Uh-oh, the daffodils think it is spring. We have had a remarkably warm winter and look what we found in the garden today. Hang in there little fellas!]]>Margot Mache will be graduating from Boston University in May 2012. She majored in History of Art and Architecture and will have a minor in Business Administration and Management. She has worked in public programs at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, as a Project Coordinator at the Association of Architecture Organizations, in media relations at the Royal College of Art in London, and served as a research assistant at Boston University with Professor Jodi Cranston. She has lead after school art classes and been involved in the Boston University Theatre troupe.
Amara McMann earned her MA in the History of Fine and Decorative Arts from the University of Manchester in the UK, and her BA in Art History at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. Most recently she worked as a gallery assistant at the University of North Florida Gallery of Art. During her time there she taught lower level art history courses, as well as a few specialized upper level courses. She has served as an Education instructor and docent trainer at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville and during the summer of 2011, lead art classes at Camp Walt Whitman in Piermont, NH. Ms. McMann wrote her undergraduate thesis on the works of Thomas Cole and presented a paper analyzing the relationship between Cole’s poetry and his paintings at the 2010 School of Visual Arts conference, Green, Greener, Greenest: Romancing Nature Again.
Elizabeth Mandle will complete her BA from Boston College in May 2012. She majored in History and studied abroad at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Mandle has experience with historic house education and interpretation from her time working as a tour guide at Lexington Historical Society. She has also has experience designing and constructing theatre sets, and serving as sound manger for productions at Lexington High School. At Boston College she served as a guide and panelist for prospective students, and has been involved in student outreach and admissions. She served as a tutor for recent immigrants in an after school program at Dorchester middle school.
]]>Uh-oh, the daffodils think it is spring. We have had a remarkably warm winter and look what we found in the garden today. Hang in there little fellas!]]>
Maria Bartow, played by Brigitte Choura, getting readyExactly 175 years ago today, 35-year-old Thomas Cole married 24-year-old Maria Bartow in the Main House of what we now call the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. Last Saturday we had a little fun with this anniversary and created a light-hearted re-enactment of the event with three professional actors, a three-tiered wedding cake from an 1833 recipe, and a keg of locally brewed beer. Maria's actual 1836 white silk wedding dress was on display for that one night only, so we 
Cotten family with dress-up propssituated it next to Thomas Cole's original top hat in order to create a little reunion of sorts. Guests were supplied with their own top hats and other flourishes for a photo-shoot, and copies of the hand-written 1836 wedding certificate were given out as party favors. More photos, including one of Maria's 1836 wedding dress, can be seen on our Facebook page. Happy anniversary Tom and Maria!
The happy couple cutting the cake]]>
We had a big crowd at our Community Day this past weekend, with budding Thomas Cole artists at work on a 12-foot-long landscape painting and dancing around to live banjo music. I was glad to see that they also visited and enjoyed our Duncanson exhibition, as you can see in this photo. Best of all, we learned that most visitors had never been to the site before and lived nearby -- exactly who we had hoped would come! How did they find out about the event? It seems that the good old-fashioned sandwich boards around town did the trick.]]>
We don't know how bad the winds and rain will get, so to be safe we will be closed on Sunday August 28th due to Hurricane Irene. Inside, we've made preparations in case there is a leak, and we placed fitted plywood covers over all the windows to be extra secure. In this photo you can see the house all ready for the storm. Be safe everyone!]]>]]>
This week we started intalling the new kitchen garden, right on the very spot where it was in Thomas Cole's time. A crew of volunteers will plant the seeds and tend it -- let us know if you would like to join the garden team! The garden is part of our overall landscape restoration project: The landscape architect Robert M. Toole researched the history of the land around Cole's home and drew up a detailed restoration plan for us, and now we are implementing it. If you would like to help with the garden this season, you can contact Melissa at 518-943-7465 extension 5.]]>
Robert S. Duncanson, Untitled, 1861. Courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, NYI have recently received some beautiful images of the paintings that will be coming to us in May as part of our 2011 exhibition, Robert S. Duncanson: The Spiritual Striving of the Freedman’s Son. Duncanson was the first African-American landscape painter to gain international renown, and his work is magnificent. It is especially significant that this exhibition will bring the work of this ground-breaking artist to the home of Thomas Cole, as Cole was a major influence on Duncanson. The exhibition is curated by Joseph D. Ketner, the Henry and Lois Foster Chair in Contemporary Art and the Distinguished Curator-in-Residence at Emerson College in Boston. He is the author of the definitive book about the artist, The Emergence of the African- American Artist: Robert S. Duncanson 1821-1872. The catalogue for this exhibition will contain an essay by Mr. Ketner including new information on the artist and color illustrations of many new paintings discovered over the past fifteen years. We will post more of the images on our Facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/ThomasColeHistoricSite.]]>