Got Trees?

Chestertown – The Center for Environment & Society (CES) at Washington College and the Town of Chestertown are pleased to announce that the Town has received a grant from the Chesapeake Bay Trust in order to begin implementation of the Town’s Community Forest Master Plan.

This plan involves planting a minimum of 2,000 trees within the Town’s official boundaries over the next four years, beginning with this Fall/Winter planting season, in order to eventually reach a 45% tree canopy cover.

The Town is offering a “buy one tree, get one free” program for residents of Chestertown proper only; the coupons are available at Town Hall on Cross Street.

The Center for Environment & Society works to instill a conservation ethic by connecting people to the land and water.
It supports interdisciplinary research and education, exemplary stewardship of natural and cultural resources, and the integration of ecological and social values.  For more information, visit www.ces.washcoll.edu or call 410/810-7161.

From The Western Front To The Home Front: World War I Historian Presents Armistice Day Lecture At Washington College

Chestertown – Martha Hanna, Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder, will present “Husbands and Wives, Fathers and Children: Family Life and Military Service in France during World War I” at Washington College’s Litrenta Lecture Hall on Wednesday, November 11, at 5:30 p.m.

The event, this year’s Conrad M. Wingate Memorial Lecture in History, is being held on November 11 to honor the anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I.

Dr. Hanna is a specialist in the history of modern France, with a particular interest in the First World War. During a research trip to Paris in  2000, she unearthed a previously unknown collection of wartime letters written by a peasant couple, Paul and Marie Pireaud.

The Pireauds had been married only six months when World War I began in 1914. Called up to serve in the French Army for almost five years, Paul saw action in some of France’s bloodiest battles, while Marie joined her parents and in-laws in tending the farm that had been left in their care.

The letters of Marie and Paul chronicle the day-to-day life, anxieties and abiding love of a couple separated by war.

Numbering well over a thousand letters, the Pireaud collection – perhaps the only extant collection of letters written by French peasants that includes the letters of both husband and wife – formed the foundation of Dr. Hanna’s latest book, Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War (Harvard University Press, 2008).

Examining wartime experience from the vantage points of both the military and home fronts, Your Death Would Be Mine was hailed by the London Review of Books as “a vivid picture of the Great War.” In a starred review, Booklist enthused, “Hanna offers a fascinating look at one peasant couple separated and in love….”

Your Death Would Be Mine won the American Historical Association’s 2007 J. Russell Major Prize, the Society for Military History’s 2008 Distinguished Book Award (Biography and Memoir category) and the 2007 Colorado Book Award for History/Biography.

Dr. Hanna also is the author of The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers During the Great War (Harvard University Press, 1996) and numerous articles on the cultural history of France during the early 20th century.

The Conrad M. Wingate Memorial Lecture in History is held in honor of the late Conrad Meade Wingate ’23, brother of late Washington College Visitor Emeritus Phillip J. Wingate ’33 and the late Carolyn Wingate Todd.

Litrenta Lecture Hall is located in the John S. Toll Science Center. Admission to “Husbands and Wives, Fathers and Children: Family Life and Military Service in France During World War I” is free and open to the public.

Washington College's Afro-Cuban Ensemble, Jazz Combo To Perform

Chestertown – The exciting drum and song traditions of a vibrant musical culture will come alive on campus when the Washington College Afro-Cuban Ensemble performs in Hotchkiss Recital Hall on Wednesday, November 11, at 9 p.m. The Washington College Jazz Combo also will perform, presenting enduring classics from the American jazz canon.

The Afro-Cuban Ensemble was founded in 2005 by percussionist and ethnomusicologist Kenneth Schweitzer, D.M.A., of the Washington College Department of Music. The November 11 concert will include Santeria drums and songs, rumba, popular sones and boleros (as in “The Buena Vista Social Club”) and Brazilian bossa nova.

Schweitzer also leads the Washington College Jazz Combo, which will round out November 11’s entertainment. The Jazz Combo is composed of a small group of Washington College students (both majors and non-majors) who show exceptional talent and motivation. The goal of the ensemble is to provide members with professional opportunities; playing in club-like settings and providing ambient music in a variety of venues both on and off campus.

Hotchkiss Recital Hall is located in the new Daniel Z. Gibson Center for the Arts. Admission to the concert is free and open to the public.

Dance Program Hosts Community Dance Day

The Washington College Dance Program will host its Sixth Annual Community Dance Day at the Johnson Lifetime Fitness Center on Saturday, November 7, from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

No prior dance experience is necessary to participate in the program, which is open to children grades K-8.

Members of the Nu Delta Alpha National Dance Honor Society, under the direction of Professor Karen Smith, will offer classes in hip-hop, Broadway dance and creative movement.

For more information, call 410/778-7237 or contact ksmith2@washcoll.edu.

Acclaimed 'Second Nature' Art Exhibition Continues At Washington College's New Kohl Gallery

Rarely seen works by Monet, Renoir, Pissarro et al. displayed

 

“The first exhibition at the Kohl Gallery … is striking and wonderful … The work on view in that gallery is in every way interesting and delightful. It is a pleasure for the eye, a feast for the intellect, a wonderful view of the diversity and the humanity of the 19^th century.… A great critic … said that in the past there had been an art for the gods, an art for kings and queens and princes, and that finally, in the 19^th century, there was an art for mankind, an art of democracy, available to everyone…. landscape painting. I recommend that you rush right over as soon as you can to the Kohl Gallery and see this wonderful and varied show.”

-- Linda Nochlin, Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art, Institute of Fine Arts/New York University, contributing editor of Art in America and author of numerous groundbreaking books including Women, Art, and Power and The Politics of Vision

 

Chestertown – “Second Nature: Masterpieces of 19^th-Century Landscape Painting,” featuring seldom-displayed masterworks from some of the major artists of the period, is on view at Washington College’s new Kohl Gallery through November 15.

The exhibition features 23 rarely seen paintings from a private collection, including artworks by Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Frederic Edwin Church, Camille Corot, Martin Johnson Heade, Thomas Moran, Alfred Sisley and Thomas Worthington Whittredge.

The new gallery and its opening exhibition have been a hit – there were more than 1,200 visitors in the first week alone.

The masterpieces constitute an auspicious debut for the College’s first-ever climate-controlled, secure exhibition space, the 1,200-square-foot Kohl Gallery, funded by Washington College parents Benjamin and Judy Kohl.

The Kohl Gallery is located in the newly opened Daniel Z. Gibson Center for the Arts, a $24-million renovation and expansion of the original performing arts center built more than 40 years ago.

Sponsored by Brown Advisory, “Second Nature” was curated by Donald McColl, Nancy L. Underwood Chair in Art History, Chair in the Department of Art and Art History and Director of the Kohl Gallery at Washington College.

Dr. McColl was assisted by students in last spring’s Museum Studies class at the College, by Kohl Gallery Interns Colleen Kearins ’09, Erin Harrison ’09, Riley Carbonneau ’10 and Andrea Roth ’11, and by alumni of, and colleagues in, the Department of Art and Art History.

Though its origins are traceable to the Renaissance, landscape painting flourished in the 1800s as never before. Artists, increasingly freed from state or church patronage, catered to a growing system of galleries, dealers and collectors. Landscape, previously considered a minor genre, began to garner new respect, and evolved in tandem with a reverence for natural beauty, and a national pride felt by artists for the sweeping vistas of their respective homelands.

Artists in the exhibition not only documented rare and distant species, and made images so powerful as to spur the formation of America’s first national park, but also helped lift the spirits of those who were too ill to walk in nature, by creating a likeness of a spring flower or a lush field that could well outlast its subject.

Visitors to the “Second Nature” exhibition see stirring examples from landscape painting’s apogee, including such works as Claude Monet’s “Le Val d’Antifer,” Thomas Moran’s “Tantallon Castle,” George Inness’ “Landscape with a Split-Rail Fence” and many others.

“Second Nature: Masterpieces of 19^th-Century Landscape Painting” continues at the Kohl Gallery on Tuesdays through Saturdays through November 15. Gallery hours are: Tuesdays from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., Wednesdays through Fridays from 2 to 5 p.m., and Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. (The gallery is closed Sundays and Mondays.) A $5 donation is requested. Students are admitted free of charge.

One Nation, Under Debt: 'I.O.U.S.A.' Screened At Washington College

CHESTERTOWN – The Washington College Republican Club will present a screening of the acclaimed (and alarming) documentary “I.O.U.S.A.: One Nation, Under Stress, In Debt” at Litrenta Lecture Hall on Sunday, November 1, at 7 p.m.

“I.O.U.S.A.” opened to resounding praise in 2008. The New York Times hailed it as “resolutely non-partisan … a documentary everyone should see.” Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times declared, “‘I.O.U.S.A.’ accomplishes an amazing thing. It explains the national debt.”

The United States, as the film warns, is on the brink of a financial meltdown. Throughout history, the federal government has found it nearly impossible to spend only what has been raised through taxes.

Now, burdened with an ever-expanding government and military, increased international competition, overextended entitlement programs and debts to foreign countries that are becoming impossible to honor, America must mend its spendthrift ways or face an economic disaster of epic proportions, the documentary asserts.

Featuring candid interviews with both average American taxpayers and government officials, “I.O.U.S.A.” helps demystify the nation’s financial practices and policies. The film follows former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker as he quixotixally crisscrosses the country explaining America’s unsustainable fiscal policies to its citizens.

The film interweaves archival footage and economic data to paint a vivid and disturbing profile of America’s current economic situation. But the ultimate power of “I.O.U.S.A.” is that it moves beyond doomsday rhetoric to proffer potential financial scenarios and propose solutions about how Americans can recreate a fiscally sound nation for future generations.

Litrenta Lecture Hall is located in the John S. Toll Science Center. Admission to “I.O.U.S.A.: One Nation, Under Stress, In Debt” free and open to the public.

Washington College 2009-2010 Concert Series Continues With Lute Recital By Richard Stone

CHESTERTOWN – The 58th season of the Washington College Concert Series continues with a performance by lutenist Richard Stone in Hotchkiss Recital Hall on Sunday, November 1, at 4 p.m.

Stone has performed worldwide as a soloist and accompanist. The New York Times called his playing “beautiful” and “lustrously melancholy,” while the Washington Post described it as having “the energy of a rock solo and the craft of a classical cadenza.”
Stone recently completed a two-season nationwide solo tour performing the Bach lute suites.

The founder and co-director of the Philadelphia baroque orchestra Tempesta di Mare, Stone studied lute at SUNY Purchase and as a Fulbright Scholar at London’s Guildhall School. He is an instructor of baroque lute and theorbo (a type of lute with an extended neck) at the Peabody Conservatory.

The 2009-2010 Washington College Concert Series will continue with performances by the Gemini Piano Trio in Decker Theatre on January 23, the Lyric Brass Quintet on February 27 and pianist Inna Faliks on March 28.

Season tickets are available in advance or at the box office on performance nights. Single admission tickets, available at the box office, are $15 for adults, $5 for youth 18 and under. Hotchkiss Recital Hall is located in Washington College’s new Daniel Z. Gibson Center for the Arts. For more information, call 410/778-7839.