The first POW! WOW! Worcester in 2016 focused mainly on downtown Worcester, as international and local artists painted murals on walls at places such as the DCU Center, Mechanics Hall, the Palladium and the YWCA.

It made a lasting impression — for one thing, you can still see them.

For its fourth installment, POW! WOW! Worcester 2019, made a mark while engaging with residents at the Great Brook Valley public housing complex.

Four murals were painted on walls of the Great Brook Valley apartment buildings as well as one at Edward M. Kennedy Community Health Center on Tacoma Street. Also, murals will be painted on walls and open spaces at nearby schools, including Clark Street School, Lincoln Street School and Burncoat Middle School. Besides the murals, artists will put on workshops and activities with youth and adult Great Brook Valley residents.

Great Brook Valley has 1,000 apartments, with over 3,000 individuals of whom about 1,200 are children.

“There’s excitement,” said Alec Corrales, executive director of the Worcester Housing Authority, which runs the apartments at Great Brook Valley. “I’m excited to see what the murals look like.”

Corrales said that, meeting with Great Brook Valley residents, “what I kept hearing, a lot of folks have had an opportunity to see the murals throughout the city. There were a lot of ideas about what murals should include.” POW! WOW! Worcester welcomed their ideas, Corrales said. “I’m looking forward to seeing how the residents respond to the murals.”

With that, “it’s not just about a couple of murals but engaging the community,” Corrales said.

“I hope that this continues. It’s helping put Worcester on the map.”

Video by Mikey Inouye.

The Worcester Art Museum is pleased to present the 2020 Central MA Regional Youth Art Month Exhibit. Youth Art Month is a national celebration endorsed by Council for Art Education, the National Art Education Association, and the Massachusetts Art Education Association, and is proudly hosted by the Worcester Art Museum.

This annual celebration emphasizes the value of art education for all children and encourages support for quality art programs in public and private schools. This special digital video of the exhibit features each of the 461 artworks from Massachusetts students in grades K-12 that were put on display in the Higgins Education Wing of the Worcester Art Museum .

We would like to recognize the efforts of the wonderful young artists and the dedication that their teachers show in annually volunteering their time to coordinate this exhibition. The theme for 2020 was Take a Journey through Art, and I invite you to do just that through this video. The Museum’s Pick Winners, normally announced at the Exhibition Celebration, will be announced via the Worcester Art Museum’s Facebook page on March 22nd.

Please enjoy.

https://www.worcesterart.org/

Recorded Live at The White Eagle, Worcester, MA - January 25, 2020

May 21st, 2019 - "Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century"

Scholars have explored how nineteenth-century scrapbooks and friendship albums circulated among free black women in the North to showcase their middle-class status and close networks. However, little is known about how black girls participated in this sentimental practice. In this lecture, Nazera Sadiq Wright will discuss how histories of black girlhood are often “buried” in literary genres less likely to be studied. Recovering these histories involves using types of literature that move beyond the bound book. To locate evidence of their lives, she explores the often uncatalogued signatures and inscriptions written in nineteenth-century black girls’ autograph albums to reveal the wide-ranging impact that early friendships, alliances, and associations had on black girls’ intellectual and political development. For example, autograph albums owned by Sallie and Miranda Venning, two sisters from a middle-class African American family in Philadelphia, reveal that in their youthful years, the Venning girls were building alliances that would connect them to a black elite. Through such “unexpected spaces” as autograph albums, Wright will discuss how it is possible to recover buried histories of black girlhood in the nineteenth century.

Nazera Sadiq Wright is an associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky. Her book, Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (2016), won the 2018 Children’s Literature Association’s Honor Book Award for Outstanding Book of Literary Criticism. Her research is supported by the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. During 2017–18, she was in residence at the Library Company of Philadelphia as a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellow and an Andrew W. Mellon Program in African American History Fellow to advance her second book on the influence of libraries on the literary careers of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American women writers.

How staff and volunteers made beautiful flower lights in five easy steps.

http://www.secretcityinteractive.info

Built in 1911 of white glazed terracotta, Union Station is a powerful symbol of Worcester at the height of its industrial prosperity. This Beaux Arts Classical style building is modeled after the ancient Basilica of Maxentius in Rome, but with the addition of two ornate baroque-style towers that break the skyline as they rise high above the main facade. Inside, the station's grand hall is one of the city's most dramatic interior spaces – with a soaring vaulted ceiling, stained glass skylights, ornate plasterwork, and marble trim.

Today’s station replaced a very handsome Victorian Gothic style Union Station, opened in 1875, which stood nearby on Washington Square. With ground-level tracks, that station became obsolete in the early 20th century when it became necessary to elevate the tracks to avoid traffic problems. Special engineering was required to construct the foundation for the new building because underneath it ran the Blackstone Canal. The old station was demolished, but its tall stone tower was left standing until it was removed in the late 1950s for the construction of Interstate 290.

After World War II, with the increasing use of the automobile, fewer and fewer people relied on train travel. Gradually, the station fell into disuse and was closed in 1972. By the 1990s, Union Station was an abandoned ruin – its roof open to the rain. The stained glass ceiling fell in and seedling trees grew up through cracks in the masonry. But, public sentiment called for its preservation. Under the auspices of the Worcester Redevelopment Authority, the station interior was completely rebuilt. The glazed terracotta exterior was cleaned and repaired. New towers were built to reproduce the originals. Now of fiberglass, they are strong and light enough to withstand the vibrations caused by passing trains. In July of 2000, after a $32 million restoration, the station reclaimed its role as the city's key transportation hub – and one of Worcester's grandest buildings.

Thanks to Susan Ceccacci of Preservation Worcester for this content.

http://www.preservationworcester.org/

Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/secretcityworcester

The Worcester Art Museum is pleased to present the 2020 Central MA Regional Youth Art Month Exhibit. Youth Art Month is a national celebration endorsed by Council for Art Education, the National Art Education Association, and the Massachusetts Art Education Association, and is proudly hosted by the Worcester Art Museum.

This annual celebration emphasizes the value of art education for all children and encourages support for quality art programs in public and private schools. This special digital video of the exhibit features each of the 461 artworks from Massachusetts students in grades K-12 that were put on display in the Higgins Education Wing of the Worcester Art Museum .

We would like to recognize the efforts of the wonderful young artists and the dedication that their teachers show in annually volunteering their time to coordinate this exhibition. The theme for 2020 was Take a Journey through Art, and I invite you to do just that through this video. The Museum’s Pick Winners, normally announced at the Exhibition Celebration, will be announced via the Worcester Art Museum’s Facebook page on March 22nd.

Please enjoy.

https://www.worcesterart.org/

Mauro Pasquale from WCCA TV interviews The Hanover Theatre's CEO and president Troy Siebels on Soapbox.