Sculptures, photographs on display at CAM Green, June 18 to July 30

Brad Story Anhinga, 2011. Wood, Epoxy, Fiberglass and Found Objects. Collection of Mollie and John Byrnes.

GLOUCESTER, MASS. (June 2021) – Drawing inspiration from the vast Great Marsh, Essex sculptor Brad Story and Ipswich photographer Dorothy Kerper Monnelly are showcasing works in a special exhibition at the Janet & William Ellery James Center at Cape Ann Museum Green from June 18 to July 30. Each artist has been inspired by the natural beauty of the surroundings on the North Shore and in particular The Great Marsh which extends from Cape Ann up to the New Hampshire border.

“The sculptures and photographs by each artist are particularly striking as they reflect the genuine beauty of our local landscape,” said Cape Ann Museum Director Oliver Barker. “As we celebrate the opening of our new CAM Green campus, they are well suited as our featured artists in this setting, melding historic buildings, contemporary art, and bucolic pastures. Both elevate the region’s natural beauty to an artform.”

Barker said this is the first of three exhibitions and related programming that will safely engage the community during the lingering pandemic and make use of the open space at CAM Green. As of June 18, the campus will be open Thursday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. and Sunday 1:00 – 4:00 p.m. Admission is free. 

Brad Story is a native of Essex and lives and works on the edge of The Great Marsh. After graduating from college in 1969, he returned home to work with his father, Dana Story, in the family shipyard. The Storys have been building boats in Essex since the 1660s. After 27 years of working in the boat yard, Story turned to designing and building three-dimensional works of art that combine his fascination with airplanes, birds, and boat building. Using nature as his point of departure and materials such as wood and fiberglass, he creates sculptures that capture imaginations and lift spirits. As one critic observed, his works “conjure scenes from the Daedalus’ feather-and-wax myth to Leonardo’s drawings for an ornithopter, to the one-man gliders constructed by Otto Lilienthal in the 1890s.”

Dorothy Kerper Monnelly. Salt Marsh Island, Clouds Ipswich, MA – May, 2001. Archival Silver Gelatin Print from a 4×5 Negative.

Dorothy Kerper Monnelly has been photographing in black and white for decades. Both fascinated and inspired by the 20,000-acre Great Marsh, it was the subject of her 2006 book, “Between Lane and Sea: The Great Marsh,” which was republished in 2020. Over the course of her career, Monnelly’s photographs have been celebrated by conservation groups, and her large-scale silver gelatin prints are in the collections of several museums including the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.

In mid-September, the Museum will host another Great Marsh-related exhibition at the Pleasant Street campus. Two paintings of the marsh  by Martin Johnson Heade (1819 – 1904) will be juxtaposed alongside works by photographer, Martha Hale Harvey (1863 – 1949), whose glass plate negatives belong to the Museum.

The Dorothy Kerper Monnelly, Brad Story, and the Great Marsh exhibition will include two virtual lectures. In response to the continued limits on large indoor gatherings, the Museum continues to offer gallery talks online with the CAM Virtual Lecture Series. These regular online events—lectures, discussions, presentations, gallery tours, artists talks and more—offer visitors near and far the chance to engage deeply with the Museum’s extensive collection from the safety home. In person tickets are free for CAM members or $10 for the general public. The lectures will be live streamed for free on Facebook and Vimeo.

Thursday, June 24 at 1:00 pm

Photographing The Great Marsh

With Dorothy Kerper Monnelly and Doug Stewart

Author, Ipswich resident and Museum docent Doug Stewart will sit down with photographer Dorothy Kerper Monnelly to discuss her photographs of The Great Marsh. Their conversation will cover the inspiration and process behind her black and white photographs and what they reveal about the everchanging landscape of the marsh. This virtual event will be streamed online via Facebook and Vimeo.

Thursday, July 8 at 2:00 pm

From Boats to Birds, A Sculptors Journey

With Brad Story and Harold Burnham

Join CAM for a conversation between sculptor Brad Story and Harold Burnham, a master boat designer, shipwright and sailmaker. In this conversation, Story and Burnham will explore the relationship between ships and sculptures and how they’re tied to Cape Ann.

LINK TO HIGH RES IMAGES: https://www.dropbox.com/t/eCTD4VXVETjNJeHB

For more information about the Museum, its programs, exhibits, and collections, visit www.capeannmuseum.org.

The Cape Ann Museum, founded in 1875, exists to preserve and celebrate the history and culture of the area and to keep it relevant to today’s audiences. Spanning 44,000 square feet, the Museum is one of the major cultural institutions on Boston’s North Shore welcoming more than 25,000 local, national and international visitors each year to its exhibitions and programs. In addition to fine art, the Museum’s collections include decorative art, textiles, artifacts from the maritime and granite industries, three historic homes, a Library & Archives and a sculpture park in the heart of downtown Gloucester.

In Summer 2021, the Museum will officially open the 12,000 square foot Janet & William Ellery James Center at the Cape Ann Museum Green. The campus includes three historic buildings – the White-Ellery House (1710), the recently acquired Babson-Alling House (c.1740), and an adjacent barn (c.1740), all located on the site at the intersection of Washington and Poplar Streets in Gloucester.   Starting on June 18, the CAM Green will be open Thursday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. and Sunday 1:00 – 4:00 pm. Admission is free.  

The Cape Ann Museum is located at 27 Pleasant Street in Gloucester. Due to the ongoing Covid-19 situation, operating hours have been reduced to better protect the safety and well-being of visitors, staff, and volunteers. The Museum is currently open Thursday through Sunday, 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. As of June 1, 2021 the Museum at Pleasant Street will be resuming pre-COVID operating hours, Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Sunday  1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Timed tickets are required for all visitors at this time and can be reserved online at www.camuseum.eventbrite.com. Admission is $12.00 adults, $10.00 Cape Ann residents, seniors and students. Youth (under 18) and Museum members are free. Cape Ann residents can visit for free on the second Saturday of each month. For more information please call (978)283-0455 x110 or visit www.capeannmuseum.org.   For a detailed media fact sheet please visit www.capeannmuseum.org/press

GLOUCESTER, MASS. (June 2021) – The Cape Ann Museum is pleased to announce the generous donation of over one million photos from the vast and historically significant archive of the Gloucester Daily Times by North of Boston Media Group. This important local photo collection of Cape Ann events, people, and historic moments dates from 1980 to 2005 and will be housed at the Museum’s Library & Archives collections.

“This is an extraordinary repository of photography capturing Cape Ann’s illustrious history, and it shows how irreplaceable local journalism is in chronicling our communities,” said Oliver Barker, the Museum’s Director. “We cannot thank the Gloucester Daily Times and North of Boston Media Group enough for recognizing the historic value of their photography over the years and understanding why it is so vital to protect and preserve these images in perpetuity.”

The Gloucester Daily Times was founded in 1888 and has been documenting the region’s activities ever since. An award-winning newspaper, the photographers who captured these images are well known and produced exceptional work including Amy Sweeney, Cristin Gisler Bradley, Paul Bilodeau, Josh Reynolds, Mike Dean, and Bart Piscitello.

“This is a wonderful opportunity for us to permanently archive our photo collection from the Gloucester Daily Times at the Cape Ann Museum,” said Times Editor David Olson. “Local journalism captures the important moments of communities, and we’re glad to ensure access to these images – some award-winning, some historic, some simply relatable – for future generations on Cape Ann. It’s also important for Times journalists to know their work matters as a chronicle of history. Everyone benefits from this arrangement – the Times, the Museum, and our community.”

The collection is primarily centered around photographic negatives on 35mm film and digital images on compact disks and memory cards. Also included are photographic prints from earlier decades as well as the vast newspaper clipping “morgue” which gives unique insight into 20^th century newspaper journalism. As is the case with all photograph collections in the CAM Library & Archives’ care, it will be fully accessible and available to researchers. The Times retains its rights to the images.

Digitizing select images has already begun, and the Museum will be integrating many of these into upcoming exhibits, through future issues of its online periodical, CAM Connects, and in 2023 will be hosting a large scale exhibition at the Janet & William Ellery James Center at the Cape Ann Museum Green looking at over three decades of Gloucester Daily Times photojournalism. For now, the collection is being stored, preserved, and categorized at the climate-controlled James Center.

The collection holds many familiar images from full front-page photos of historic times on Cape Ann to picturesque feature photos to game-winning moments by young athletes. Trenton Carls, the Museum’s Librarian & Archivist, cites the incredible reach of the collection as its most exciting aspect: “Many photograph collections that come to the Museum are usually very specific in scope, covering a certain event, by a specific photographer, or a certain time period. With this expansive collection, the Museum will be able to share the stories of an entire generation of people and almost three decades worth of events and moments from our community.”

The Cape Ann Museum, founded in 1875, exists to preserve and celebrate the history and culture of the area and to keep it relevant to today’s audiences. Spanning 44,000 square feet, the Museum is one of the major cultural institutions on Boston’s North Shore welcoming more than 25,000 local, national and international visitors each year to its exhibitions and programs. In addition to fine art, the Museum’s collections include decorative art, textiles, artifacts from the maritime and granite industries, three historic homes, a Library & Archives and a sculpture park in the heart of downtown Gloucester. In Summer 2021, the Museum will officially open the 12,000 square foot Janet & William Ellery James Center at the Cape Ann Museum Green. The campus also includes three historic buildings – the White Ellery House (1710), the recently acquired Babson-Alling House (c.1740), an adjacent Barn (c. 1740), all located on the site at the intersection of Washington and Poplar Streets in Gloucester.   Starting on June 18, 2021, the CAM Green will be open Thursday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. and Sunday 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 pm.

The Cape Ann Museum is located at 27 Pleasant Street in Gloucester and is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m and Sunday,  1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Timed tickets are recommended for all visitors at this time and can be reserved online at www.camuseum.eventbrite.com. Admission is $12.00 adults, $10.00 Cape Ann residents, seniors and students. Youth (under 18) and Museum members are free. Cape Ann residents can visit for free on the second Saturday of each month. For more information please call (978)283-0455 x110 or visit www.capeannmuseum.org.  

GLOUCESTER , MASS. – Gloucester Education Foundation has made a gift of $7,500 to the GHS class of 2021 to support the production costs of Senior Award Night, Senior Prom and Graduation.

“This grant is a departure from the type of projects that GEF normally funds in our schools,” said Aria McElhenny, GEF’s Executive Director, “but this year has been anything but normal, and thanks to our generous community, GEF can be flexible and step up to provide this one-time support where it is needed most. We’re so proud of these kids and the remarkable resilience and strength they’ve shown this past year. They deserve to be celebrated.”

Due to COVID-19 restrictions in the schools this year, opportunities for students to fundraise were limited. According to Dan Fleury, GHS Senior class advisor, the students’ best efforts fell short:
“They raised 2/3 of their goal, but still faced a shortfall. GEF’s willingness to be flexible in what they fund this year has been a tremendous support to the students and teachers of Gloucester Public Schools.”

GEF’s gift will enable every member of the Class of 2021 to attend Prom for free.

“Without an entry fee to prom, we hope to have full participation from our students, which is what this is all about,” said Dan Fleury. “We’d like to see all students break free from the burden and stress of this school year and finally enjoy the celebrations, commendations, and adulations that are synonymous with graduation season. GEF is helping us make that a reality.”

Join us on Thursday, May 27th at 7:15pm via Zoom to learn more about Gloucester Biotechnology Academy’s hands-on training program that provides young adults with the skills needed to start a career in biotech. This is a webinar, so all you have to do is log in and listen – we wont be able to see or hear you (unless you submit a question for Q&A)!

If you’re curious about the Academy’s training program, or if you’re looking for information on how to apply and be part of the Class of 2022 – all are welcome! Hear from Academy instructors, learn the basics of the program, how to apply, get a virtual tour of the training laboratory, and ask questions during a live Q&A.

You can click here to register, or see the invitation below for details. Please reach out to Ashley Destino at ashley.destino@gmgi.org with any questions.

Virtual Open House alert

Join us on Thursday, May 27th at 7:15p via Zoom to learn more about Gloucester Biotechnology Academy’s innovative, hands-on training program. Tune in to hear from Academy instructors, gain insight into program details, and information on how to apply! No need to have your camera on, all you have to do is log in and listen!

The Academy trains young adults to be entry-level lab technicians in just ten months – you can learn more about the program here.

Register for the information session via the link below, and reach out to ashley.destino@gmgi.org with any questions.

Click here to register!