Mystic, Conn. (January 28, 2020) — Mystic Seaport Museum will hold its annual Ice Festival, February 15-17. The event will be three days of winter activities in conjunction with the exhibition J.M.W. Turner: Watercolors from Tate, now on display in the Museum’s Collins Gallery.
Families are invited to enjoy games, activities, music, and entertainment throughout the Museum’s grounds:
Ice sculpture demos (Sunday and Monday)
Sock-skating rink for kids
Toy boat building
Paint-n-sip
How to make pemmican, the original survival food
A fire pit, with s’mores
Working dog demonstrations with Saint Bernards and Newfoundlands (Saturday and Sunday)
Horse-and-carriage rides (Monday)
“Resonances Boreales,” a live music concert featuring the aurora borealis in the Planetarium
The U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Bollard will berth at the Museum, weather permitting.
In conjunction with the Turner exhibition, there will be daily screenings of the feature film Mr. Turner and periods of piano music in the gallery on Sunday and Monday. The exhibition ends it run at the Museum on Sunday, February 23.
New to the festival this year is “Resonances Boreales,”a live piano performance by Canadian musician Roman Zavada set to a stunning 360-degree video of the Northern Lights projected onto the dome of the Planetarium. There will be daytime and evening performances. Daytime performances are 30 minutes long and will occur at 1 and 3 p.m. all three days of the festival. Tickets are $3 for members and $5 for non-members and can be purchased at the Planetarium starting at 10 a.m. on the day of the show.
The evening shows are 60-minute performances beginning at 7 p.m. on February 14-16. Tickets for these after-hours events are $8 for members and $10 for non-members (General admission not required for the evening shows and tickets can be purchased in advance).
General admission tickets will be valid for all three days of the Ice Festival.
Mystic Seaport Museum, founded in 1929, is the nation’s leading maritime museum. In addition to providing a multitude of immersive experiences, the Museum also houses a collection of more than two million artifacts that include more than 500 historic vessels and one of the largest collections of maritime photography. The new Thompson Exhibition Building houses a state-of-the-art gallery that currently features J.M.W. Turner: Watercolors from Tate, the most comprehensive exhibition of Turner watercolors ever displayed in the U.S. Mystic Seaport Museum is located one mile south of Exit 90 off I-95 in Mystic, CT. For more information, please visit https://mysticseaport.wpengine.com/ and follow Mystic Seaport Museum on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
Mystic, Conn. (January 7, 2020) — In conjunction with the exhibition J.M.W. Turner: Watercolors from Tate, now on display on the Museum’s Collins Gallery, Mystic Seaport Museum is hosting “Tea with Turner,” a weekly lecture series that features a lineup of prominent speakers who will explore the iconic artist’s world, including his travels, techniques, and the time in which he lived.
The “Tea with Turner” series runs every Tuesday from January 14 to February 11.
Tea and lectures will take place in the dining room at Latitude 41° Restaurant at the Museum. A traditional British afternoon tea will be served at 3:30 p.m. The talks begin at 4 p.m. Participants are encouraged to view the show beforehand (same-day admission is included for non-Museum members).
January 14: Turner’s Inhabited Landscapes
Alexis Goodin, curatorial research associate at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA, will explore the significance of the human figure in Turner’s landscapes. More than markers of scale, Turner’s figures contribute to compelling narratives that reveal social, cultural, and political concerns of Turner’s day. Goodin will discuss works in the exhibition as well as paintings in the Clark collection that reveal how Turner’s figures enrich and complicate his landscape paintings. Goodin recently curated the exhibition Turner and Constable: The Inhabited Landscape (2018-2019) and authored the accompanying booklet, Turner and Constable at the Clark (2018).
January 21: Turner and Switzerland
Constance McPhee, curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will explore Turner’s repeated visits to Switzerland, focusing on four seminal trips that he made to the area around Lucerne in the 1840s. Switzerland’s terrain and history were central to Turner’s artistic imagination, and its mountains and lakes offered him life-long inspiration. Using The Metropolitan Museum’s The Lake of Zug, 1843 as a touchstone, this talk will consider how the artist’s travel sketches offer fascinating windows into his process and supported masterful finished watercolors now regarded as highpoints of British art.
January 28: Why Turner?
Artist Ellen Harvey, who contributed to Mystic Seaport Museum’s recently published book Conversations with Turner, in connection with the current exhibition, will be discussing her own work, its relationship to J.M.W. Turner, and why she considers Turner’s work to be relevant to many issues we face today. Harvey is a British-born artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She is a 2016 recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in the Visual Arts and a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program. Her new project, Ellen Harvey and J.M.W. Turner: The Disappointed Tourist, will be opening at Turner Contemporary in the UK in the summer of 2020.
February 4: Turner and Industry
Glenn Adamson, senior scholar at the Yale Center for British Art, is a historian and curator specializing in craft and design. He will offer thoughts on Turner’s work in the context of the industrial revolution. Turner lived during one of the greatest periods of transformation in history, one with certain parallels to our own. His paintings sometimes captured the awe-inspiring power but also the trauma of these shifts.
February 11: From Mystic to New York: A Close Look at the Frick Turners with Susan Grace Galassi
After examining J.M.W. Turner’s watercolors of the 1820s on view in the Mystic Seaport Museum exhibition, Galassi will shift the subject to New York City to look in depth at two of the artist’s masterpieces in oil from the mid-1820s, both centerpieces of The Frick Collection’s West Gallery. These luminous harbors of Dieppe and Cologne reveal Turner’s preoccupation with Continental subjects following Napoleon’s defeat and the lifting of travel bans. They also showcase the artist’s technical experimentation in which he brought qualities of the watercolor medium into oil paint, arousing the ire of critics and leading to a turning point in his art. Susan Grace Galassi is curator emerita of The Frick Collection. In 2017, she was co-curator with Ian Warrell and Joanna Sheers Seidenstein of Turner’s Modern and Ancient Ports: Passages Through Time.
Tea with Turner Tickets
Afternoon tea will be served at 3:30 p.m. Talks begin at 4 p.m. Both events take place in the Latitude 41° Restaurant Dining Room at Mystic Seaport Museum.
Members: $30 per lecture, or $135 for all 5 lectures
Non-members: $35 per lecture, or $160 for all 5 lectures (includes same-day Museum admission)
Mystic Seaport Museum, founded in 1929, is the nation’s leading maritime museum. In addition to providing a multitude of immersive experiences, the Museum also houses a collection of more than two million artifacts that include more than 500 historic vessels and one of the largest collections of maritime photography. The new Thompson Exhibition Building houses a state-of-the-art gallery that currently features J.M.W. Turner: Watercolors from Tate, the most comprehensive exhibition of Turner watercolors ever displayed in the U.S. Mystic Seaport Museum is located one mile south of Exit 90 off I-95 in Mystic, CT. For more information, please visit https://mysticseaport.wpengine.com/ and follow Mystic Seaport Museum on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
SABINO steaming on the Mystic River. The plan calls for augmenting coal-fired steam with an electric motor.
Mystic Seaport Museum is exploring the possibility of adding electric propulsion to its steamboat Sabino with the installation of an electric motor and battery bank. The boat’s boiler and its original steam engine would remain in the vessel and operational. The addition of electric power would enable the vessel to operate under steam or electricity and vastly expand its capacity to provide public cruises on the Mystic River.
“In order to keep Sabino running on the Mystic River, we have determined that the highest and best solution for the vessel, both as a National Historic Landmark and as a beloved presence on the Mystic River, is to add an alternative means of propulsion to augment its historic steam power plant,” says Steve White, president of Mystic Seaport Museum.
The plan calls for state-of-the-art, batteries, motors, and controls to be installed in parallel with the existing boiler and steam plant. The Museum will retain the ability to run Sabino under steam, but add the capability to run on electric power.
The 1908-built excursion vessel Sabino has been a fixture at Mystic Seaport Museum and on the Mystic River since its arrival in 1973. Built in Maine as a passenger ferry on the Damariscotta and Kennebec Rivers, the boat served in that capacity for nearly two decades and later as a ferry in Casco Bay. It is powered by the same duplex reciprocating steam engine that was original equipment in 1908. In fact, the engine was manufactured downriver from Mystic in nearby Noank. With its nearly silent steam propulsion, a cruise down the Mystic River on Sabino is a connection to the past when small steamboats filled the nation’s coasts and harbors. The boat was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1992.
In partnership with a team of marine engineers and the U.S. Coast Guard, the Museum determined that an electric system could be installed in such a way as to fully maintain the historic operational integrity of the vessel’s original steam power plant. Sabino would continue to operate the steam plant for demonstrations and special events, but operate under electric power for daily passenger cruises. The electric motor would quietly drive the vessel’s original shaft. Batteries would be recharged overnight and between trips. Importantly, this system would provide a smoke- and soot-free operation, greatly reducing the vessel’s environmental impact in terms of carbon emissions. Other benefits include a return to a seven-day per week schedule, and reduced crewing, maintenance, and coaling expenses.
The historic status of Sabino is paramount to the Museum. The historic fabric of the boat will not be altered and the installation of the electric system would be entirely reversible.
“The expectation is the addition of electric propulsion will enable us to increase the boat’s daily passenger capacity and provide more people with the opportunity to get out on the water and enjoy a cruise on the Mystic River on a National Landmark,” says White.
