Bob Manning--art historian, artist and professor emeritus of fine arts--has been lecturing for years on the Neolithic World of Stone. In 2012, he and his wife Libby toured Ancient Anatolia, which included a visit to the Stone Circles in Gobekli Tepe in Southern Turkey. These stone circles, which were discovered in 1993 and predate Stonehenge by 6,000 years, are noted for their low- and high-relief carvings of vultures, lions, snakes, bulls, scorpions and other creatures.

 

Manning has now incorporated his experiences and insights from that trip into a new program on Neolithic stone. His lecture with slides, made possible by support from the Vermont Humanities Council, will also cover Stonehenge and other important Neolithic monuments in Britain and Ireland.

 

Manning, who lives in Ryegate, VT, has been a member of the Vermont Humanities Council's Speakers Bureau since 2001. His paintings were exhibited at AVA in 1999, when he also delivered the lecture "The Megaliths: from Galway to Stonehenge to Orkney."

 

Artist educators interested developing the skills necessary to work with children who have an incarcerated parent are invited to register for a workshop, "Community Arts Behind Bars," that takes place April 24, 2014 at the Kimball-Jenkins Carriage House in Concord, N.H.

 

Nationwide, one in 28 children has a parent behind bars. Prison's highly structured environment makes it challenging for both incarcerated parents and their children to bond through creative activities when they are able to be together during supervised visits.

 

The "Community Arts Behind Bars" workshop will train artist educators how to incorporate their own creative skills into leadership and guidance in non-traditional classroom settings. It will also touch on how to start planning a residency and begin working in corrections or juvenile justice environments.

 

Community artist Jessica Wyatt, MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, will lead the interactive workshop. Kristina Toth, director of the N.H. Department of Corrections' Family Connections Center, and Catherine O'Brian, coordinator of Arts Education Grants and Programs at the N.H. State Council on the Arts, will join Wyatt for a question and answer session.

 

There is no cost to participate in "Community Arts Behind Bars," but registration is required. Click here to learn more and to register online.

   

The Upper Valley Zen Center will host a weekend gallery of local art May 2nd and 3rd, 9 am to 9 pm, as both a promotion for local artists and as a fundraiser for the Zen Center. The gallery will be held at the Center in its location below the Main Street Museum, 58 Main Street, in White River Junction.

Upper Valley Zen Center opened in March of 2005 and has since held a schedule of Zen study and practice, led by Gendo Allyn Field, founder, a lay ordained monk and osho (teacher) in the Rinzai Zen tradition. Zen is Buddhist practice. It is a discipline of meditation practice and insight with attention to the stuff of everyday life. It is a tradition long associated with the arts in Asia. The joining of Zen and Art in this local event, supporting both, has ancient precedent.

"Art is meditation," says Gendo. "A work of art expresses an intuition, deeper than thought. It moves the viewer to touch that place in themselves. Zen points to that expression in all areas of life." Local artists contributing the gallery include: Matt Brown, Julie Puttgen, Herb Ferris, Richard Wilson, Jenny-lynn Hall, Ken Blaisdell, Stacy Hopkins, Lillian Shen, and many more.