Calendar of Events

Tour the exhibition Alexander Calder: Collaborative Creations with a docent and learn how artists’ combined efforts produce unique textiles. Be sure to lend your finishing touch to our community rug. Design a card using a variety of textures to give to someone you love. Sign up for an Eyes on Art Family Tour at 12:15pm. Admission is free noon–2pm.

Drop in for an informal performance by Chia-Yu Joy Lu, director of the Chinese music ensembles at Wesleyan University and Smith College, and Flora Gu, Wesleyan University student musician, featuring the erhu (Chinese two-string fiddle) and guzheng (Chinese 21-string zither). As you listen, view artworks from East Asia in the Wadsworth’s collection, including a porcelain “Vault of Heaven” vase dating to the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty. Free with admission.

Presented with support from The Saunders Foundation Music Endowment at the Wadsworth Atheneum.

”Vault of Heaven” vase (tianqiu ping), Qing Dynasty, Qianlong period (1736–95). Porcelain. Bequest of Elisha E. Hilliard, 1951.321

Tour the exhibition I Am Seen… and learn about the studio practices of the African American photographers of Frederick Douglass’s era. View a daguerreotype demonstration and observe how these one-of-a-kind images are created. Afterward, design a portrait and frame that captures your unique personality. Don’t forget to join our friends across the street at Center Church for additional family programming, including a performance by Nathan M. Richardson, renowned interpreter of Frederick Douglass. Find the Ice Cream for a Dream truck for free ice cream parked outside the museum while supplies last. Admission is free from noon–2pm.

Presented in collaboration with Center Church. 

Join trumpet player and composer Haneef Nelson, the Greater Hartford Arts Council’s 2023 Jazz Activation Fellow, for an informal performance with the Birth of the Cool Ensemble led by Drake Smith. While you listen, view Bob Thompson’s monumental painting Garden of Music (1960), which features depictions of Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, and other jazz legends that inspired Thompson’s work. Free.

Presented with support from the Greater Hartford Arts Council and the Saunders Foundation Music Endowment at the Wadsworth Atheneum

Image: Bob Thompson, Garden of Music, 1960. Oil on canvas. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1987.4

Discover how MATRIX artist Lisa Alvarado creates meditative, patterned works that echo non-Western traditions of abstraction. Use sand to design a colorful geometric configuration. Work alongside artist and graphic designer Lindaluz Carrillo to develop a large-scale background that emphasizes community. Enjoy a dance performance from Spectrum in Motion. Find the Ice Cream for a Dream truck, parked outside the museum from noon to 2pm, for free ice cream while supplies last.

Image courtesy of Lindaluz Carrillo.

Celebrate Latine heritage and culture with art making, music, and performances. Work alongside teaching artists from Bomba De Aqui in a vejigante mask-making workshop. Watch Mexican folkloric dancer Tere Luna perform in collaboration with Mariachi Mexico Antiguo. Then participate in an interactive dance presentation by Movimiento Cultural Afro-Continental and learn the history of Bomba, an Afro-Puerto Rican style of music and dance. Admission is free noon–2pm.

Please note: The Hartford Marathon runs on October 14. Check hartfordmarathon.com for best access to downtown Hartford, parking bans, and road closures.

5pm gallery viewing, 6pm lecture

Meissen, the oldest porcelain manufactory in Europe, has produced hard-paste porcelain in Germany since the early eighteenth century. Vanessa Sigalas, the Wadsworth’s David W. Dangremond Associate Curator for Collections Research and author of the book All Walks of Life: A Journey with The Alan Shimmerman Collection (Arnoldsche Verlagsanstalt, 2023), shares how her recent research sheds light on the creation, production, and distribution of Meissen porcelain. Join us in the galleries before the lecture to view Meissen figures from the Wadsworth’s collection. Free with reservations encouraged.

Presented in partnership with the Design and Decorative Arts Council and the Auerbach Library Associates at the Wadsworth Atheneum.

2pm reception, 3–5pm film and panel

Join us for the premiere of Voices of Veterans: Buffalo Soldiers and Beyond, a film produced by The Amistad Center for Art & Culture that highlights the legacy of the US Army regiment comprised mainly of Black Americans. The film examines objects from The Amistad’s permanent collection and surveys the contributions of African American military members though guided interviews with veterans. A reception to celebrate veterans living in Hartford precedes the film and a panel discussion with speakers including oral historian Nild Sansone follows. Free.

Image: Still from Voices of Veterans during interview with Deacon Arthur Miller.

Drop in as regional musicians create a sound map of our city throughout the galleries with a special recreation of the 1970 musical composition (Hartford) Memory Space by Alvin Lucier (1931–2021), one of the most influential American composers of the last hundred years, best known for his works that explore the properties of sound and how we perceive them. (Hartford) Memory Space premiered at Hartford Art School, inviting musicians to recreate the sounds they heard while out in the city. In conjunction with the exhibition Rules & Repetition. Free with admission.

Performances by Joan La Barbara, The Daxophone Consort (Daniel Fishkin, Cleek Schrey, and Ron Shalom), Tongue Depressor (Henry Birdsey and Zach Rowden), Trevor Saint, Ronald Kuivila, Emerson Jenisch, and Sam Boston.

Presented in partnership with Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts and Hartford Art School at University of Hartford with support from the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation Fund at the Wadsworth Atheneum.

Image: Contact sheet from the Museum Archives Photograph Collection documenting Alvin Lucier’s performance of Music for Solo Performer (1965) at the Wadsworth Atheneum on April 23, 1996, part of an “Evening Lecture Series” on performance art.