Connecticut Travel

The New England Carousel Museum will be in full New Orleans-style celebration mode during its 28th annual Mardi Gras party on Saturday, February 10, 2018 from 7:30 PM – midnight. Come join us for an evening of fun and frolicking with great music, good food, bourbon, and beads.

The Big Easy evening features music and dancing in the magnificent museum ballroom. Along with a 50/50 raffle and live entertainment that will include face painters, temporary tattoos, balloon twisting and magic, there will be bourbon and wine tastings in the Speakeasy, beads and doubloons, and a catered dinner! This is a BYOB event. “This unique party brings a taste of New Orleans to Bristol.” said Louise DeMars, the museum’s Executive Director. Attendees are encouraged to wear an optional mask or come in full costume. Masks are available to purchase in the museum gift shop.

The evening’s festivities will culminate in the crowning of a king and queen of the ball. Gather your friends and come kick up your heels to help us celebrate our 28th Anniversary year, while supporting the wonderful programming and events produced by the Carousel Museum for the Greater Bristol community.

Tickets are on sale at the Carousel Museum or you may order them by mail, by phone, or on-line. RSVP by Monday, February 5, 2018. The cost is $50 per person and pre-paid tables of 8 may be reserved. The event will be held at the New England Carousel Museum, 95 Riverside Ave, Bristol, CT.

For more information or to purchase tickets, please contact The New England Carousel Museum at (860) 585-5411 or email manager@thecarouselmuseum.org.

BOOK ONLINE:
www.thecarouselmuseum.org/book-online

Calling all little princes and princesses! Stepping Stones is rolling out the red carpet as the museum transforms into a snow-kissed wonderland for its sixth annual Winter Wonderland Children’s Ball on Saturday, February 10 from 4:00 – 8:30 pm.

Children are invited to dress up in their party best for a memorable evening of fun and entertainment. Moms and Dads, sons and daughters will be treated like the princes and princesses that they are as they enjoy a magical wintry celebration featuring dancing and full access to all the exhibits in the museum. Families will enjoy posing for the paparazzi as they arrive, learning ballroom moves from the experts and making wonderful winter crafts.

Be sure you bring your camera. Photo opportunities abound as we celebrate the magic and wonder of the season amidst a whimsical winter backdrop of a lighted courtyard, a play-sized igloo, a life-sized snow globe, spectacular winter murals, snowflake-adorned galleries and a myriad of snow people. Bring your appetite as well. The Stepping Stones Cafe will be open for purchases of their healthy fare.

Bubbleology – The Secret World of Bubbles” is a mesmerizing performance for audiences of all ages. Be dazzled by a bubbly Eiffel Tower or a dancing snow-white snow-man, while learning about the art and science of soap bubbles. Bubble artist Keith Michael Johnson uses bubbles—large and small—to explain liquids, solids and gasses, geometry, tension and pressure. He has appeared on the Discovery Channel and National Geographic TV. Performance times are: 5:00 pm, 6:00 and 7:00 pm.

Get your tickets early as this event traditionally sells out. Early bird tickets for Members are $8/person, Non-members $13/person. After Friday, February 2nd, tickets for Members are $10/person, Non-members $15/person. Register online at www.steppingstonesmuseum.org, call 203 899 0606, ext. 264, or visit the Welcome Desk. Reservations are required.

About Stepping Stones Museum for Children

Stepping Stones Museum for Children in Norwalk, Conn., is an award-winning, private, non-profit 501(c)(3) children’s museum committed to broadening and enriching the lives of children and families. Located on five acres in Mathews Park, the LEED Gold certified museum encompasses five hands-on galleries, state-of-the-art Multimedia Gallery, Family and Teacher Resource Center, cafe and retail store. Stepping Stones is located at 303 West Avenue, exit 14N or 15S off I-95 in Norwalk. Museum hours are Monday – Sunday, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm. Admission is $15 for adults and children. Children under 1 are free. To learn more, call 203 899 0606 or visit http://www.steppingstonesmuseum.org.

​A “Blue Moon” is a fairly infrequent phenomenon involving the appearance of an additional full moon within one month and the next one is on January 31. To celebrate the blue moon the Institute for American Indian Studies in Washington is hosting a blue moon hike on the 31st @ 6:30 p.m.- 8:30 p.m. Native Americans followed the cycles of the moon and every month the full moon had a different name.

The Algonquin tribes called January the full wolf moon because when this full moon appeared wolves howled in hunger outside the villages. Traditionally, the January Moon is also known as the Old Moon. The hike concludes at the replicated Algonkian village for hot cocoa around the campfire. Native Americans drew constellations, created a mythology around the stars and built structures in alignment with the sky long before Europeans arrived on American shores. Like other groups, they tracked the motions of the Sun to help them decide when to plant crops, move their camps, or stage sacred rituals.

Their stories contained explanations of the constellations they saw as patterns of bright stars, meteor showers, the Northern Lights, and saw in what we call the Milky Way a pathway to the afterlife.

Some tribes built great circles of stones to help them predict the changing seasons, or ceremonial sites and mounds of earth in alignment with the Sun and stars and to reflect the patterns they saw in the heavens.

Participants on this hike through the Native American Village and surrounding woodland trails will learn about the beliefs and folklore of the Eastern Woodland Indians that made Connecticut their home.

For information about additional programs visit the website​ and facebook page​.

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is pleased to present Anissa Mack: Junk Kaleidoscope, a reflection on Mack’s The Fair project, realized in both 1996 and 2006, to be reimagined at the Museum through April 22, 2018. Mack mines Americana, its artifacts, folklore, and rituals, and explores American vernacular traditions, examining their shifting role in a dialogue between the history of art making and the culture of collecting. Through all new objects, Junk Kaleidoscope will re-envision The Fair in a way that weaves together over two decades of work, sixty miles from the Durham Fair fairgrounds that inspired this project.

The Fair was first realized in 1996, when Mack entered all seventy-three craft categories at the Durham Fair, the largest agricultural fair in Connecticut; she had participated in the fair, located near her hometown of Guilford, CT, throughout her childhood. In 2006, she remade the project as The Fair (10th Anniversary Edition) by generating new entries for all of the craft categories available that year. On both occasions, the objects were displayed at the fairs and then (re)presented in a commercial gallery with their winning ribbons. At The Aldrich, Mack will create a layered exhibition that engages fairs in new ways. For Junk Kaleidoscope, she will utilize a self-generated list of seventy categories—comprising actual competition categories collected from various county and state fairs, as well as those of her own invention—to generate and support the works in the show. The list will serve as a catalyst for production and as a framework for understanding the shifting, participatory display that the objects will enjoy at The Aldrich.

For Mack, “fairs serve as fascinatingly complex archives that mirror both ‘America’ and the art world.” Repetition, displacement, and distortion are constant concerns and the act of revisiting is an ongoing theme. Mack attends county and state fairs nationwide, where her experiences fundamentally reshape her approach to the creation and staging of her work. The atmosphere of the local fair and the environment of the artist’s studio share similar outtakes, as both are equally concerned with narrative, arrangement, and (e)valuation. Her appropriation of the fair’s system of categorization attempts to undo or rewrite storylines embedded within local material culture. These objects are symbolic containers of a collective memory that can travel across time. Ultimately, Mack positions herself as both an artist and maker, placing herself inside a subculture and adopting its system of classification for her own (re)invention. This enables Mack to move seamlessly between two distinctive locales and contexts, each of which has its own structure, methodology, and currency. The objects embody these alternating experiences and distinguishing histories.

On Saturday, January 27, the Bruce Museum (One Museum Dr.) in Greenwich will host a World War I Digitization Day organized by the Connecticut State Library. Scheduled to take place from 12 to 4 pm (snow date, February 10), Remembering World War One: Sharing History/Preserving Memory is a statewide collaborative project to create a community-generated archive of stories related to the Great War.

The event is held to complement the Bruce Museum’s new exhibition Patriotic Persuasion: American Posters of the First World War, which opens Saturday, January 20, and commemorates the centennial of the entry of the United States into the global conflict once hailed as “the War to End All Wars.”

For Digitization Day, Connecticut residents are invited to bring their photos, letters, and other keepsakes from World War I to be added to the State Library’s online archive. The images and stories collected at the event will be made accessible for public use. Original materials will be returned to the owners after digitization is complete. Digitization contributors and their families will receive free admission to the Bruce Museum.

For more information about the Digitization Day project, please see this set of FAQs: http://ctinworldwar1.org/digitization-days/faq/.

The Museum’s Patriotic Persuasion exhibition, which features a selection of works from the First World War donated to the museum by Beverly and John W. Watling III, will be on view through June 10, 2018.

“This show represents a hallmark of the Bruce — to develop creative ways to showcase our collection in meaningful exhibitions that link artistic works with human history on a global and local scale,” says Kirsten Reinhardt, museum registrar. “These posters were displayed all over the country, including in Greenwich, and the power of their message remains strong today.”

Visitors to the Bruce Museum on WWI Digitization Day will enjoy the added attraction of a new exhibition debuting January 27, Hot Art in a Cold War: Intersections of Art and Science in the Soviet Era. Juxtaposing art made in opposition to state-sanctioned Socialist Realism with artifacts from the Soviet nuclear and space programs, Hot Art in a Cold War examines one of the dominant concerns of Soviet unofficial artists—and citizens everywhere—during the Cold War: the consequences of innovation in science, technology, mathematics, communications, and design.

White Memorial Foundation in Litchfield is offering a series of two programs on Saturday, Feb. 3 that assure winter family fun. First program will teach families about animal tracking and the second program explains the history of ice cutting in the Litchfield Hills.

On Saturday, February 3 from 10 am to 12 noon go on an adventure with Andrew Dobbs to learn how to track wolves. Andrew Dobos takes you on a wildlife tracking walk through the winter woods. There are always clues left behind by the animals for us to decipher, telling a story of their habits and lives.

Get to know our beloved wildlife that much better. Children should be accompanied by an adult and all should dress extra warm and wear good boots! You never know where the animals have been! Meet in the Museum. Members: $5.00 Non-Members: $15.00, Pre-registration and pre-payment are required. Call 860-567-0857 or register online

Also on February 3 is the popular Ice Harvest Festival that will take place from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and is free of charge. For many years, ice harvested from Bantam Lake was used for refrigeration throughout the year. This event begins in the Museum with a visit to the Ice House display, then participants will head outdoors for a walk down the Lake Trail to visit the old ice house ruins.

The ice harvest program culminates with White Memorial staff, Jeff Greenwood, James Fischer, and Gerri Griswold demonstrating how ice was cut and moved using the same tools and methods. Dress for the weather because participants will be walking and standing on Ongley Pond for extended periods of time. Wear warm boots and prepare for wind and sun. Hot beverages and treats will be provided to fortify you! 11:00 A.M. – 2:00 P.M. Meet in the Museum.