You are currently browsing greenbeltcurator’s articles.
Greenbelt's Labor Day Festival is a decades-long tradition. Festival-goers in the late 1950s gather around a booth in this photograph from the Museum's archives. Photograph by Paul Kasko.
Labor Day is a big deal in Greenbelt! Crowds start arriving Friday evening for carnival rides, booths selling hot dogs and funnel cakes, music and activities, and, of course, the parade on Labor Day itself. The town first began having a town festival over the Labor Day weekend in 1939, and although the Labor Day Festival as we know it today did not really begin (following WWII) until 1955, it has been going strong ever since. The Museum has been preparing for the big weekend for months now and is pleased to offer something new this year – free walking tours of the historic area of Greenbelt!
Join the Greenbelt Museum’s, Stephen Oetken, for a walking tour of historic Greenbelt. Visit and learn about all of the iconic sites including the Greenbelt Community Center and Roosevelt Center.
Greenbelt is best viewed from its interior walkways, join the Museum for free walking tours Labor Day weekend. Photograph by Megan Searing Young.
Travel the winding interior walkways to view our significant brick, block and frame homes. These tours are part of a pilot program and may be offered on some upcoming Sundays in the fall and spring (for a fee). Labor Day weekend tours are free, but require a ticket as space is limited. Tickets are available on a first come, first served basis at the Greenbelt Museum’s table on Information Day, Saturday September 3 in the RooseveltCenter, from 9:30 to 4pm. Walking tours will be given on Sunday, September 4 at 10 am and Monday, September 5 at 3pm.
Green from the Start t-shirts are for sale at the Museum house, come by to pick one up!
Also at the Greenbelt Museum’s table at Information Day in Roosevelt Center, on Saturday, September 3, we will be screening our new orientation film, come by and take a look. We will also offer a watercolor activity for kids. The Museum’s historic house will be open for free walk-throughs on Sunday, September 4, from 1-5pm and from 12-3pm on Monday immediately following the parade and the Museum exhibition, Green from the Start: A History of Gardening Greenbelt, is also on display in the Community Center.
We have also just completed the latest edition of the Museum newsletter, the Utopian. To access it, please click here Summer 2011 Greenbelt Museum Utopian
We hope to see you this weekend!
10B Crescent, the Greenbelt Museum's historic house will be closed on Sunday, August 28 as Hurricane Irene approaches.
Please note: the Greenbelt Museum’s historic house at 10B Crescent Road will be closed this Sunday, August 28. Normally, the house is open for tours on Sundays from 1pm to 5pm, but based on current predictions of Hurricane Irene’s path, we feel it is safer to keep the Museum closed. Today we are also in the process of removing some of the most valuable and fragile artifacts to keep them safe.
The Maryland Department of Planning’s Maryland Historical Trust sent out an email reminder yesterday urging cultural institutions to start assessing and preparing their sites, and we are heeding their advice. Their website features a hurricane preparedness and disaster recovery page with many useful links. http://mht.maryland.gov/hurricane.html
The Maryland Historical Trust site also has been collecting reports of damage to older and historic buildings in Maryland as a result of Tuesday’s earthquake, click http://mht.maryland.gov/earthquake.html for more information. Thankfully, here, neither the museum house nor the collections storage area in the Community Center were harmed in the earthquake.
The Museum house will be open for tours next Sunday, September 4, from 1pm to 5pm and immediately following the parade on Monday, September 5, from 12pm to 3pm. On both days, tours are free! The Friends of the Greenbelt Museum will also have a table at Information Day, stop by and say hello!
Friends of the Greenbelt Museum Preservation Evening
FOGM’s Preservation Evening, held July 19, both educated and entertained an audience of approximately 40 people who braved record-breaking heat to hear award-winning historic preservationist, Michael Leventhal, speak about the importance of Greenbelt’s historic homes. Leventhal spoke about the unique responsibilities of stewardship of historic properties and the importance of community discussion when major changes are being contemplated. Following his talk, attendees enjoyed cookies and lemonade by lantern light and walked through the Museum’s historic house. Thanks to everyone who attended and who helped to make the event a success!
Join FOGM for a Preservation Evening! In conjunction with the exhibition, Green from the Start: A History of Gardening in Greenbelt, the Museum has held a series lectures which featured topics related to gardening. The final event in our series, A Preservation Evening, will combine an old-fashioned garden party with an informative talk by historic preservationist Michael Leventhal about the architectural significance of the Museum’s historic cinderblock house. Join us at 7pm for this informal and educational evening. Parking is available across the street behind the public library.
Tuesday, July 19, 7pm Sip lemonade by lantern light while learning about the historic fabric of our community!
Our special guest will be historic preservationist Michael Leventhal, a winner of the 2011 Secretary of the Interior Historic Preservation Awards, recognizing outstanding contributions to the preservation of historic places.
"Provide for the Common Defense" bas relief by Lenore Thomas, 1937, Greenbelt, MD
…but long before it was established as such by the City of Greenbelt and the Prince George’s County Peace & Justice Coalition , Lenore Thomas, the sculptor whose work adorns the Greenbelt Community Center (formerly Center School) and Roosevelt Center, was making a statement about peace through her art. Thomas, who was employed by the Resettlement Administration, the Pubilc Works Administration and later by the Farm Security Administration, was allowed to choose her subject matter. 
For Center School, she chose to create bas reliefs which illustrate the preamble to the United States constitution, and one relief in particular bears a closer look.
“Provide for the Common Defense,” is panel comprised of a farming family to the left and soldiers to the right. The family includes a child, a mother holding a babe in arms, and a father whose shoulder abuts a line of stark, streamlined soldiers who stand in formation with faces barely visible, their mouths unseen, obscured and silenced by the guns they carry. The farm family significantly occupies more space within the frame, and, according to Thomas, the family group is “stalwart in their resistance to the robot-like group of marching soldiers. The crosses to the right of the soldiers symbolize the death left behind them.” This panel was supposed to symbolize “the resistance of the people to war.”
Though much more research needs to be done to determine Thomas’ political leanings, and the nature of her pacifism, the fact that she sculpted this panel on the eve of World War II, before anyone could imagine the devestation and loss of life that would result is remarkable.
Stay tuned for more information on Lenore Thomas, as the Museum is planning an exhibition about her work to open in 2014. Also, be sure to look for products featuring her work which are being developed by Greenbelt’s 75th Anniversary Committee and which will be sold to raise funds for the celebration.
Kitchen at 10B Crescent
Come to the Greenbelt Museum’s historic house at 10B Crescent Road on June 5th to celebrate Greenbelt Day weekend! Take a free tour of the Museum house which will have special hands-on items on display in each room, sip lemonade, and reflect on everything that makes Greenbelt great! Sunday, June 6, 2011 from 1-5pm. Free admission.
A young visitor shows off the May bouquet he made at last year's spring event.
Stop by the Greenbelt Museum’s historic house at 10B Crescent Road on May 1 to welcome Spring! Take a free tour of the Museum house. Get a sneak peek at this season’s Victory Garden. (Our volunteer garden experts, John Henry Jones and Jim Fatteleh have planted radishes and other early crops.)
Vintage May basket
Buy a brand new Green from the Start exhibition t-shirt or poster and support the museum’s fundraising efforts. Kids can plant a seed to take home in an section egg carton which can go right in the ground, or make a May basket using repurposed silk flowers and paper plates. There will also be a cake walk for kids featuring cupcakes instead of full-size cakes. The event is free, so bring friends!
An example of a potager, or kitchen garden. Courtesy Cynthia Brown.
We are honored to welcome Cynthia A. Brown, the Smithsonian Gardens’ Education Specialist and Manager of Collections and Education, as the speaker for the next Museum lecture, Designing an Urban Potager, scheduled for April 19, 2011 in the Greenbelt Community Center. According to Ms. Brown, ”a traditional French kitchen garden – potager – mingles vegetables, fruits, flowers and herbs to make the function of providing food for the table aesthetically pleasing. An urban potager uses every inch of available space, growing edibles and ornamentals on balconies, patios, porches and rooftops.” Join us to hear how Ms. Brown will eliminate excuses for excluding edibles with suggestions on what edibles to grow, unusual ways to grow them and how to do it all with style!
Ms. Brown is a regular contributor to Washington Gardener magazine and the Washington Post blog AllWeCanEat/Groundworks. She is a frequent speaker at many venues and enjoys entertaining the public with her gardening trials and tribulations. Ms. Brown wasn’t always an expert. She started gardening because she loves to cook and was frustrated at the inability to purchase the special herbs and vegetables mentioned in cookbooks and cooking magazines. She believes that every garden should be a mix of ornamentals and edibles for a truly gourmet garden!
The Friends of the Greenbelt Museum Annual Meeting will begin at 7pm immediately prior to the lecture. Please join us.
This Greenbelt Museum lecture is offered in conjunction with our exhibit, Green from the Start: A History of Gardening in Greenbelt.
Victory Garden of Tomorrow poster by J. Wertheim
Posters created by Portland, Oregon artist, Joe Wirtheim, have been featured in the the Greenbelt Museum’s current exhibition, Green from the Start: A History of Gardening in Greenbelt, since its opening in July 2010. Imagine our surprise to find the posters in the pages of this month’s Martha Stewart Living magazine, an issue devoted to gardening!
Museum exhibition poster designed by Joe Parisi
Wirtheim’s posters, a part of his Victory Garden of Tomorrow series, are inspired by the World War II era posters produced by the federal government which encouraged Americans on the home front to plant victory gardens, can the vegetables produced, and conserve their resources. According to the artist, ”The Victory Garden of Tomorrow is a self-commissioned poster campaign designed to channel the bold energy of historical poster propaganda. It is committed to civic innovation and social progress– better food, better gardens, better cities. It is artful advocacy for the modern homefront.”
Museum's "Green from the Start" exhibition featuring Victory Garden of Tomorrow posters.
Greenbelt Museum Director and Curator, Megan Searing Young, thought the posters complemented perfectly the themes of the Museum’s exhibition which explore the ways that Greenbelt’s history has always been intertwined with gardening – from it’s construction in 1937 which was based on the principles of garden city planning, to its active (and original) allotment gardens, straight through to its thriving farmer’s market today. She purchased copies of some of the posters through Wirtheim’s Etsy shop and the artist graciously sent several more, all of which have been displayed in the exhibition. For more information about the Victory Garden of Tomorrow series, visit http://victorygardenoftomorrow.com/
The exhibition poster for Green from the Start is also based on a war-time poster produced by WPA artist Hubert Morley. The Museum’s version, which was designed by Joe Parisi and incorporates work from local artist Dan Kennedy, is for sale through the Museum’s gift shop. Green from the Start: A History of Gardening in Greenbelt was made possible through the support of Prince George’s County Council member Ingrid Turner, The Greenbelt Community Foundation, the City of Greenbelt, and the Friends of the Greenbelt Museum. It will be on display through 2011.
http://greenbelt.patch.com/articles/greenbelt-museum-offers-a-walk-through-our-history#video-4750642
View this short video to take a quick tour of the Greenbelt Musuem’s historic house at 10B Crescent Road. The short film, made by Bailey Henneberg for her column “P Patch – Pioneers, Peeves and Passions,” on Patch.com offers viewers a taste of what they’ll see when they come by for a visit. The Museum’s house, located at 10B Crescent Road, which was open by appointment only in January, resumes normal Sunday hours (1pm-5pm) on February 6th. We hope you’ll drop by for your own guided tour led by one of the Museum’s excellent docents.
The famous dancer, Sally Rand, posing with a heart. Rand danced at both the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Fair and the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco in 1939 and 1940.
Please note: This Valentine’s Day program has been cancelled. We apologize for any inconvenience. We do plan to offer the tour again in 2012. For Valentine’s Day, the Museum is trying something new, so grab your sweetie (or a friend!) and come to a program at the Greenbelt Museum: “A Romantic Evening Tour for Sweethearts.” Join us on Monday, February 14 at 7pm at the Greenbelt Museum’s historic house, 10-B Crescent Road.
Take in vintage Valentine’s Day decorations, learn a bit about romance circa 1937, and hear a couple of great Greenbelt love stories. $10 per person, space is extremely limited. RSVP at 240-542-2064 by February 12. Light refreshments will be served.
Vintage Valentine's Day decorations at 10B Crescent
