What Etsy is to crafts, Society6 is to fine art. Artists can use the site to sell their prints online, collaborate with other artists, and even find grant opportunities. Anyone can join, and artists can choose the selling prices of their own works.
Salon.com has posted their list already. Are your favorites included?
Youth services librarians from across Connecticut have compiled listings of more than 200 recommended holiday gift books for children of all ages.
The New Haven Symphony Orchestra will be performing their Holiday Extravaganza concert on Saturday, December 12 at 7:30 PM at Hamden Middle School. This NHSO Pops! perfomance will have you singing and tingling with anticipation for the season of good cheer!
The United Nations proclaimed 2009 as the International Year of
American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life 1765-1915 is the title of an exhibit on display now through January 24, 2010 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Our library has the exhibition catalog. This exhibit assembles more than 100 masterpieces of American painting from more than 45 museums across the country. It includes works by John Singleton Copley, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt and George Bellows. The exhibition is organized into four chronological sections which can also be viewed online: Inventing American Stories 1765-1830,
See the review article by
There is a lovely exhibit now at the Morgan Library in New York: A Woman's Wit: Jane Austen's Life and Legacy. It will run from Nov. 6, 2009 to March 14, 2010. Jane Austen (1775-1817) is one of the greatest British novelists. The Morgan library owns several of Jane Austen's few surviving letters. Some of these rare letters are on display, as well as drawings and prints of important people, places and events in Austen's life. To accompany the exhibit, the Morgan Library has scheduled various gallery talks, lectures, family programs, and film screenings. And there is an online exhibition as well with selected images, facsimiles, and a short documentary film. For our library's holdings on Jane Austen click here. For a selection of websites on Jane Austen click here. See also the article by Edward Rothstein as published in the New York Times. Update: On Dec. 2, 2009 the New York Times reported on a new theory on Jane Austen's Death. PBS will broadcast several new film adaptations of Jane Austen's novels, starting on January 24. For more information and other additional background information, go the PBS Masterpiece website.
On November 9, 1989, twenty years ago, after weeks of civil unrest and widespread peaceful demonstrations, East-Germans were allowed to travel freely to West-Berlin and West-Germany, resulting in the opening of the Berlin Wall. The Wall, the concrete barrier erected by the East-German government in 1961, separated West-Berlin from East-Berlin and East-Germany for more than a quarter century. Click here for some interesting websites on the history of the Berlin Wall from the Librarians' Internet Index. For a fascinating glimpse of Berlin in the 1920s, check out on DVD the documentary from 1927 titled BERLIN SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY. For books on the history of Berlin and the Berlin Wall, click here.
This year marks the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus ("house of building"), the most important and most influential school of design of the 20th century. It was founded by Walter Gropius in 1919 in Weimar, Germany where it was based until 1925. It was then moved to Dessau in 1932 and on to Berlin until its was closed by the Nazis in 1933. The European avant-garde taught at the Bauhaus: Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Oskar Schlemmer, Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer and Lászlo Moholy-Nagy among others. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has organized a special exhibit on the Bauhaus which will be shown from November 8, 2009 until January 25, 2010. For a selection of books on the Bauhaus in our library click here. For a photo gallery on the Bauhaus click here. See the work of Bauhaus student, painter and printmaker Werner Drewes who immigrated to the United States in 1930.
The Yale Center for British Art in New Haven is hosting a stunning exhibit that includes decoupage, natural history specimans, embroidered textiles, sketches, garden design, and live floral displays.
Beginning on November 14, all telephone calls made in Connecticut will need an area code, even a call to your next door neighbor. To complete local calls, the new dialing procedure requires callers to dial area code + telephone number. This means that all local calls in Connecticut that are currently dialed with seven digits will need to be dialed using area code + telephone number. Calls outside the local calling area will still need a 1 before the area code, while local calls will require 10-digit dialing, without the 1.
NPR joins StoryCorps in declaring Friday, November 27th the National Day of Listening. On this day, Americans are encouraged to record and share an interview with a loved one and to preserve that conversation for future generations. The National Day of Listening falls on the day after Thanksgiving, when friends and family are likely to be together and able to spend an hour honoring one another by listening. StoryCorps provides a Do-It-Yourself Instruction Guide and special toolkits to assist people in recording an interview and other National Day of Listening activities.
The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss died on October 30, 2009 of cardiac arrest, just a few weeks before his 101st birthday. The father of structuralism and modern anthropology, and "one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century" (quotation by Philippe Descola, Collège de France) was born on November 28, 1908 in Brussels. He obtained advanced degrees in philosophy, literature and law at the University of Paris. While teaching sociology at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, he studied various tribes in Central Brazil. These ethnological studies later informed his groundbreaking theoretical work. In 1942 he emigrated from France to the United States and taught for several years at the New School for Social Research in New York. He returned to France after World War II and during his academic career published several influential books, namely Tristes Tropiques (1955), a memoir of his life in Brazil and the The Savage Mind (La Pensée Sauvage) (1962). For more information, see the obituary by Edward Rothstein in the New York Times.
The GOOD 100 is a compendium of people, ideas, and programs attempting to change our planet for the better. Put together by GOOD magazine, the list ranges from cities racing to become the most electric-vehicle friendly to gardeners illegally fertilizing with human waste, neighbors banding together to change the economics of solar power to scholars pressing for new approaches to international aid. Visit the site and find 100 ways to get inspired.
The finalists for the 2009 National Book Awards have been announced. The winners will be revealed on November 18, 2009 at the 60th anniversary celebration of the National Book Foundation in New York City.
