester for this unusual banquet of instruments and furniture now in felicitous proximity with Fitz Henry Lane, the Folly Cove Designers and all the other luminaries who inhabit this “jewel of a museum.”
In whatever way we could make your journey to Boston’s North Shore manageable, we would enthusiastically assist. The exhibition runs through March 5, 2017.
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Have you wanted to learn how to paint your own piece of furniture and learn the basic techniques of chalk paint? Join this workshop to help you get it done. Students learn the basic techniques of one-two color distressed finish with chalk type paint and waxing and distressing techniques. Bring your own small piece of furniture and we will help you transform it into a beautiful vintage piece.
Students will leave confident to tackle any project at home.
We supply all of the materials and professional guidance to teach you all you need to know to create a fabulous finish!!
We will provide adult beverages and snacks
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On my way home from NH yesterday we took the back roads through Rye, Salisbury and Newburyport to see if we could see any snowy owls hanging about.  We didn’t find any snowys but we were lucky enough to catch the Barred Owl that has been sighted at the Parker River Wildlife Refuge at the Hellcat Trail.  He was tucked in behind a bunch of branches but he was content to just sit and bask in the warm sun…and we were content to sit and watch him!
Basking in the sunSleeping beautyCracking his eyes to check out his admirers
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So….two things. Â First of all, I was excited to read today that Cape Ann Harbor Tours will be offering a new trip in their repertoire of already fun trips for tourists and locals alike. Â Their new trip is called the “Annisquam River Trip.”
On this leisurely 2 hour journey, you will cruise along and view the barrier beaches, clam flats and tidal tributaries. Take in the unique waterscapes and experience first-hand a widely recognized Important Bird Area (IBA) featuring Herons, Egrets, Cormorants, Sandpipers, and Gulls.
We’ve spent lots of time on the King Eider and the Lady Jillian as a family, with friends, while playing tour guide and with school groups. Â My favorite nights with Harbor Tours have been when we charter the boat with a group of friends, bring some finger sandwiches and sushi, pack our coolers, play some music, and cruise around the harbor with Capt. Douglass at the helm filling us in on local lore and fishing industry facts.
And THAT…takes me to my next point…
Have you ever wanted to help out a charitable organization, but either didn’t know how (short of writing a check) or honestly didn’t feel as though you were in the position to part with enough funds to make a difference? Â Well, first of all, we know that ANY amount is appreciated by all charities, but….that having been said…here’s another idea for you…
Earlier this month I called Cape Ann Harbor Tours and, along with three other friends, booked one of their vessels for a 2.5 hour trip in May. Â The four of us split the price of the trip equally. Â We then offered the boat excursion up to friends, families, and co-workers. Â The money raised via the 25 tickets sold will go directly to the charity of our choice…which, in this case, is the school where we all work and that our children attend. Â So, for a reasonable amount of money, the four of us offered up the boat (our donation to the school), 25 other people purchased tickets (their donation to the school), and…in the end…we all get a super fun night out with friends, on the water, doing what we love….and the school gets a pretty sweet sized donation. Â Win, win, win….win. Â Right?
This same scenario could be translated to any charitable organization or cause. Â You and few friends decide who you would like to benefit, gather your friends and have them spend a little bit of money to hang out with you on the water, and Ka Bam, instant party and money raised!
I’m excited that this will be one of our first fun nights out when the winter weather turns to spring, I’m excited to raise some money for our school, and I’m excited to support Cape Ann Harbor Tours with a charter at the very beginning of their season.
Photos both courtesy of Cape Ann Harbor Tours website
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Good Morning Gloucester 