A Tree Festival In Norwalk CT

The Connecticut Tree Festival, Norwalk's annual spring tribute to leafy greenery is set for Cranbury Park, located on Grumman Ave. on Saturday, May 17 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., rain or shine.

This family fun festival will be both entertaining and educational for the whole family with up to 40 exhibition booths on a U-shaped midway making it easy to explore.  Best of all, this event is free, everything in the park is free to the public--admission, parking, door prizes, even a picnic-style lunch.

There are demonstrations of how trees are planted, trimmed and moved as well as information on how to care for trees. Bring a twig and leaf from home and look for the “Ask the Arborist” signs, certified arborists are on-site to help identify trees, foliage or unusual conditions.  In a mid-day ceremony, an eastern redbud tree is to be planted to honor the late Dick Aime who died last year at age 93 after many years as secretary of the Norwalk Tree Alliance.      

For kids there is face painting, scavenger hunts, and arts and crafts activities.  A highlight of the event are the cherry-pickers located around the midway that offers kids rides to the tree tops and tells them about the importance of tree care.

Popular exhibitors include: the Wolf Conservation Center from South Salem New York, Wildlife in Crisis of Weston, CT, Earthplace of Westport and Connecticut’s Search and Rescue dog team.

Appearing for the first time is the Art Academy of Weir Farm in Wilton with a booth on the midway and a display of arboreal art called “A Celebration of Trees” in the neighboring Gallaher Mansion. 

For additional information about this event visit https://www.ioby.org/project/2014-connecticut-tree-festival.  For area information www.visitfairfieldcountyct.com

About Cranbury Park

This is an expansive parkland of 227 acres that has a series of wooded trails, and a challenging 18- hold disc golf course.  Also on the grounds is the Gallager Mansion built in 1913 by industrialist/inventor Edward Beach Gallaher.  This limestone Tudor Revival mansion is styled with carvings, stained-glass windows and Walnut paneled rooms.  It includes a large terrace and adjacent garden that make it perfect venue for outdoor entertaining.  It's available to rent for meetings, events, luncheons and weddings. The Carriage House Arts Center is located adjacent to the mansion.  Contact Recreation and Parks for details. (203) 854-7806 or www.norwalkct.org/Facilities/Facility/Details/1

Celebrate May at the Beardsley Zoo

The Beardsley Zoo has a series of exciting events planned for the lovely month of May that promises fun for the entire family.

The Beardsley Zoo is offering two special deals in May one for Moms to celebrate Mother’s Day on May 11 and the other for Veterans to commemorate Armed Services Day on May 17. To thank all moms on Mothers Day, bring your mom to the zoo and her ticket is on the Zoo!  On Armed Services Day, Veterans and active service people are free and their family (up to 6 individuals) receives a 15% discount on admission.

On May 13 and 14, the Zoo is hosting Zoo tots at 10:30 a.m. for children accompanied by an adult that are 22 months old to four years old. This popular monthly program may include: stories, games, crafts, and a live animal presentation. A special highlight is the "Garden Critters" session that will focus on animals that like gardens. The admission is $10 for Zoo members and one child; and $15 for non-members and one child. Participants may sign up for either day. To reserve a space in the program, pre-register by calling the Zoo's Education Department at 203-394-6563.

To commemorate the Endangered Species Week, the Beardsley Zoo is holding a series of endangered species awareness events from 9 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. from May 16- May 18.  The events will encourage people of all ages to learn about the importance of protecting endangered animals and plants and what actions can be taken to help preserve their future.  A highlight of this event is for children and families to take part in a scavenger hunt featuring exotic and domestic endangered animals! 

If you have been thinking about adopting a pet, head to the Zoo on May 17 for Pet Awareness and Adoption Day that takes place from noon to 3 p.m.  Together with regional animal adoption and rescue organizations, you'll learn about the wonderful animals we live with every day - our pets! The Zoo is hosting experts on pet care and safety, and a series of special craft programs for kids will be part of the fun along with other surprises.

The month of May ends with an evening lecture on May 21 at 7 p.m. in the Hanson Exploration Station. The lecture series engages audiences of all ages, especially lifelong learners, who have an appetite for delving deeper into the wonders of wildlife. Attending these programs allows visitors to live vicariously through the Zoo’s experts, who often have had incredible close encounters with creatures across the globe. There is a suggested $5 donation for the lecture. Refreshments will be served.

About Connecticut's Beardsley Zoo

Connecticut's only zoo features 300 animals representing primarily North and South American species. Visitors won't want to miss the Amur (Siberian) tigers and leopard, Brazilian ocelot, Mexican wolves, and Golden Lion tamarins. Other highlights include: the South American rainforest with free-flight aviary, the prairie dog exhibit with "pop-up" viewing areas, the New England Farmyard with goats, cows, pigs, sheep, and other barnyard critters, plus the hoofstock trail featuring bison, pronghorn, deer, and more. Visitors can grab a bite at the Peacock Café, eat in the Picnic Grove, and enjoy a ride on a colorful carousel. For more information, visit beardsleyzoo.org.

For area information on Fairfield County www.visitfairfieldcountyct.com

The Stairwell Gallery in Washington Presents Arthur Carter

The Stairwell Gallery at Gunn Memorial Library in Washington, CT is honored to present an exhibition of sculptures, orthogonals and paintings by Arthur Carter. The exhibit will be on view through June 21.

Mr. Carter’s early years might seem like another person’s full lifetime of events.  He was trained as a classical pianist, majored in French literature at Brown University, served three years in the United States Coast Guard as a lieutenant commanding officer of an air search and rescue craft, then received his MBA in finance from Dartmouth, followed by a 25 year career as an investment banker. 

 In 1981, he started a new venture.  Founding the Litchfield County Times and six years later the New York Observer, he began his career as a publisher.  He was also the publisher of theNation and the East Hampton Star.   And in 2008, the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute was founded at New York University where Mr. Carter is a trustee and chairman of the Board of Overseers of the Faculty of Arts and Science.  Mr. Carter has also held adjunct professorships in philosophy and journalism at NYU.

 Now we come to the “art part” of Mr. Carter – the grid design and layout of the front page of his newspapers inspired him to reproduce that same theme but in a three dimensional format and using stainless steel.  This was a material he had learned to master when he was in Officer Candidate School where he learned welding.  Thus, sculpting “became the latest statement of his polymath proclivities.”

 Artists naturally evolve and he was soon working with wood, clay and copper wire and then larger constructions in silicon bronze and stainless steel.  Many of his larger pieces are on permanent public display in New York City.  The fabrication process can take months to complete and involves all the complexities of a machine shop, but each piece begins with one common denominator, his sketch pad.

The Stairwell Gallery exhibit will include Mr. Carter’s Orthogonals.  A catalog of his exhibit at the New Britain Museum of American Art from the Fall of 2011, describes the pieces as follows: “Arthur Carter’s bold new series, which he calls collectively the Orthogonals, offers a fine example of a mixed mode that channels the powers of painting and sculpture through the distinguished medium of the relief.”  These pieces are complex in their simplicity.  They are strong, mathematical and like his other work, they vary in finish and are affected by the changing light and reflection.  Carter has said, “My work focuses on simplifying and eliminating the excessive.  The question is how does purity of design lend itself to making a beautiful and elegant piece?”

 Arthur Carter maintains a production facility and design studio in Roxbury, CT.  He has been a featured solo artist at many galleries, including the Tennessee State Museum, The Grey Art Gallery, 80WSE Galleries at New York University and the New Britain Museum of American Art.  Mr. Carter is the author of two hardcover books, Arthur Carter:  Sculptures, Paintings, Drawings (2009) and Arthur Carter:  Studies for Construction (2012).

 Gunn Memorial is most pleased to welcome this prolific artist who is still immersed in the world of manufacturing and finance around the world.  Perhaps his philosophy can help unify this “polymath” for us.  Mr. Carter has said, “The simpler the economics are, the better; if you don’t understand it, you don’t do it.  Purity in both design and business function means never dilute, never diffuse, and never bloat.”

 For further information please call (860) 868-7586 or email chartman@biblio.org . The Gunn Memorial Library is located at 5 Wykeham Road at the juncture of Route 47 opposite the Green in Washington, CT.  For library hours and to learn more about our programs and events visit our website www.gunnlibrary.org .

www.litchfieldhills.com

For information on Litchfield Hills www.litchfieldhills.com

Cry of the Wild and Traditional Cooking in Litchfield Hills

This May, the Institute for American Indian Studies located on 38 Curtis Rd. in Washington Connecticut is hosting a series of events that are of interest to young and old alike.

On May 10, an annual favorite returns to the Institute, the Call of the Wild Wolf program that begins at 1 p.m. The wolves come from the Wolf Conservation Center of South Salem, New York!  Participants will get to meet Atka, the oldest and most traveled ambassador wolf, to learn more about wolves, their behavior, their unique relationship with the environment and our role in protecting their future. There is limited seating so be sure to make your reservations in advance to avoid missing out on meeting these majestic animals. The cost is $10 for adults and $6 for kids.

On May 31 participants are invited to prepare and enjoy a a delicious prehistoric meal with Judy Kalin of Primitive Technologies! Participants will learn how to prepare food in a traditional way and will use traditional Native American crops and a variety of wild edibles.  Participants will work with stone age tools and utensils to create a sampling of dishes cooked over the village hearth. Registration and prepayment required. Please call for reservations. Fee: $20; $15 IAIS 

Members.

The Museum is open Monday - Saturday from 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. and on Sunday from 12 p.m. - 5 p.m. Permanent exhibits include Quinnetukut: Our Homeland, Our Story; From East To West: Across Our Homelands; Digging into the Past: Archaeology in Connecticut; a Sachem's wigwam (longhouse) classroom with a beautifully painted lifeways mural; and a replicated early-1900s Northeastern reservation house room. Changing exhibits and the shop's Artist's Corner give visitors a reason to come back again and again.

For information about Litchfield Hills visit www.litchfieldhills.com and for information about the Institute www.iaismuseum.org/

The Glass House presents Fujiko Nakaya: Veil May 1 to November 30, 2014

Coinciding with the 65th anniversary of the Glass House and its 2014 tour season, the Glass House will present Fujiko Nakaya: Veil, the first site-specific artist project to engage the iconic Glass House itself, designed by Philip Johnson and completed in 1949.

Nakaya, a Japanese artist who has produced fog sculptures and environments internationally, will wrap the Glass House in a veil of dense mist that comes and goes. For approximately 10 to 15 minutes each hour, the Glass House will appear to vanish, only to return as the fog dissipates. Inside the structure, the sense of being outdoors will be temporarily suspended during the misty spells.

Veil will stage a potent dialogue with the Glass House, producing an opaque atmosphere to meet the building's extreme transparency and temporal effects that complement its timelessness. Johnson's interest in the balance of opposites is evident throughout the Glass House campus. With Nakaya's temporary installation, this sensibility is carried  to its endpoint while allowing the unique magic of the Glass House - the dream of transparency, an architecture that vanishes - to return again and again as the fog rises and falls.

The Glass House, situated on a promontory overlooking a valley, is subject to changing wind patterns, as well as variable temperature and humidity, that will continually influence the interchange between Veil and the building it shrouds. Fresh water, pumped at high pressure through 600 nozzles, will produce an immersive environment that reveals these dynamic conditions.  

Fog responds constantly to its own surroundings, revealing and concealing the features of the environment. Fog makes visible things become invisible and invisible things - like wind - become visible. The drama of Nakaya's work rests in the continuous interplay between what is visible and what is not. Known coordinates vanish, only to be replaced by a miasma, rich in changing phenomenological effects, that evoke a sense of mystery, foreboding, and wonder.

This installation is part of a greater initiative to transform the Glass House campus into a center for contemporary art and ideas, in particular those that foster new interpretations of the historic site's meanings. The exhibition will be accompanied by public programs at the Glass House and in New York City.

Nakaya has created fog installations around the world, including projects for the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; the Grand Palais, Paris; the Australian National Gallery, Canberra; and the Exploratorium, San Francisco, among others. She consulted with architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro on the Blur Building for the 2002 Swiss Expo, and has worked with numerous artists (including Trisha Brown, David Tudor, and Bill Viola) on environments for music and performance. This will be her first large-scale installation on the east coast of the United States and the first time her work has been presented at an internationally renowned historic site.

The Glass House, built between 1949 and 1995 by architect Philip Johnson, is a National Trust Historic Site located in New Canaan, CT. The pastoral 49-acre landscape comprises fourteen structures, including the Glass House (1949), and features a permanent collection of 20th-century painting and sculpture, along with temporary exhibitions. The tour season runs from May to November and advance reservations are required. For more information, please visit www.theglasshouse.org.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation (www.PreservationNation.org) is a privately funded nonprofit organization that works to save America's historic places to enrich our future, re-imagining historic sites for the 21st century. The guiding principle of this initiative is that historic sites must be dynamic, relevant, and evolving in order to foster an understanding of history and culture that is critical, sensory, and layered.

Visitor Information:
The Glass House Visitor Center and Design Store
199 Elm Street, New Canaan, CT 06840
Open Thursday - Monday, 9:30 a.m. - 5:30 p.m. Tickets start at $30, including tour of the site.
For general information, please call 203.594.9884 or visit the Glass House online: www.theglasshouse.org.

For area information www.visitfairfieldcountyct.com

STEPPING STONES MUSEUM FOR CHILDREN TO HOST A STORYBOOK PAJAMA PARTY FEATURING THE VERY HUNGRY CATERPILLAR ON MAY 2

Throw on your most comfy and cozy set of pajamas and head over to Stepping Stones Museum for Children on Friday, May 2, from 6:00 – 8:30 pm for a special evening story time featuring Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Stepping Stones is excited to bring the Very Hungry Caterpillar to the museum for the first time as 2014 marks the 45^th anniversary of the release of this classic children’s tale. By the time you travel home “by the light of the moon” at the evening’s end, your child will be fulfilled by the smorgasbord of play-filled fun and ready for the warm “cocoon” of his or her bed.

The museum’s second Storybook Pajama Party of 2014 will be “stuffed” with family fun. Not only will you get to sit in for story times with the Very Hungry Caterpillar, but you’ll also get to take photos with a life-sized version of the caterpillar with the voracious appetite. There will be a tremendous number of Hungry Caterpillar-themed crafts and activities as we celebrate his metamorphosis from ‘hungry caterpillar’ to ‘beautiful butterfly.’ Pajama party guests can make a days-of-the-week calendar or construct a colorful chrysalis that would make the Hungry Caterpillar proud. 

Kids can dress up like a fruit or leaf and crawl through a caterpillar tube or free play with butterfly wings. Guests can use their imagination to design brilliantly bright, butterfly wings or create a collage in the style that Eric Carle uses to illustrate his books. They can also make a necklace that will resemble the trail of foodstuffs left behind in the wake of the Hungry Caterpillar’s seven-day eating binge. If a moment of peace and quiet is what you seek, guests can snuggle up with a number of other Eric Carle stories in the cocoon of our special bedtime story corner. The evening will wrap up with a musical Fly Away Home Parade throughout the entire museum.

The Stepping Stones Cafe will be open during the event and serving up some appropriately-themed items for purchase.  Enjoy the fantastic fare, but don’t overindulge like the Hungry Caterpillar or you’ll wind up with a stomach ache.

Tickets for this event cost $10 per person for museum members and $15 per person for non-members.  Children under the age of one will be admitted for free.  Storybook Pajama Party tickets are non-refundable and non-transferable.  Registration is required.  Space is limited and tickets are selling briskly, so register early.  Call 203 899 0606, ext. 264 or visit www.steppingstonesmuseum.orgwww.steppingstonesmuseum.org.

Beautiful Dogwood Festival Blossoms Help Celebrate 375th Anniversary of Fairfield, in Western Connecticut

A steepled church, a village green, and colonial homes enveloped in clouds of pink blossoms are a traditional sign of spring in Fairfield, one of Western Connecticut’s oldest and loveliest towns. Fairfield’s Dogwood Festival has been a tradition for 79 years, celebrating the hundreds of trees that light up the lanes of the town’s historic Greenfield Hill neighborhood. This year’s event takes place Friday May 2 through Sunday, May 4.

But Greenfield Hill is just one of three historic districts in this Fairfield County town celebrating an impressive 375^th anniversary this year.  So after enjoying one of spring’s most colorful celebrations, visitors can enjoy the celebration taking place in the rest of the town.

The Dogwood Festival

Fairfield’s first dogwood trees were planted back in 1705, when Isaac Bronson, a retired Revolutionary War surgeon-turned-farmer, decided his Greenfield Hills property would be enhanced if he transplanted some of the native wild dogwood trees blooming in the nearby woods. Bronson propagated and so did his trees. By 1895, the blooms were so outstanding that the Greenfield Hill Village Improvement Society took on care of the dogwoods as an official project, adding many new plantings that continue to grow. 

In 1935 the Greenfield Hills Congregational Church held the first Dogwood Festival, and like the trees, it has grown prodigiously with time.  Besides taking in the beauty of the blossoms, guests can visit tents where some 40 juried New England artisans and crafters will be showing their creations, see an art show, hunt for treasures at a tag sale, enjoy free musical entertainment and pick up prize plants that make perfect Mothers’ Day gifts. Walking tours of the historic lanes will be available and kids will have their own craft tent, bounce house, and face painter, plus cotton candy, and carnival games with prizes. Proceeds from the festival benefit more than 30 local, national and international charities. For details, see www.greenfieldhillschurch.com

                                    The 375^th Anniversary

In the second historic district in the center of town, the first sign of something special going on this year will be the fire hydrants, painted in historic garb like the Colonial soldiers who once marched here.

At the Fairfield Museum and History Center, a new hands-on exhibit explores the doings in town over its colorful past. Creating Community: Exploring 375 years of Our Past lets visitors look inside a Native American wigwam, climb into an American Revolution fort, watch a video depicting the Burning of Fairfield by the British in 1779, decipher a spy code, and sit on a 19^th century trolley. In six chronologically organized sections, it shows how people worked, lived, and built communities over time by exploring original objects, individual stories, and engaging activities like trying on wardrobes from different periods.

The corner of the Museum block, Beach and Old Post Road, was the center point of the original “four squares” of the town laid out in 1639. Only four original homes survived the British fires, but a pleasant hour can be spent exploring the area’s many beautiful post-Revolutionary homes, historic churches and the town hall, whose central section remains as it was rebuilt in 1790

Southport, the picturesque harbor area, is the third historic area. Boats laden with onions from Greenfield Hill farms used to sail out of this harbor before the British did their damage. Now it is home to yachts and country clubs and exclusive residential areas in the hills surrounding the tiny village.

Fairfield is planning many special events in the months ahead to mark its special birthday.  See www.fairfield375.com for a complete calendar.

For more information about lodging and other activities in the area and a free copy of UNWIND, a full-color, 152-page booklet detailing what to do and see, and where to stay, shop and dine in Fairfield County and the Litchfield Hills of Western Connecticut, contact the Western Connecticut Visitors Bureau, PO Box 968, Litchfield, CT 06759, (860) 567-4506, or visit their web site at www.visitwesternct.com