Wishing all our Museum Members and Friends of the Museum a wonderful Memorial Day on Monday, May 31. Memorial Day is an American holiday, observed on the last Monday of May, honoring the men and women who died while serving in the U.S. military.
Originally known as Decoration Day, it originated in the years following the Civil War and became an official federal holiday in 1971. Many Americans observe Memorial Day by visiting cemeteries or memorials, holding family gatherings and participating in parades. Unofficially, it marks the beginning of the summer season.
To see the full history of this celebration day please visit:
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Upcoming Events: BLUE MUSE Opening Reception, Sunday June 6 from 2-5pm |
New DMFAH Exhibition to Open On Craghead Street at the 536 Gallery. Blue Muse, an exhibition of 26 tintype photographs by Timothy Duffy will open on June 1. Please join us for the Sunday, June 6 Opening Reception from 2-5pm at the 536 Craghead Gallery in the River District.
Blue Muse is a musical testament to the 25-year history of the Music Maker Relief Foundation and its partner artists. Tim Duffy’s photographs represented in the Blue Muse Exhibition is a remarkable retrospective on a quarter-century of work done by the Music Maker Relief Foundation to sustain and preserve the America’s roots music traditions. The Blue Muse CD serves as musical companion the Blue Muse exhibition which will allow you to hear the music produced by the extraordinary musicians photographed by Duffy: Timothy Duffy’s Southern Photographs, published by UNC Press, available February 25th, 2019, and accompanying an exhibition organized by the Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History, on view June 1 – August 28th, 2021.
The CD album features 21 tracks, most of which were recorded by Music Maker founder Timothy Duffy, that capture the infinite complexity of Traditional American Music.
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Summer at the Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History |
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SUMMERSTACK and DMFAH Open House Today from 2-5pm: Sign Up for Summer Camp and the Youth Production |
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Free Ice Cream!!! TODAY 2-4pm |
TODAY is a great time not only to audition for the next youth theater production, but to also sign up for SUMMERSTACK CAMP, starting on June 7th -18 at the Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History. The DMFAH is joining forces with Smokestack Theater company this year to offer Theater Camp in the morning (9am -11am) – A lunch that includes learning how to play chess and strategy games (11am – 1pm) and afternoon Art classes in the Swanson Studio (1pm – 2:30 pm).
So come on out today to the Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History to get your FREE ICE CREAM! FREE FACE PAINTING and LAWN GAMES. Come get info about Summerstack as well as Museum summer Art classes teaching everything from Color Theory to the mystery of perspective and drawing from life. Announcement and reading of our youth production at 3pm.
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Book Reading: Caste – The Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson
Katie Whitehead will be discussing this book during the next Duke University Truth Racial Healing and Transformation group meeting via Zoom on Tuesday June 8th at 6:30pm.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER; OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK; NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONG LIST. "An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far."—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.
Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more.
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WANDERLOVE NOTES for Community Partners
All the DMFAH community partners knitted panels will be transported from the museum to the new Pop-up Gallery on Craghead Street next to Mucho’s Restaurant in the Month of June.
This happens in preparation of the June 27-July 3 WANDERLOVE: A Stitch in Time - Riverwalk Installation Dates.
Please make sure you drop off all completed work to the Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History. The Fiber Lab Workshops will continue through June on Wednesday and Friday Mornings from 10pm -12pm. We want to make sure that all the last threads are tied together, that your panel is labeled, and that you have your Craghead Street Pop-up Gallery box for transportation. So if you do not come to Fiber Lab to Stitch, come to fiber lab to put labels on your work. It is important that EVERYBODY who participated in this event get a tag. All the Community Labor needs to be highlighted. Thank You for being part of the WANDERLOVE project, and for making us finish up all for a spectacular show of color in the river District on July 4th.
Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions about WANDERLOVE at info@danvillemuseum.org or phone us at 434.793.5648
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Migrant Mother, Nipoma, California, 1936 |
“One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.” Dorothea Lange
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Remembering Dorothea Lange |
May 26 is the birthday of documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1895. She contracted polio when she was seven and developed a permanent limp as a result. When she was 12 her father abandoned the family, so she dropped her middle name and adopted her mother’s maiden name. She studied photography at Columbia University, and then in 1918 she began to travel, selling her photographs as she went. She ran out of money by the time she got to San Francisco so she settled there, opened a photography studio, and made a good living shooting portraits of the Bay Area’s upper class.
She began taking photographs of men on breadlines, striking workers, and the homeless during the Great Depression to call attention to their plight, and she did indeed attract the attention of other local photographers. She was hired by the Resettlement Administration, which would later become the Farm Security Administration, to document the displacement of American farmers during the Dust Bowl years, and it’s her photo, “Migrant Mother, Nipoma, California, 1936” that is her most famous. Her camera gave us a vivid visual memory of the Great Depression even if we weren’t around to experience it.
She was hired by the War Relocation Authority during World War II to document the internment of Japanese Americans, but when she photographed Japanese-American children saying the Pledge of Allegiance shortly before they were sent to the camps, the Army felt the photographs were too critical of U.S. policy and they were impounded.
She said,
( A Writers Almanac, May 26, 2021)
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