Wednesday, June 11, 2008

WRAP (World Reclamation Art Project)
International Fiber Collaborative

Price: Free
2301 E. Colvin St.
(corner of Nottingham), Syracuse

Artist Jennifer Marsh and participants from all over the world have crocheted, knitted, stitched, patched, or collaged 3-foot square fiber panels that express concern about the world's extreme dependency on oil. The panels have been sewn together to completely cover an abandoned gas station.

For more information, visit internationalfibercollaborative.com.

Onondaga Art Guild Spring Show

Price: Free
Hospice of Central New York
990 Seventh North St., Liverpool

For more information, phone 315-449-2240.

The Materials of Color: Paintings by Italian artist Maria Grazia Facchinetti
Downtown Writer's Center

Price: Free
YMCA Downtown
340 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Labyrinths
Point of Contact Gallery

Price: Free
Point of Contact Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

A life-size maze of mirrors and dreams reveals an exceptional collection of works by Swietlan Nicholas Kraczyna: a fugue-like series of 25 drawings and etchings inspired by the Borgian notion of the labyrinth, with Icarus as protagonist. Twenty-three 7-foot tall mirrored panels form this massive installation that complicates and multiplies the space of the gallery, and infiltrates the observer.

Invasion! The Culture of Fear in America
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

Price: Free
Bird Library, 6th Floor
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This student-curated exhibition illustrates the concept of fear in the United States. The students, members of the Renee Crown University Honors Program taking the Spring 2008 course American Fear, felt that the theme of "invasion" underlies many of our historical anxieties relating to race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and a host of other issues. The idea that different people, aliens or even epidemics, like the AIDS virus during the 1980s, might infiltrate society and bring about sweeping change has been cause for extreme fear in the American experience. The exhibition raises questions of identity, and the class hopes that visitors will "understand their differences and be less discriminating in their actions."

Among the exhibited works that illuminate the roots of our culture of fear are a 1651 edition of Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan," Cotton Mather's 1693 account of the Salem Witch trials, the literature of the Red Scare, a variety of pulp science fiction magazines and Werner Pfeiffer's sculptural tribute to the victims of 9/11 "Out of the Sky."

Crystal LaPoint: PhotoImpressions
Westcott Community Center

Price: Free
Westcott Community Center
Corner of Euclid Ave. and Westcott St., Syracuse

The digital artwork of Crystal LaPoint, PhotoImpressions, embraces a dramatic range of styles. Crystal digitally redefines her own original photographic images into unique fine art prints, produced with museum-quality archival materials. Her work has been exhibited at the Delavan Art Gallery, OCPL at the Galleries, the Technology Garden, Everson Museum, Ann Felton Multicultural Center, and Hospice of CNY, and has earned awards at the New York State Fair and from the CNY Art Guild. A native of Pennsylvania, Crystal is a long time resident of Central New York. She attended Syracuse University, where she earned advanced degrees in both Piano Performance and Music Theory and Composition. She is a self-taught artist, a professional pianist, published composer and poet, and a mother of three children. Crystal is the PR/Communications Manager for the Central New York Chapter of Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Artist's Statement: Serendipity -- that sums up my experience as a visual artist. I discovered the process of digitally manipulating photographic images as a blissful accident, and it has become my creative playground. The forgiving nature of the medium allows for endless trial and error. But it also invites fearless exploration and experimentation. My creative intuition grows in direct proportion to my fluency with this virtual toolbox, and I now approach each new photograph imagining a host of possibilities for its evolution. But it is always the unexpected twist, the daring leap, the "let's give this a whirl and see how it turns out!" that ultimately results in my best work. My current exhibit balances some quiet, austere pieces with vivid virtual textures.

The Gathering
Edgewood Gallery

Price: Free
Edgewood Gallery
216 Tecumseh Rd., Syracuse

Patrice Downes Centore: still life and landscape watercolors
Lauren Bristol: sculptural basketry
Diane Menzies: naturalistic oil paintings

Read a review!

The Whipping Post: Photos by Brantley Carroll
Community Folk Art Center

Price: Free
Community Folk Art Center
805 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Blending historical images and engravings or text, Brantley Carroll's exhibition explores the legacy of The Middle Passage and the American Plantation System of Slavery in the United States. The exhibition engages the viewer in a visual tête-à-tête with colonial slavery and starkly captures the instrumentation of abuses that slaves endured. Each photograph draws you in to witness and read the digitally interwoven images and text taken from antebellum slave auctions, warrants, historical maps and documents.

In a piece entitled Thomas Jefferson's Slave Sally Hemmings, a young woman looks out beyond the words and signatures pearled together to constitute the foundation of a country. This piece holds a special significance to the artist, amongst commonly recognized filigree marks -- Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, and Benjamin Franklin -- is a Charles Carroll, the artist's great, great, great-grandfather. "My father, Walter Carroll was reportedly very ashamed when as a young man he learned that he was the descendant of Charles Carroll. Carroll was a founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence. An Irish Catholic immigrant, Carroll became a wealthy landowner in Maryland who founded the first industrial Iron Works in Baltimore and owned a large tobacco plantation. He owned one thousand slaves."

Artist Brantley Carroll contends, "that a nation, like an individual, must face its sins and make amends if it is to move toward greatness and enlightenment. It is the goal of my work to more fully understand and educate people about what the sins and realities of slavery and more importantly how its legacy pervades today."

Blake Fitch: The Expectations of Adolescence
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Blake Fitch's photographs capture her sister, cousin, and friends as they have grown from children to young adults. Fitch has been able to draw on the autobiographical nature of photography by creating candid and intimate images of her family.

Exploring History With Art: Work!
Onondaga Historical Association

Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

The third art exhibition in the series features occupations and places of work. Appropriately titled "Occupations & Places of Work," the exhibition showcases paintings illustrating different occupations and places of work in Onondaga County through the years.

Inside the exhibit gallery you'll see Onondaga Pottery, Comfort Tyler's Tavern, Good Shepherd Hospital, salt towers, and several others depicting the diverse places to work in Onondaga County from the early 19th through the late 20th centuries.

Bedtime Stories
Redhouse

Price: Free
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

Bedtime Stories began as an exhibition focusing on the indeterminate space of the bedroom as a site for innocence, play, sexuality, deviant behavior, convalescence and death.

Artists Derrick Adams, Yasser Aggour, and Anna Tsouhlarakis explore identity and race, but not in a direct way. Each of these artists' work is more complex, more subversive, difficult, and harder at times to pin down, but it gets the job done by exposing the underpinnings of the dominant culture.

Exhibit curated by Arjan Zazueta.

Works of Sandra Philips and Helen Woodmansee
Skaneateles Artisans

Skaneateles Artisans
11 Fennell St., Skaneateles

Exhibit features artists Sandra Philips, decorative painting and portraits, and Helen Woodmansee, paintings, etchings and monoprints.

Whimsy: Celebrating the Power of 'Why Not'?
Contemporary Gallery

Price: Free
Contemporary Gallery
230 Harrison St., Syracuse

The art featured in Whimsy: Celebrating the Power of 'Why Not?' includes art books, drawings, fabric art, film, illustration, installation art, intaglio prints, works in mixed media, paintings, photo etchings, photography, sculpture, and video art. The majority of artists represented come from the New York State area. The theme "whimsy" is inspired by its definition: 1. The quality of being quaint, odd, or playfully humorous, especially in an endearing way; 2. An idea that has no immediately obvious reason to exist. Since the gallery itself was created on a whim as a labor of love, it seemed appropriate for the theme of the exhibition to exemplify these characteristics.

Unchained Memories: Readings from Slave Narratives
Community Folk Art Center

Price: Free
Community Folk Art Center
805 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

In the early 1930s, the Federal Writers' Project mounted a project to transcribe the memories of former African-American slaves who were still living. The result was a massive collection of notes, documents, and recordings, all of which found their way into the Library of Congress. Co-produced by the Library and the HBO cable channel, Unchained Memories: Readings From the Slave Narratives features a truly impressive array of black performers sharing the reminiscences of those who lived under the yoke of slavery. Directors Ed Bell and Thomas Lennon complement the words with vivid images culled from contemporary photographs of the years 1850-1935.

Unchained Memories will be screening in the Herbert T. Williams Gallery throughout The Whipping Post exhibition. Come sit for a moment with 'elders' and listen to this stunning collection of slave stories.

The Little Jazz Trio
Liverpool is the Place

Price: Free
Johnson Park
Corner of Vine and Oswego Streets, Liverpool

A swingin' trio featuring Liverpool clarinetist Carl Borek performing music by Fats Waller and Hoagy Carmichael. No rain date for this concert.

Menopause The Musical
Syracuse Stage

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Menopause The Musical brings together four women (a Power Woman, Earth Mother, Soap Star and an Iowa Housewife) at a NYC Bloomingdale's lingerie sale, who have nothing in common but a black lace bra and hot flashes, night sweats, memory loss, chocolate binges, not enough sex, too much sex, plastic surgery and more! Menopause The Musical joyfully parodies 25 of the top "baby boomer" songs of the '60s and '70s celebrating women who are or will be experiencing The Change.

Read a review!

Thursday, June 12, 2008

WRAP (World Reclamation Art Project)
International Fiber Collaborative

Price: Free
2301 E. Colvin St.
(corner of Nottingham), Syracuse

Artist Jennifer Marsh and participants from all over the world have crocheted, knitted, stitched, patched, or collaged 3-foot square fiber panels that express concern about the world's extreme dependency on oil. The panels have been sewn together to completely cover an abandoned gas station.

For more information, visit internationalfibercollaborative.com.

Onondaga Art Guild Spring Show

Price: Free
Hospice of Central New York
990 Seventh North St., Liverpool

For more information, phone 315-449-2240.

The Materials of Color: Paintings by Italian artist Maria Grazia Facchinetti
Downtown Writer's Center

Price: Free
YMCA Downtown
340 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Labyrinths
Point of Contact Gallery

Price: Free
Point of Contact Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

A life-size maze of mirrors and dreams reveals an exceptional collection of works by Swietlan Nicholas Kraczyna: a fugue-like series of 25 drawings and etchings inspired by the Borgian notion of the labyrinth, with Icarus as protagonist. Twenty-three 7-foot tall mirrored panels form this massive installation that complicates and multiplies the space of the gallery, and infiltrates the observer.

Invasion! The Culture of Fear in America
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

Price: Free
Bird Library, 6th Floor
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This student-curated exhibition illustrates the concept of fear in the United States. The students, members of the Renee Crown University Honors Program taking the Spring 2008 course American Fear, felt that the theme of "invasion" underlies many of our historical anxieties relating to race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and a host of other issues. The idea that different people, aliens or even epidemics, like the AIDS virus during the 1980s, might infiltrate society and bring about sweeping change has been cause for extreme fear in the American experience. The exhibition raises questions of identity, and the class hopes that visitors will "understand their differences and be less discriminating in their actions."

Among the exhibited works that illuminate the roots of our culture of fear are a 1651 edition of Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan," Cotton Mather's 1693 account of the Salem Witch trials, the literature of the Red Scare, a variety of pulp science fiction magazines and Werner Pfeiffer's sculptural tribute to the victims of 9/11 "Out of the Sky."

Crystal LaPoint: PhotoImpressions
Westcott Community Center

Price: Free
Westcott Community Center
Corner of Euclid Ave. and Westcott St., Syracuse

The digital artwork of Crystal LaPoint, PhotoImpressions, embraces a dramatic range of styles. Crystal digitally redefines her own original photographic images into unique fine art prints, produced with museum-quality archival materials. Her work has been exhibited at the Delavan Art Gallery, OCPL at the Galleries, the Technology Garden, Everson Museum, Ann Felton Multicultural Center, and Hospice of CNY, and has earned awards at the New York State Fair and from the CNY Art Guild. A native of Pennsylvania, Crystal is a long time resident of Central New York. She attended Syracuse University, where she earned advanced degrees in both Piano Performance and Music Theory and Composition. She is a self-taught artist, a professional pianist, published composer and poet, and a mother of three children. Crystal is the PR/Communications Manager for the Central New York Chapter of Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Artist's Statement: Serendipity -- that sums up my experience as a visual artist. I discovered the process of digitally manipulating photographic images as a blissful accident, and it has become my creative playground. The forgiving nature of the medium allows for endless trial and error. But it also invites fearless exploration and experimentation. My creative intuition grows in direct proportion to my fluency with this virtual toolbox, and I now approach each new photograph imagining a host of possibilities for its evolution. But it is always the unexpected twist, the daring leap, the "let's give this a whirl and see how it turns out!" that ultimately results in my best work. My current exhibit balances some quiet, austere pieces with vivid virtual textures.

The Gathering
Edgewood Gallery

Price: Free
Edgewood Gallery
216 Tecumseh Rd., Syracuse

Patrice Downes Centore: still life and landscape watercolors
Lauren Bristol: sculptural basketry
Diane Menzies: naturalistic oil paintings

Read a review!

The Whipping Post: Photos by Brantley Carroll
Community Folk Art Center

Price: Free
Community Folk Art Center
805 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Blending historical images and engravings or text, Brantley Carroll's exhibition explores the legacy of The Middle Passage and the American Plantation System of Slavery in the United States. The exhibition engages the viewer in a visual tête-à-tête with colonial slavery and starkly captures the instrumentation of abuses that slaves endured. Each photograph draws you in to witness and read the digitally interwoven images and text taken from antebellum slave auctions, warrants, historical maps and documents.

In a piece entitled Thomas Jefferson's Slave Sally Hemmings, a young woman looks out beyond the words and signatures pearled together to constitute the foundation of a country. This piece holds a special significance to the artist, amongst commonly recognized filigree marks -- Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, and Benjamin Franklin -- is a Charles Carroll, the artist's great, great, great-grandfather. "My father, Walter Carroll was reportedly very ashamed when as a young man he learned that he was the descendant of Charles Carroll. Carroll was a founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence. An Irish Catholic immigrant, Carroll became a wealthy landowner in Maryland who founded the first industrial Iron Works in Baltimore and owned a large tobacco plantation. He owned one thousand slaves."

Artist Brantley Carroll contends, "that a nation, like an individual, must face its sins and make amends if it is to move toward greatness and enlightenment. It is the goal of my work to more fully understand and educate people about what the sins and realities of slavery and more importantly how its legacy pervades today."

Blake Fitch: The Expectations of Adolescence
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Blake Fitch's photographs capture her sister, cousin, and friends as they have grown from children to young adults. Fitch has been able to draw on the autobiographical nature of photography by creating candid and intimate images of her family.

Exploring History With Art: Work!
Onondaga Historical Association

Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

The third art exhibition in the series features occupations and places of work. Appropriately titled "Occupations & Places of Work," the exhibition showcases paintings illustrating different occupations and places of work in Onondaga County through the years.

Inside the exhibit gallery you'll see Onondaga Pottery, Comfort Tyler's Tavern, Good Shepherd Hospital, salt towers, and several others depicting the diverse places to work in Onondaga County from the early 19th through the late 20th centuries.

Bedtime Stories
Redhouse

Price: Free
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

Bedtime Stories began as an exhibition focusing on the indeterminate space of the bedroom as a site for innocence, play, sexuality, deviant behavior, convalescence and death.

Artists Derrick Adams, Yasser Aggour, and Anna Tsouhlarakis explore identity and race, but not in a direct way. Each of these artists' work is more complex, more subversive, difficult, and harder at times to pin down, but it gets the job done by exposing the underpinnings of the dominant culture.

Exhibit curated by Arjan Zazueta.

Works of Sandra Philips and Helen Woodmansee
Skaneateles Artisans

Skaneateles Artisans
11 Fennell St., Skaneateles

Exhibit features artists Sandra Philips, decorative painting and portraits, and Helen Woodmansee, paintings, etchings and monoprints.

Whimsy: Celebrating the Power of 'Why Not'?
Contemporary Gallery

Price: Free
Contemporary Gallery
230 Harrison St., Syracuse

The art featured in Whimsy: Celebrating the Power of 'Why Not?' includes art books, drawings, fabric art, film, illustration, installation art, intaglio prints, works in mixed media, paintings, photo etchings, photography, sculpture, and video art. The majority of artists represented come from the New York State area. The theme "whimsy" is inspired by its definition: 1. The quality of being quaint, odd, or playfully humorous, especially in an endearing way; 2. An idea that has no immediately obvious reason to exist. Since the gallery itself was created on a whim as a labor of love, it seemed appropriate for the theme of the exhibition to exemplify these characteristics.

Unchained Memories: Readings from Slave Narratives
Community Folk Art Center

Price: Free
Community Folk Art Center
805 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

In the early 1930s, the Federal Writers' Project mounted a project to transcribe the memories of former African-American slaves who were still living. The result was a massive collection of notes, documents, and recordings, all of which found their way into the Library of Congress. Co-produced by the Library and the HBO cable channel, Unchained Memories: Readings From the Slave Narratives features a truly impressive array of black performers sharing the reminiscences of those who lived under the yoke of slavery. Directors Ed Bell and Thomas Lennon complement the words with vivid images culled from contemporary photographs of the years 1850-1935.

Unchained Memories will be screening in the Herbert T. Williams Gallery throughout The Whipping Post exhibition. Come sit for a moment with 'elders' and listen to this stunning collection of slave stories.

An A Cappella Celebration
The Music Masters; Spirit of Syracuse; and the Marcellus, Skaneateles, and Solvay High School choruses

Price: $5; children under 5 free
Marcellus High School
1 Mustang Hill, Marcellus

For more information, phone 315-673-1879.

Death Takes a Bow
Acme Mystery Company

Price: $35.95 plus tax and gratuities (includes meal and show)
Spaghetti Warehouse
689 N. Clinton St., Syracuse

Interactive mystery dinner theater.

Menopause The Musical
Syracuse Stage

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Menopause The Musical brings together four women (a Power Woman, Earth Mother, Soap Star and an Iowa Housewife) at a NYC Bloomingdale's lingerie sale, who have nothing in common but a black lace bra and hot flashes, night sweats, memory loss, chocolate binges, not enough sex, too much sex, plastic surgery and more! Menopause The Musical joyfully parodies 25 of the top "baby boomer" songs of the '60s and '70s celebrating women who are or will be experiencing The Change.

Read a review!

Friday, June 13, 2008

WRAP (World Reclamation Art Project)
International Fiber Collaborative

Price: Free
2301 E. Colvin St.
(corner of Nottingham), Syracuse

Artist Jennifer Marsh and participants from all over the world have crocheted, knitted, stitched, patched, or collaged 3-foot square fiber panels that express concern about the world's extreme dependency on oil. The panels have been sewn together to completely cover an abandoned gas station.

For more information, visit internationalfibercollaborative.com.

Onondaga Art Guild Spring Show

Price: Free
Hospice of Central New York
990 Seventh North St., Liverpool

For more information, phone 315-449-2240.

The Materials of Color: Paintings by Italian artist Maria Grazia Facchinetti
Downtown Writer's Center

Price: Free
YMCA Downtown
340 Montgomery St., Syracuse

Labyrinths
Point of Contact Gallery

Price: Free
Point of Contact Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

A life-size maze of mirrors and dreams reveals an exceptional collection of works by Swietlan Nicholas Kraczyna: a fugue-like series of 25 drawings and etchings inspired by the Borgian notion of the labyrinth, with Icarus as protagonist. Twenty-three 7-foot tall mirrored panels form this massive installation that complicates and multiplies the space of the gallery, and infiltrates the observer.

Invasion! The Culture of Fear in America
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

Price: Free
Bird Library, 6th Floor
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This student-curated exhibition illustrates the concept of fear in the United States. The students, members of the Renee Crown University Honors Program taking the Spring 2008 course American Fear, felt that the theme of "invasion" underlies many of our historical anxieties relating to race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and a host of other issues. The idea that different people, aliens or even epidemics, like the AIDS virus during the 1980s, might infiltrate society and bring about sweeping change has been cause for extreme fear in the American experience. The exhibition raises questions of identity, and the class hopes that visitors will "understand their differences and be less discriminating in their actions."

Among the exhibited works that illuminate the roots of our culture of fear are a 1651 edition of Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan," Cotton Mather's 1693 account of the Salem Witch trials, the literature of the Red Scare, a variety of pulp science fiction magazines and Werner Pfeiffer's sculptural tribute to the victims of 9/11 "Out of the Sky."

Crystal LaPoint: PhotoImpressions
Westcott Community Center

Price: Free
Westcott Community Center
Corner of Euclid Ave. and Westcott St., Syracuse

The digital artwork of Crystal LaPoint, PhotoImpressions, embraces a dramatic range of styles. Crystal digitally redefines her own original photographic images into unique fine art prints, produced with museum-quality archival materials. Her work has been exhibited at the Delavan Art Gallery, OCPL at the Galleries, the Technology Garden, Everson Museum, Ann Felton Multicultural Center, and Hospice of CNY, and has earned awards at the New York State Fair and from the CNY Art Guild. A native of Pennsylvania, Crystal is a long time resident of Central New York. She attended Syracuse University, where she earned advanced degrees in both Piano Performance and Music Theory and Composition. She is a self-taught artist, a professional pianist, published composer and poet, and a mother of three children. Crystal is the PR/Communications Manager for the Central New York Chapter of Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Artist's Statement: Serendipity -- that sums up my experience as a visual artist. I discovered the process of digitally manipulating photographic images as a blissful accident, and it has become my creative playground. The forgiving nature of the medium allows for endless trial and error. But it also invites fearless exploration and experimentation. My creative intuition grows in direct proportion to my fluency with this virtual toolbox, and I now approach each new photograph imagining a host of possibilities for its evolution. But it is always the unexpected twist, the daring leap, the "let's give this a whirl and see how it turns out!" that ultimately results in my best work. My current exhibit balances some quiet, austere pieces with vivid virtual textures.

The Gathering
Edgewood Gallery

Price: Free
Edgewood Gallery
216 Tecumseh Rd., Syracuse

Patrice Downes Centore: still life and landscape watercolors
Lauren Bristol: sculptural basketry
Diane Menzies: naturalistic oil paintings

Read a review!

The Whipping Post: Photos by Brantley Carroll
Community Folk Art Center

Price: Free
Community Folk Art Center
805 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Blending historical images and engravings or text, Brantley Carroll's exhibition explores the legacy of The Middle Passage and the American Plantation System of Slavery in the United States. The exhibition engages the viewer in a visual tête-à-tête with colonial slavery and starkly captures the instrumentation of abuses that slaves endured. Each photograph draws you in to witness and read the digitally interwoven images and text taken from antebellum slave auctions, warrants, historical maps and documents.

In a piece entitled Thomas Jefferson's Slave Sally Hemmings, a young woman looks out beyond the words and signatures pearled together to constitute the foundation of a country. This piece holds a special significance to the artist, amongst commonly recognized filigree marks -- Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, and Benjamin Franklin -- is a Charles Carroll, the artist's great, great, great-grandfather. "My father, Walter Carroll was reportedly very ashamed when as a young man he learned that he was the descendant of Charles Carroll. Carroll was a founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence. An Irish Catholic immigrant, Carroll became a wealthy landowner in Maryland who founded the first industrial Iron Works in Baltimore and owned a large tobacco plantation. He owned one thousand slaves."

Artist Brantley Carroll contends, "that a nation, like an individual, must face its sins and make amends if it is to move toward greatness and enlightenment. It is the goal of my work to more fully understand and educate people about what the sins and realities of slavery and more importantly how its legacy pervades today."

Blake Fitch: The Expectations of Adolescence
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Blake Fitch's photographs capture her sister, cousin, and friends as they have grown from children to young adults. Fitch has been able to draw on the autobiographical nature of photography by creating candid and intimate images of her family.

Exploring History With Art: Work!
Onondaga Historical Association

Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

The third art exhibition in the series features occupations and places of work. Appropriately titled "Occupations & Places of Work," the exhibition showcases paintings illustrating different occupations and places of work in Onondaga County through the years.

Inside the exhibit gallery you'll see Onondaga Pottery, Comfort Tyler's Tavern, Good Shepherd Hospital, salt towers, and several others depicting the diverse places to work in Onondaga County from the early 19th through the late 20th centuries.

Bedtime Stories
Redhouse

Price: Free
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

Bedtime Stories began as an exhibition focusing on the indeterminate space of the bedroom as a site for innocence, play, sexuality, deviant behavior, convalescence and death.

Artists Derrick Adams, Yasser Aggour, and Anna Tsouhlarakis explore identity and race, but not in a direct way. Each of these artists' work is more complex, more subversive, difficult, and harder at times to pin down, but it gets the job done by exposing the underpinnings of the dominant culture.

Exhibit curated by Arjan Zazueta.

Works of Sandra Philips and Helen Woodmansee
Skaneateles Artisans

Skaneateles Artisans
11 Fennell St., Skaneateles

Exhibit features artists Sandra Philips, decorative painting and portraits, and Helen Woodmansee, paintings, etchings and monoprints.

Whimsy: Celebrating the Power of 'Why Not'?
Contemporary Gallery

Price: Free
Contemporary Gallery
230 Harrison St., Syracuse

The gallery's opening reception, designed as an afterparty for the Everson Biennial, will be held from 7:00-10:00pm, featuring DJ Afar.

The art featured in Whimsy: Celebrating the Power of 'Why Not?' includes art books, drawings, fabric art, film, illustration, installation art, intaglio prints, works in mixed media, paintings, photo etchings, photography, sculpture, and video art. The majority of artists represented come from the New York State area. The theme "whimsy" is inspired by its definition: 1. The quality of being quaint, odd, or playfully humorous, especially in an endearing way; 2. An idea that has no immediately obvious reason to exist. Since the gallery itself was created on a whim as a labor of love, it seemed appropriate for the theme of the exhibition to exemplify these characteristics.

Opening Night Lecture and Reception
Everson Museum of Art

Price: $10; members free
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

Join the Everson in celebrating the rich talent of the Central New York region at this opening night of The Object and and Beyond: 2008 Everson Biennial and Syracuse Ceramic Guild: 2008 Juried Exhibition.

More than 260 artists residing in the Central New York region submitted more than 1,000 works for consideration by juror Edward Winkleman, an independent curator and director of Winkleman Gallery in Chelsea, New York.

The Syracuse Ceramic Guild: 2008 Juried Exhibition presents new functional and non-functional work in clay involving a variety of clay bodies, construction, glazing and firing techniques, all of which were selected by Jo Buffalo, a local ceramic artist who has been a professor of art at Cazenovia College for 23 years.

Winkleman will give a lecture promptly at 5:30pm in Hosmer Auditorium, followed by a reception of light hors d'oeuvres with a cash bar as the exhibition is previewed. Participants will enjoy hors d'oeuvres, a cash bar, and entertainment by DJ Rich Pekala of Ohm Lounge.

Syracuse Balloon Festival

Price: $5 regular; $1 children 6-12; free ages 5 and under
Clinton Square
Downtown, Syracuse

Main Stage
6:30-7:15pm: Long Since Forgotten
7:30-8:15pm: Saving Jane
8:30-9:30pm: Kane

9:00pm Balloon Glow

Balloon Flight Times: 6:00-7:30pm Friday, Saturday, and Sunday; 6:00am Saturday and Sunday

For more information, go to syracuseballoonfest.com.

Unchained Memories: Readings from Slave Narratives
Community Folk Art Center

Price: Free
Community Folk Art Center
805 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

In the early 1930s, the Federal Writers' Project mounted a project to transcribe the memories of former African-American slaves who were still living. The result was a massive collection of notes, documents, and recordings, all of which found their way into the Library of Congress. Co-produced by the Library and the HBO cable channel, Unchained Memories: Readings From the Slave Narratives features a truly impressive array of black performers sharing the reminiscences of those who lived under the yoke of slavery. Directors Ed Bell and Thomas Lennon complement the words with vivid images culled from contemporary photographs of the years 1850-1935.

Unchained Memories will be screening in the Herbert T. Williams Gallery throughout The Whipping Post exhibition. Come sit for a moment with 'elders' and listen to this stunning collection of slave stories.

Annual Pops at the Knights Concert
Onondaga Civic Symphony Orchestra
Erik Kibelsbeck, conductor

Knights of Columbus (Taft Rd.)
E. Taft Road, North Syracuse

Charley Orlando and Tim Herron
Redhouse

Price: $12 regular; $10 students/seniors
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

Charley Orlando has been writing songs for over 25 years and touring North America for 17. In 2007 Charley released three albums, two of which, "Charley Orlando" and "The Dust That Lands," have been added to the 50th Annual GRAMMY entry list in six categories. In 2005, Charley's debut solo release "Beauty & Pain" was added to the 48th Annual GRAMMY entry list in four categories.

In his career Charley has released 11 albums, played nearly 3,000 shows in 45 states in the USA, Mexico and Canada, and has shared the stage with the likes of Peter Rowan (Old And In The Way), Jorma Kaukonen (Hot Tuna and Jefferson Airplane), David Lindley (Jackson Browne), John Dawson and David Nelson (New Riders Of The Purple Sage), Martin Fierro (Legion Of Mary and the Grateful Dead), Dave Mason & Jim Capaldi (Traffic), moe., Leftover Salmon, Tony Trischka, Michael Glabicki (Rusted Root), Spin Doctor's, Kid Rock and even 70s and 80s rockers Meatloaf and Quiet Riot; not to mention such prominent music festivals as the classic High Sierra in California to the up and coming 10,000 Lakes in Minnesota. Whether Charley is playing solo, with his new project Charley Orlando Band or with Ruha, his shows are always honest and emotional, professional and memorable.

Tim Herron has been a mainstay on the Northeast Music Scene, for nearly 20 years. As a multi-instrumental side musician for bands like Dexter Grove, Small Appliances and Wooden Spoon or as a frontman for the high powered Bluegrass/Americana band, Tim Herron Corporation, Tim always delivers. The combination of expert guitar playing and original music that speaks to all souls that have loved, lost, failed and conquered keeps fans always coming back to see what he'll do next. Tim has been nominated for a SAMMY (Syracuse Area Music Award) on three occasions, Best Instrumentalist, Best Jamband (THC) and Best Album(THC-Rebuild). These days Tim can be caught playing solo shows in the CNY area as well as with the Assassins of Hip. Recently Tim has joined forces with Mark Nanni (Los Blancos) to play in the jazz quartet, The Intention and at least once a year you can hear the Tim Herron Corporation do a summer tour of all of their old haunts. Tim is also currently putting the finishing touches on a new album that will be released this summer. This exciting project is Tim at his finest, singing songs that ring true in everyone's hearts and still playing the hell out of that Yellow Tele.

Go, Dog, Go!
Gifford Family Theatre

Coyne Center for the Performing Arts
LeMoyne College, Syracuse

P. D. Eastman's classic children's book comes to life in a free-for-all of movement, color, and space. This is a rollicking riot of canine chicanery, like a pop-up book that comes to life -- and never stops.

Read a Review!

Father's Day
Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company

Price: $15 regular, $10 seniors/students
CFAC Black Box Theater
805 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Father's Day, written and directed by Jackie Warren Moore, is a play about the lives of black men as fathers. It encompasses the joys and the drama, pain and sorrows of being a black father in today's world. It is a story of men who grew up with fathers and those without the influence of a father in their lives. It is a complex weaving of the responsibility and vulnerability of parenthood.

Read a review!

Menopause The Musical
Syracuse Stage

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Menopause The Musical brings together four women (a Power Woman, Earth Mother, Soap Star and an Iowa Housewife) at a NYC Bloomingdale's lingerie sale, who have nothing in common but a black lace bra and hot flashes, night sweats, memory loss, chocolate binges, not enough sex, too much sex, plastic surgery and more! Menopause The Musical joyfully parodies 25 of the top "baby boomer" songs of the '60s and '70s celebrating women who are or will be experiencing The Change.

Read a review!

Bath House: The Musical!
Rarely Done Productions
Dan Tursi, director

Price: $20
Jazz Central
441 E. Washington St., Syracuse

Four men, four doors, four bath towels -- and lots of bawdy music! Need we say more? Mature audiences.

Read a Review!

Saturday, June 14, 2008

WRAP (World Reclamation Art Project)
International Fiber Collaborative

Price: Free
2301 E. Colvin St.
(corner of Nottingham), Syracuse

Artist Jennifer Marsh and participants from all over the world have crocheted, knitted, stitched, patched, or collaged 3-foot square fiber panels that express concern about the world's extreme dependency on oil. The panels have been sewn together to completely cover an abandoned gas station.

For more information, visit internationalfibercollaborative.com.

The Materials of Color: Paintings by Italian artist Maria Grazia Facchinetti
Downtown Writer's Center

Price: Free
YMCA Downtown
340 Montgomery St., Syracuse

The Object and Beyond: 2008 Everson Biennial
Everson Museum of Art

Price: Suggested donation, $5, adults
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

In celebration of the 2008 Everson Biennial the Everson has devoted the entire second floor of the Museum to the display of current artwork created by artists from the Central New York region. This year's call for entries elicited a strong response from artists of all ages and diverse practices. More than 266 artists residing in the Central New York region submitted more than 1,000 works for consideration by juror Edward Winkleman. Winkleman is an independent curator and director of Winkleman Gallery in Chelsea, New York who specializes in contemporary art. He selected works by 55 artists for the exhibition which will occupy all four galleries on the second floor of the Museum.

Artists represented in the exhibition are diverse in their practices as well as their techniques, materials, and presentation. Winkleman's eye was on the look out for fine quality and craftsmanship and his goal was to showcase the broad spectrum of artwork being produced in the Central New York community from traditional to conceptual art.

Syracuse Ceramic Guild: 2008 Juried Exhibition
Everson Museum of Art

Price: Suggested donation, $5, adults
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

The Syracuse Ceramic Guild: 2008 Juried Exhibition presents new functional and non-functional work in clay involving a variety of clay bodies, construction, glazing and firing techniques, all of which were selected by Jo Buffalo, a local ceramic artist who has been a professor of art at Cazenovia College for 23 years.

Works of Sandra Philips and Helen Woodmansee
Skaneateles Artisans

Skaneateles Artisans
11 Fennell St., Skaneateles

Exhibit features artists Sandra Philips, decorative painting and portraits, and Helen Woodmansee, paintings, etchings and monoprints.

Opening Reception: The Whipping Post: Photos by Brantley Carroll
Community Folk Art Center

Price: Free
Community Folk Art Center
805 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

An opening reception with the artist will be held today at 2:00 pm.

Blending historical images and engravings or text, Brantley Carroll's exhibition explores the legacy of The Middle Passage and the American Plantation System of Slavery in the United States. The exhibition engages the viewer in a visual tête-à-tête with colonial slavery and starkly captures the instrumentation of abuses that slaves endured. Each photograph draws you in to witness and read the digitally interwoven images and text taken from antebellum slave auctions, warrants, historical maps and documents.

In a piece entitled Thomas Jefferson's Slave Sally Hemmings, a young woman looks out beyond the words and signatures pearled together to constitute the foundation of a country. This piece holds a special significance to the artist, amongst commonly recognized filigree marks -- Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, and Benjamin Franklin -- is a Charles Carroll, the artist's great, great, great-grandfather. "My father, Walter Carroll was reportedly very ashamed when as a young man he learned that he was the descendant of Charles Carroll. Carroll was a founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence. An Irish Catholic immigrant, Carroll became a wealthy landowner in Maryland who founded the first industrial Iron Works in Baltimore and owned a large tobacco plantation. He owned one thousand slaves."

Artist Brantley Carroll contends, "that a nation, like an individual, must face its sins and make amends if it is to move toward greatness and enlightenment. It is the goal of my work to more fully understand and educate people about what the sins and realities of slavery and more importantly how its legacy pervades today."

Art on the Porches 2008

Price: Free
Ruskin Avenue
Strathmore neighborhood, Syracuse

Artists will show and sell their work on Ruskin Ave in the historic Strathmore neighborhood of Syracuse. The block will be closed to traffic for a street-fair event that includes musicians, dancers, theatre, a free Hands-On Art Center, and delicious food.

Entertainment Schedule:

Evans Stage, 105 Ruskin Ave.
11:00am: David Terrero -- Acoustic Rock/Punk/Minimalist
12:00pm: Gary Frenay and Arty Lenin -- World famous Power pop duo
1:00pm: Gregg Yeti and the Best Lights -- Indie Dream pop
2:00pm: William Nicholson and the Herbs -- Experimental/Folk Rock/Freestyle guitar and drum duo
3:00pm: Los Blancos -- Roots, Zydeco, Funk & Roll Guaranteed To Fill A Hole In Your Soul
4:30pm: Birds Anonymous -- Eclectic power-pop

Clairmonte-Ruskin Cultural Stage
11:00am: Nick Palumbo and the Dixieland Update -- Syracuse's favorite Dixieland review
1:00pm: Nick Frenay and Friends -- Strathmore's own jazz trumpet prodigy.
2:00pm: Chaos Productions Pirate Play The Lesser Known Tales Of Bob The Pirate
2:30pm: The Butler-Sheehan Academy of Irish Dance -- High Energy Irish Dance!
3:00pm: The Menagerie Belly Dance Co. -- American Tribal Style and Fusion Bellydance
4:15pm: The TippHillbillies Y'Allternative Music from the next hill over

For more information, visit www.artontheporches.com or call 315-415-1615.

Exploring History With Art: Work!
Onondaga Historical Association

Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

The third art exhibition in the series features occupations and places of work. Appropriately titled "Occupations & Places of Work," the exhibition showcases paintings illustrating different occupations and places of work in Onondaga County through the years.

Inside the exhibit gallery you'll see Onondaga Pottery, Comfort Tyler's Tavern, Good Shepherd Hospital, salt towers, and several others depicting the diverse places to work in Onondaga County from the early 19th through the late 20th centuries.

Syracuse Balloon Festival

Price: $5 regular; $1 children 6-12; free ages 5 and under
Clinton Square
Downtown, Syracuse

Main Stage
1:15-2:15pm: Supergush
2:30-3:15pm: Ferras
3:30-4:15pm: Kat Tale
4:45-5:30pm: Forever The Sickest Kids
6:00-7:15pm: Under the Gun
7:35-8:35pm: Whiskey Mae

Balloon Flight Times: 6:00-7:30pm Friday, Saturday, and Sunday; 6:00am Saturday and Sunday

For more information, go to syracuseballoonfest.com.

Juneteenth Festival

Price: Free
Clinton Square
Downtown, Syracuse

Main Stage
1:05-1:50pm: The Critics
2:10-2:55pm: Carolyn Kelly & Roosevelt Dean Band
3:15-4:00pm: Bells of Harmony (Gospel)
4:20-5:05pm: J Project
5:25-6:10pm: Soulmind
7:15-8:00pm: John Puma & Booty Inc.
8:15-9:00pm: Blacklites
9:15-10:00pm: UAD

Jubilee Stage
1:50-2:10pm: Blodgett Elementary School step/drill team
2:55-3:15pm: Greg "Sax" White
4:00-4:20pm: Tucker Missionary Baptist Church step/drill team
5:05-5:25pm: Ny'anna
6:10-6:30pm: Most Talented
7:00-7:15pm: Rachel Walker

For more information, go to syracuse-juneteenth.org.

Unchained Memories: Readings from Slave Narratives
Community Folk Art Center

Price: Free
Community Folk Art Center
805 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

In the early 1930s, the Federal Writers' Project mounted a project to transcribe the memories of former African-American slaves who were still living. The result was a massive collection of notes, documents, and recordings, all of which found their way into the Library of Congress. Co-produced by the Library and the HBO cable channel, Unchained Memories: Readings From the Slave Narratives features a truly impressive array of black performers sharing the reminiscences of those who lived under the yoke of slavery. Directors Ed Bell and Thomas Lennon complement the words with vivid images culled from contemporary photographs of the years 1850-1935.

Unchained Memories will be screening in the Herbert T. Williams Gallery throughout The Whipping Post exhibition. Come sit for a moment with 'elders' and listen to this stunning collection of slave stories.

Films by Sara Kinney
Contemporary Gallery

Price: Free
Contemporary Gallery
230 Harrison St., Syracuse

Hooks, Lines, and Singers: The Hearts and Minds of Songwriters
Syracuse Center for the Performing Arts

Price: $29
Syracuse Center for the Performing Arts
728 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Appearing will be Rex Fowler and Neal Shulman of Aztec Two-Step, Jon Pousette-Dart, Danny O'Keefe, and the Barrigar Brothers.

Andy Pratt
Redhouse

Price: $15
Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

Andy Pratt is an American rock music singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. In the 1970s, he made a number of experimental records that were appreciated by small audiences, and scored a commercial hit with "Avenging Annie".

After words of praise from Rolling Stone magazine ("By reviving the dream of rock as an art and then re-inventing it, Pratt has forever changed the face of rock"), he tried a more commercial approach. Having converted to Christianity and settled in the Netherlands in 1987, he continued to make records and perform at big Christian pop music festivals.

Pratt returned to Boston after an absence of 13 years in 2004. The continually-prolific Pratt has been trying to make a comeback with a new band as well as solo appearances at regional festivals (such as South by Southwest in 2006). Despite his reputation as a one-hit wonder of the 1970s, Pratt has released 20 studio albums as of mid-2006.

Alice in Wonderland
Magic Circle Children's Theatre

Price: $5
Spaghetti Warehouse
689 N. Clinton St., Syracuse

Interactive family performance.

Go, Dog, Go!
Gifford Family Theatre

Coyne Center for the Performing Arts
LeMoyne College, Syracuse

P. D. Eastman's classic children's book comes to life in a free-for-all of movement, color, and space. This is a rollicking riot of canine chicanery, like a pop-up book that comes to life -- and never stops.

Read a Review!

Menopause The Musical
Syracuse Stage

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Menopause The Musical brings together four women (a Power Woman, Earth Mother, Soap Star and an Iowa Housewife) at a NYC Bloomingdale's lingerie sale, who have nothing in common but a black lace bra and hot flashes, night sweats, memory loss, chocolate binges, not enough sex, too much sex, plastic surgery and more! Menopause The Musical joyfully parodies 25 of the top "baby boomer" songs of the '60s and '70s celebrating women who are or will be experiencing The Change.

Read a review!

Bath House: The Musical!
Rarely Done Productions
Dan Tursi, director

Price: $20
Jazz Central
441 E. Washington St., Syracuse

Four men, four doors, four bath towels -- and lots of bawdy music! Need we say more? Mature audiences.

This afternoon's performance is held to benefit the Syracuse Gay and Lesbian Chorus. Reservations for this performance only can be emailed to SGLCTickets@twcny.rr.com.

Read a Review!

Go, Dog, Go!
Gifford Family Theatre

Coyne Center for the Performing Arts
LeMoyne College, Syracuse

P. D. Eastman's classic children's book comes to life in a free-for-all of movement, color, and space. This is a rollicking riot of canine chicanery, like a pop-up book that comes to life -- and never stops.

Read a Review!

Father's Day
Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company

Price: $15 regular, $10 seniors/students
CFAC Black Box Theater
805 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Father's Day, written and directed by Jackie Warren Moore, is a play about the lives of black men as fathers. It encompasses the joys and the drama, pain and sorrows of being a black father in today's world. It is a story of men who grew up with fathers and those without the influence of a father in their lives. It is a complex weaving of the responsibility and vulnerability of parenthood.

Read a review!

Menopause The Musical
Syracuse Stage

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Menopause The Musical brings together four women (a Power Woman, Earth Mother, Soap Star and an Iowa Housewife) at a NYC Bloomingdale's lingerie sale, who have nothing in common but a black lace bra and hot flashes, night sweats, memory loss, chocolate binges, not enough sex, too much sex, plastic surgery and more! Menopause The Musical joyfully parodies 25 of the top "baby boomer" songs of the '60s and '70s celebrating women who are or will be experiencing The Change.

Read a review!

Bath House: The Musical!
Rarely Done Productions
Dan Tursi, director

Price: $20
Jazz Central
441 E. Washington St., Syracuse

Four men, four doors, four bath towels -- and lots of bawdy music! Need we say more? Mature audiences.

Read a Review!

Sunday, June 15, 2008

WRAP (World Reclamation Art Project)
International Fiber Collaborative

Price: Free
2301 E. Colvin St.
(corner of Nottingham), Syracuse

Artist Jennifer Marsh and participants from all over the world have crocheted, knitted, stitched, patched, or collaged 3-foot square fiber panels that express concern about the world's extreme dependency on oil. The panels have been sewn together to completely cover an abandoned gas station.

For more information, visit internationalfibercollaborative.com.

Blake Fitch: The Expectations of Adolescence
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Blake Fitch's photographs capture her sister, cousin, and friends as they have grown from children to young adults. Fitch has been able to draw on the autobiographical nature of photography by creating candid and intimate images of her family.

Exploring History With Art: Work!
Onondaga Historical Association

Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

The third art exhibition in the series features occupations and places of work. Appropriately titled "Occupations & Places of Work," the exhibition showcases paintings illustrating different occupations and places of work in Onondaga County through the years.

Inside the exhibit gallery you'll see Onondaga Pottery, Comfort Tyler's Tavern, Good Shepherd Hospital, salt towers, and several others depicting the diverse places to work in Onondaga County from the early 19th through the late 20th centuries.

Works of Sandra Philips and Helen Woodmansee
Skaneateles Artisans

Skaneateles Artisans
11 Fennell St., Skaneateles

Exhibit features artists Sandra Philips, decorative painting and portraits, and Helen Woodmansee, paintings, etchings and monoprints.

The Object and Beyond: 2008 Everson Biennial
Everson Museum of Art

Price: Suggested donation, $5, adults
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

In celebration of the 2008 Everson Biennial the Everson has devoted the entire second floor of the Museum to the display of current artwork created by artists from the Central New York region. This year's call for entries elicited a strong response from artists of all ages and diverse practices. More than 266 artists residing in the Central New York region submitted more than 1,000 works for consideration by juror Edward Winkleman. Winkleman is an independent curator and director of Winkleman Gallery in Chelsea, New York who specializes in contemporary art. He selected works by 55 artists for the exhibition which will occupy all four galleries on the second floor of the Museum.

Artists represented in the exhibition are diverse in their practices as well as their techniques, materials, and presentation. Winkleman's eye was on the look out for fine quality and craftsmanship and his goal was to showcase the broad spectrum of artwork being produced in the Central New York community from traditional to conceptual art.

Syracuse Ceramic Guild: 2008 Juried Exhibition
Everson Museum of Art

Price: Suggested donation, $5, adults
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

The Syracuse Ceramic Guild: 2008 Juried Exhibition presents new functional and non-functional work in clay involving a variety of clay bodies, construction, glazing and firing techniques, all of which were selected by Jo Buffalo, a local ceramic artist who has been a professor of art at Cazenovia College for 23 years.

9th Annual Jewish Music and Cultural Festival

Price: Free
Clinton Square
Downtown, Syracuse

This year's festival will celebrate Israel at 60. A special Israel at 60 Ceremony will start the festival at 11:00 am with area rabbis, clergy, cantors, choir, and dignitaries. The festival will have music, Jewish and Israeli food, arts and crafts vendors, a Children's Activities tent, Jewish community organizations and synagogues. This cultural community event is open to the general public.

For more information, go to www.syracusejewishfestival.com or phone 315-446-7810 or 315-682-8489.

Main Stage

11:00 AM: Israel at 60 Commemorative Ceremony with area rabbis, clergy, cantors, dignitaries and Community Choir honoring Israel's 60th Anniversary (chairs will be provided for seating).
12:00 PM: Love & Knishes
12:40 PM: Hananel Edri, from Israel
1:30 PM: L'dor v'dor - special feature to honor dads, parents, Bar & Bat Mitzvahs
2:05 PM: Schaechter-Tekhter & Binyumen
3:30 PM: Simply Tsfat, from Israel
5:15 PM: All-Star Klezmer Jam with Jonathan Dinkin & Klezmercuse, the Keyna Hora Klezmer Band, and Love & Knishes.

Clinton Square Stage
11:45 AM: Kenesseth Shalom Singers & the Cantors
12:25 PM: Kenesseth Shalom Singers & the Cantors
1:50 PM: Love & Knishes
3:10 PM: Love & Knishes
5:00 PM: Gypsy Fire Dancers

Syracuse Balloon Festival

Price: $5 regular; $1 children 6-12; free ages 5 and under
Clinton Square
Downtown, Syracuse

Main Stage
1:15-2:00pm: Jason Bean
2:15-3:00pm: Ryan Cabrera
3:15-4:15pm: The Reissues
4:30-5:15pm: Ace Young
5:35-7:00pm: Los Blancos

Balloon Flight Times: 6:00-7:30pm Friday, Saturday, and Sunday; 6:00am Saturday and Sunday

For more information, go to syracuseballoonfest.com.

Southwest Showcase Sunday: Sire's Sunday
Featuring Intimate Connection

Price: Free
Spirit of Jubilee Park
161 South Ave., Syracuse

For more information, go to www.showcasesundays.com.

Syracuse Wurlitzer
Featuring Don Malcolm, theater organ

Price: $15 adults, $2 children
Empire Theater
New York State Fairgrounds, Geddes

Menopause The Musical
Syracuse Stage

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Menopause The Musical brings together four women (a Power Woman, Earth Mother, Soap Star and an Iowa Housewife) at a NYC Bloomingdale's lingerie sale, who have nothing in common but a black lace bra and hot flashes, night sweats, memory loss, chocolate binges, not enough sex, too much sex, plastic surgery and more! Menopause The Musical joyfully parodies 25 of the top "baby boomer" songs of the '60s and '70s celebrating women who are or will be experiencing The Change.

Read a review!

Father's Day
Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company

Price: $15 regular, $10 seniors/students
CFAC Black Box Theater
805 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Father's Day, written and directed by Jackie Warren Moore, is a play about the lives of black men as fathers. It encompasses the joys and the drama, pain and sorrows of being a black father in today's world. It is a story of men who grew up with fathers and those without the influence of a father in their lives. It is a complex weaving of the responsibility and vulnerability of parenthood.

Read a review!

Menopause The Musical
Syracuse Stage

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Menopause The Musical brings together four women (a Power Woman, Earth Mother, Soap Star and an Iowa Housewife) at a NYC Bloomingdale's lingerie sale, who have nothing in common but a black lace bra and hot flashes, night sweats, memory loss, chocolate binges, not enough sex, too much sex, plastic surgery and more! Menopause The Musical joyfully parodies 25 of the top "baby boomer" songs of the '60s and '70s celebrating women who are or will be experiencing The Change.

Read a review!

Monday, June 16, 2008

WRAP (World Reclamation Art Project)
International Fiber Collaborative

Price: Free
2301 E. Colvin St.
(corner of Nottingham), Syracuse

Artist Jennifer Marsh and participants from all over the world have crocheted, knitted, stitched, patched, or collaged 3-foot square fiber panels that express concern about the world's extreme dependency on oil. The panels have been sewn together to completely cover an abandoned gas station.

For more information, visit internationalfibercollaborative.com.

Onondaga Art Guild Spring Show

Price: Free
Hospice of Central New York
990 Seventh North St., Liverpool

For more information, phone 315-449-2240.

Labyrinths
Point of Contact Gallery

Price: Free
Point of Contact Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

A life-size maze of mirrors and dreams reveals an exceptional collection of works by Swietlan Nicholas Kraczyna: a fugue-like series of 25 drawings and etchings inspired by the Borgian notion of the labyrinth, with Icarus as protagonist. Twenty-three 7-foot tall mirrored panels form this massive installation that complicates and multiplies the space of the gallery, and infiltrates the observer.

Invasion! The Culture of Fear in America
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

Price: Free
Bird Library, 6th Floor
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This student-curated exhibition illustrates the concept of fear in the United States. The students, members of the Renee Crown University Honors Program taking the Spring 2008 course American Fear, felt that the theme of "invasion" underlies many of our historical anxieties relating to race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and a host of other issues. The idea that different people, aliens or even epidemics, like the AIDS virus during the 1980s, might infiltrate society and bring about sweeping change has been cause for extreme fear in the American experience. The exhibition raises questions of identity, and the class hopes that visitors will "understand their differences and be less discriminating in their actions."

Among the exhibited works that illuminate the roots of our culture of fear are a 1651 edition of Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan," Cotton Mather's 1693 account of the Salem Witch trials, the literature of the Red Scare, a variety of pulp science fiction magazines and Werner Pfeiffer's sculptural tribute to the victims of 9/11 "Out of the Sky."

Crystal LaPoint: PhotoImpressions
Westcott Community Center

Price: Free
Westcott Community Center
Corner of Euclid Ave. and Westcott St., Syracuse

The digital artwork of Crystal LaPoint, PhotoImpressions, embraces a dramatic range of styles. Crystal digitally redefines her own original photographic images into unique fine art prints, produced with museum-quality archival materials. Her work has been exhibited at the Delavan Art Gallery, OCPL at the Galleries, the Technology Garden, Everson Museum, Ann Felton Multicultural Center, and Hospice of CNY, and has earned awards at the New York State Fair and from the CNY Art Guild. A native of Pennsylvania, Crystal is a long time resident of Central New York. She attended Syracuse University, where she earned advanced degrees in both Piano Performance and Music Theory and Composition. She is a self-taught artist, a professional pianist, published composer and poet, and a mother of three children. Crystal is the PR/Communications Manager for the Central New York Chapter of Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Artist's Statement: Serendipity -- that sums up my experience as a visual artist. I discovered the process of digitally manipulating photographic images as a blissful accident, and it has become my creative playground. The forgiving nature of the medium allows for endless trial and error. But it also invites fearless exploration and experimentation. My creative intuition grows in direct proportion to my fluency with this virtual toolbox, and I now approach each new photograph imagining a host of possibilities for its evolution. But it is always the unexpected twist, the daring leap, the "let's give this a whirl and see how it turns out!" that ultimately results in my best work. My current exhibit balances some quiet, austere pieces with vivid virtual textures.

Blake Fitch: The Expectations of Adolescence
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Blake Fitch's photographs capture her sister, cousin, and friends as they have grown from children to young adults. Fitch has been able to draw on the autobiographical nature of photography by creating candid and intimate images of her family.

Works of Sandra Philips and Helen Woodmansee
Skaneateles Artisans

Skaneateles Artisans
11 Fennell St., Skaneateles

Exhibit features artists Sandra Philips, decorative painting and portraits, and Helen Woodmansee, paintings, etchings and monoprints.

Hollywood Party
Syracuse Cinephile Society

Price: $3 non-members, $2.50 members
Spaghetti Warehouse
689 N. Clinton St., Syracuse

Hollywood Party, a 1934 all-star musical in which a Tarzan-like hero (Jimmy Durante) searches for lions to play in his next jungle adventure. Other stars include Laurel and Hardy, Lupe Velez and the Three Stooges.

Liverpool Community Chorus
Liverpool is the Place
Joe Spado Jr., conductor

Price: Free
Johnson Park
Corner of Vine and Oswego Streets, Liverpool

Rain Date: Tues., June 17

Bloomsday
Redhouse

Former Redhouse Theater
219 S. West St., Syracuse

The Syracuse James Joyce Club will celebrate its 15th annual Bloomsday at Redhouse. Richard Long, chairperson of Bloomsday, said that the 2008 program will be like the Bloomsday celebrated in Dublin. "The Dublin Bloomsday committee invites a wide community of the arts, literature, and music to participate," Long said. Each person invited reads about five minutes from their own selection of Joyce.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

WRAP (World Reclamation Art Project)
International Fiber Collaborative

Price: Free
2301 E. Colvin St.
(corner of Nottingham), Syracuse

Artist Jennifer Marsh and participants from all over the world have crocheted, knitted, stitched, patched, or collaged 3-foot square fiber panels that express concern about the world's extreme dependency on oil. The panels have been sewn together to completely cover an abandoned gas station.

For more information, visit internationalfibercollaborative.com.

Onondaga Art Guild Spring Show

Price: Free
Hospice of Central New York
990 Seventh North St., Liverpool

For more information, phone 315-449-2240.

Labyrinths
Point of Contact Gallery

Price: Free
Point of Contact Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

A life-size maze of mirrors and dreams reveals an exceptional collection of works by Swietlan Nicholas Kraczyna: a fugue-like series of 25 drawings and etchings inspired by the Borgian notion of the labyrinth, with Icarus as protagonist. Twenty-three 7-foot tall mirrored panels form this massive installation that complicates and multiplies the space of the gallery, and infiltrates the observer.

Invasion! The Culture of Fear in America
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

Price: Free
Bird Library, 6th Floor
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This student-curated exhibition illustrates the concept of fear in the United States. The students, members of the Renee Crown University Honors Program taking the Spring 2008 course American Fear, felt that the theme of "invasion" underlies many of our historical anxieties relating to race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and a host of other issues. The idea that different people, aliens or even epidemics, like the AIDS virus during the 1980s, might infiltrate society and bring about sweeping change has been cause for extreme fear in the American experience. The exhibition raises questions of identity, and the class hopes that visitors will "understand their differences and be less discriminating in their actions."

Among the exhibited works that illuminate the roots of our culture of fear are a 1651 edition of Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan," Cotton Mather's 1693 account of the Salem Witch trials, the literature of the Red Scare, a variety of pulp science fiction magazines and Werner Pfeiffer's sculptural tribute to the victims of 9/11 "Out of the Sky."

Crystal LaPoint: PhotoImpressions
Westcott Community Center

Price: Free
Westcott Community Center
Corner of Euclid Ave. and Westcott St., Syracuse

The digital artwork of Crystal LaPoint, PhotoImpressions, embraces a dramatic range of styles. Crystal digitally redefines her own original photographic images into unique fine art prints, produced with museum-quality archival materials. Her work has been exhibited at the Delavan Art Gallery, OCPL at the Galleries, the Technology Garden, Everson Museum, Ann Felton Multicultural Center, and Hospice of CNY, and has earned awards at the New York State Fair and from the CNY Art Guild. A native of Pennsylvania, Crystal is a long time resident of Central New York. She attended Syracuse University, where she earned advanced degrees in both Piano Performance and Music Theory and Composition. She is a self-taught artist, a professional pianist, published composer and poet, and a mother of three children. Crystal is the PR/Communications Manager for the Central New York Chapter of Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Artist's Statement: Serendipity -- that sums up my experience as a visual artist. I discovered the process of digitally manipulating photographic images as a blissful accident, and it has become my creative playground. The forgiving nature of the medium allows for endless trial and error. But it also invites fearless exploration and experimentation. My creative intuition grows in direct proportion to my fluency with this virtual toolbox, and I now approach each new photograph imagining a host of possibilities for its evolution. But it is always the unexpected twist, the daring leap, the "let's give this a whirl and see how it turns out!" that ultimately results in my best work. My current exhibit balances some quiet, austere pieces with vivid virtual textures.

The Whipping Post: Photos by Brantley Carroll
Community Folk Art Center

Price: Free
Community Folk Art Center
805 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Blending historical images and engravings or text, Brantley Carroll's exhibition explores the legacy of The Middle Passage and the American Plantation System of Slavery in the United States. The exhibition engages the viewer in a visual tête-à-tête with colonial slavery and starkly captures the instrumentation of abuses that slaves endured. Each photograph draws you in to witness and read the digitally interwoven images and text taken from antebellum slave auctions, warrants, historical maps and documents.

In a piece entitled Thomas Jefferson's Slave Sally Hemmings, a young woman looks out beyond the words and signatures pearled together to constitute the foundation of a country. This piece holds a special significance to the artist, amongst commonly recognized filigree marks -- Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, and Benjamin Franklin -- is a Charles Carroll, the artist's great, great, great-grandfather. "My father, Walter Carroll was reportedly very ashamed when as a young man he learned that he was the descendant of Charles Carroll. Carroll was a founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence. An Irish Catholic immigrant, Carroll became a wealthy landowner in Maryland who founded the first industrial Iron Works in Baltimore and owned a large tobacco plantation. He owned one thousand slaves."

Artist Brantley Carroll contends, "that a nation, like an individual, must face its sins and make amends if it is to move toward greatness and enlightenment. It is the goal of my work to more fully understand and educate people about what the sins and realities of slavery and more importantly how its legacy pervades today."

Blake Fitch: The Expectations of Adolescence
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Blake Fitch's photographs capture her sister, cousin, and friends as they have grown from children to young adults. Fitch has been able to draw on the autobiographical nature of photography by creating candid and intimate images of her family.

Works of Sandra Philips and Helen Woodmansee
Skaneateles Artisans

Skaneateles Artisans
11 Fennell St., Skaneateles

Exhibit features artists Sandra Philips, decorative painting and portraits, and Helen Woodmansee, paintings, etchings and monoprints.

The Object and Beyond: 2008 Everson Biennial
Everson Museum of Art

Price: Suggested donation, $5, adults
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

In celebration of the 2008 Everson Biennial the Everson has devoted the entire second floor of the Museum to the display of current artwork created by artists from the Central New York region. This year's call for entries elicited a strong response from artists of all ages and diverse practices. More than 266 artists residing in the Central New York region submitted more than 1,000 works for consideration by juror Edward Winkleman. Winkleman is an independent curator and director of Winkleman Gallery in Chelsea, New York who specializes in contemporary art. He selected works by 55 artists for the exhibition which will occupy all four galleries on the second floor of the Museum.

Artists represented in the exhibition are diverse in their practices as well as their techniques, materials, and presentation. Winkleman's eye was on the look out for fine quality and craftsmanship and his goal was to showcase the broad spectrum of artwork being produced in the Central New York community from traditional to conceptual art.

Syracuse Ceramic Guild: 2008 Juried Exhibition
Everson Museum of Art

Price: Suggested donation, $5, adults
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

The Syracuse Ceramic Guild: 2008 Juried Exhibition presents new functional and non-functional work in clay involving a variety of clay bodies, construction, glazing and firing techniques, all of which were selected by Jo Buffalo, a local ceramic artist who has been a professor of art at Cazenovia College for 23 years.

Unchained Memories: Readings from Slave Narratives
Community Folk Art Center

Price: Free
Community Folk Art Center
805 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

In the early 1930s, the Federal Writers' Project mounted a project to transcribe the memories of former African-American slaves who were still living. The result was a massive collection of notes, documents, and recordings, all of which found their way into the Library of Congress. Co-produced by the Library and the HBO cable channel, Unchained Memories: Readings From the Slave Narratives features a truly impressive array of black performers sharing the reminiscences of those who lived under the yoke of slavery. Directors Ed Bell and Thomas Lennon complement the words with vivid images culled from contemporary photographs of the years 1850-1935.

Unchained Memories will be screening in the Herbert T. Williams Gallery throughout The Whipping Post exhibition. Come sit for a moment with 'elders' and listen to this stunning collection of slave stories.

The Caterpillar Hunter
Traveling Lantern Theatre Company

Price: Free
Thornden Park Amphitheater
Ostrom Ave., Syracuse

A vegetable safari, based on the late Steve Irwin. For more information, phone Syracuse Dept. of Parks and Rec at 315-473-4330.

The Caterpillar Hunter
Traveling Lantern Theatre Company

Price: Free
Thornden Park Amphitheater
Ostrom Ave., Syracuse

A vegetable safari, based on the late Steve Irwin. For more information, phone Syracuse Dept. of Parks and Rec at 315-473-4330.

Menopause The Musical
Syracuse Stage

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Menopause The Musical brings together four women (a Power Woman, Earth Mother, Soap Star and an Iowa Housewife) at a NYC Bloomingdale's lingerie sale, who have nothing in common but a black lace bra and hot flashes, night sweats, memory loss, chocolate binges, not enough sex, too much sex, plastic surgery and more! Menopause The Musical joyfully parodies 25 of the top "baby boomer" songs of the '60s and '70s celebrating women who are or will be experiencing The Change.

Read a review!

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

WRAP (World Reclamation Art Project)
International Fiber Collaborative

Price: Free
2301 E. Colvin St.
(corner of Nottingham), Syracuse

Artist Jennifer Marsh and participants from all over the world have crocheted, knitted, stitched, patched, or collaged 3-foot square fiber panels that express concern about the world's extreme dependency on oil. The panels have been sewn together to completely cover an abandoned gas station.

For more information, visit internationalfibercollaborative.com.

Onondaga Art Guild Spring Show

Price: Free
Hospice of Central New York
990 Seventh North St., Liverpool

For more information, phone 315-449-2240.

Labyrinths
Point of Contact Gallery

Price: Free
Point of Contact Gallery
350 W. Fayette St., Syracuse

A life-size maze of mirrors and dreams reveals an exceptional collection of works by Swietlan Nicholas Kraczyna: a fugue-like series of 25 drawings and etchings inspired by the Borgian notion of the labyrinth, with Icarus as protagonist. Twenty-three 7-foot tall mirrored panels form this massive installation that complicates and multiplies the space of the gallery, and infiltrates the observer.

Invasion! The Culture of Fear in America
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

Price: Free
Bird Library, 6th Floor
Syracuse University, Syracuse

This student-curated exhibition illustrates the concept of fear in the United States. The students, members of the Renee Crown University Honors Program taking the Spring 2008 course American Fear, felt that the theme of "invasion" underlies many of our historical anxieties relating to race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and a host of other issues. The idea that different people, aliens or even epidemics, like the AIDS virus during the 1980s, might infiltrate society and bring about sweeping change has been cause for extreme fear in the American experience. The exhibition raises questions of identity, and the class hopes that visitors will "understand their differences and be less discriminating in their actions."

Among the exhibited works that illuminate the roots of our culture of fear are a 1651 edition of Thomas Hobbes' "Leviathan," Cotton Mather's 1693 account of the Salem Witch trials, the literature of the Red Scare, a variety of pulp science fiction magazines and Werner Pfeiffer's sculptural tribute to the victims of 9/11 "Out of the Sky."

Crystal LaPoint: PhotoImpressions
Westcott Community Center

Price: Free
Westcott Community Center
Corner of Euclid Ave. and Westcott St., Syracuse

The digital artwork of Crystal LaPoint, PhotoImpressions, embraces a dramatic range of styles. Crystal digitally redefines her own original photographic images into unique fine art prints, produced with museum-quality archival materials. Her work has been exhibited at the Delavan Art Gallery, OCPL at the Galleries, the Technology Garden, Everson Museum, Ann Felton Multicultural Center, and Hospice of CNY, and has earned awards at the New York State Fair and from the CNY Art Guild. A native of Pennsylvania, Crystal is a long time resident of Central New York. She attended Syracuse University, where she earned advanced degrees in both Piano Performance and Music Theory and Composition. She is a self-taught artist, a professional pianist, published composer and poet, and a mother of three children. Crystal is the PR/Communications Manager for the Central New York Chapter of Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Artist's Statement: Serendipity -- that sums up my experience as a visual artist. I discovered the process of digitally manipulating photographic images as a blissful accident, and it has become my creative playground. The forgiving nature of the medium allows for endless trial and error. But it also invites fearless exploration and experimentation. My creative intuition grows in direct proportion to my fluency with this virtual toolbox, and I now approach each new photograph imagining a host of possibilities for its evolution. But it is always the unexpected twist, the daring leap, the "let's give this a whirl and see how it turns out!" that ultimately results in my best work. My current exhibit balances some quiet, austere pieces with vivid virtual textures.

The Whipping Post: Photos by Brantley Carroll
Community Folk Art Center

Price: Free
Community Folk Art Center
805 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Blending historical images and engravings or text, Brantley Carroll's exhibition explores the legacy of The Middle Passage and the American Plantation System of Slavery in the United States. The exhibition engages the viewer in a visual tête-à-tête with colonial slavery and starkly captures the instrumentation of abuses that slaves endured. Each photograph draws you in to witness and read the digitally interwoven images and text taken from antebellum slave auctions, warrants, historical maps and documents.

In a piece entitled Thomas Jefferson's Slave Sally Hemmings, a young woman looks out beyond the words and signatures pearled together to constitute the foundation of a country. This piece holds a special significance to the artist, amongst commonly recognized filigree marks -- Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, and Benjamin Franklin -- is a Charles Carroll, the artist's great, great, great-grandfather. "My father, Walter Carroll was reportedly very ashamed when as a young man he learned that he was the descendant of Charles Carroll. Carroll was a founding father and signer of the Declaration of Independence. An Irish Catholic immigrant, Carroll became a wealthy landowner in Maryland who founded the first industrial Iron Works in Baltimore and owned a large tobacco plantation. He owned one thousand slaves."

Artist Brantley Carroll contends, "that a nation, like an individual, must face its sins and make amends if it is to move toward greatness and enlightenment. It is the goal of my work to more fully understand and educate people about what the sins and realities of slavery and more importantly how its legacy pervades today."

Blake Fitch: The Expectations of Adolescence
Light Work Gallery

Price: Free
Robert B. Menschel Media Center
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

Blake Fitch's photographs capture her sister, cousin, and friends as they have grown from children to young adults. Fitch has been able to draw on the autobiographical nature of photography by creating candid and intimate images of her family.

Exploring History With Art: Work!
Onondaga Historical Association

Onondaga Historical Association
321 Montgomery St., Syracuse

The third art exhibition in the series features occupations and places of work. Appropriately titled "Occupations & Places of Work," the exhibition showcases paintings illustrating different occupations and places of work in Onondaga County through the years.

Inside the exhibit gallery you'll see Onondaga Pottery, Comfort Tyler's Tavern, Good Shepherd Hospital, salt towers, and several others depicting the diverse places to work in Onondaga County from the early 19th through the late 20th centuries.

Works of Sandra Philips and Helen Woodmansee
Skaneateles Artisans

Skaneateles Artisans
11 Fennell St., Skaneateles

Exhibit features artists Sandra Philips, decorative painting and portraits, and Helen Woodmansee, paintings, etchings and monoprints.

Whimsy: Celebrating the Power of 'Why Not'?
Contemporary Gallery

Price: Free
Contemporary Gallery
230 Harrison St., Syracuse

The art featured in Whimsy: Celebrating the Power of 'Why Not?' includes art books, drawings, fabric art, film, illustration, installation art, intaglio prints, works in mixed media, paintings, photo etchings, photography, sculpture, and video art. The majority of artists represented come from the New York State area. The theme "whimsy" is inspired by its definition: 1. The quality of being quaint, odd, or playfully humorous, especially in an endearing way; 2. An idea that has no immediately obvious reason to exist. Since the gallery itself was created on a whim as a labor of love, it seemed appropriate for the theme of the exhibition to exemplify these characteristics.

The Object and Beyond: 2008 Everson Biennial
Everson Museum of Art

Price: Suggested donation, $5, adults
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

In celebration of the 2008 Everson Biennial the Everson has devoted the entire second floor of the Museum to the display of current artwork created by artists from the Central New York region. This year's call for entries elicited a strong response from artists of all ages and diverse practices. More than 266 artists residing in the Central New York region submitted more than 1,000 works for consideration by juror Edward Winkleman. Winkleman is an independent curator and director of Winkleman Gallery in Chelsea, New York who specializes in contemporary art. He selected works by 55 artists for the exhibition which will occupy all four galleries on the second floor of the Museum.

Artists represented in the exhibition are diverse in their practices as well as their techniques, materials, and presentation. Winkleman's eye was on the look out for fine quality and craftsmanship and his goal was to showcase the broad spectrum of artwork being produced in the Central New York community from traditional to conceptual art.

Syracuse Ceramic Guild: 2008 Juried Exhibition
Everson Museum of Art

Price: Suggested donation, $5, adults
Everson Museum of Art
401 Harrison St., Syracuse

The Syracuse Ceramic Guild: 2008 Juried Exhibition presents new functional and non-functional work in clay involving a variety of clay bodies, construction, glazing and firing techniques, all of which were selected by Jo Buffalo, a local ceramic artist who has been a professor of art at Cazenovia College for 23 years.

Unchained Memories: Readings from Slave Narratives
Community Folk Art Center

Price: Free
Community Folk Art Center
805 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

In the early 1930s, the Federal Writers' Project mounted a project to transcribe the memories of former African-American slaves who were still living. The result was a massive collection of notes, documents, and recordings, all of which found their way into the Library of Congress. Co-produced by the Library and the HBO cable channel, Unchained Memories: Readings From the Slave Narratives features a truly impressive array of black performers sharing the reminiscences of those who lived under the yoke of slavery. Directors Ed Bell and Thomas Lennon complement the words with vivid images culled from contemporary photographs of the years 1850-1935.

Unchained Memories will be screening in the Herbert T. Williams Gallery throughout The Whipping Post exhibition. Come sit for a moment with 'elders' and listen to this stunning collection of slave stories.

Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North
Community Folk Art Center

Price: Free
Community Folk Art Center
805 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Catch Traces of the Trade on the big screen before it makes its small screen PBS debut. This compelling documentary follows filmmaker Katrina Browne and nine fellow family members on a remarkable journey which brings them face-to-face with the history and legacy of New England's hidden enterprise. The film follows 10 DeWolf descendants (ages 32-71, ranging from sisters to seventh cousins) as they retrace the steps of the Triangle Trade, and visit the DeWolf hometown of Bristol, RI, slave forts on the coast of Ghana, and the ruins of a family plantation in Cuba.

From 1769 to 1820, DeWolf fathers, sons, and grandsons trafficked in human beings. They sailed their ships from Bristol, Rhode Island to West Africa with rum to trade for African men, women and children. Captives were taken to plantations that the DeWolfs owned in Cuba or were sold at auction in such ports as Havana and Charleston. Sugar and molasses were then brought from Cuba to the family-owned rum distilleries in Bristol. Over the generations, the family owned 47 ships that transported thousands of Africans across the Middle Passage into slavery. They amassed an enormous fortune. By the end of his life, James DeWolf had been a U.S. Senator and was reportedly the second richest man in the United States.

The DeWolf descendants are confronted with questions that apply to the nation as a whole: What, concretely, is the legacy of slavery-for diverse whites, for diverse blacks, for diverse others? Who owes who what for the sins of the fathers of this country? What history do we inherit as individuals and as citizens? How does Northern complicity change the equation? What would repair-spiritual and material-really look like and what would it take? (Run time: 71 minutes)

Film Screening: Mexican Wrestling Night
Contemporary Gallery

Price: Free
Contemporary Gallery
230 Harrison St., Syracuse

Mexican Wrestling Night features the locally produced short Ivory Bastards Against Extinction and the Mexican documentary Los Super Amigos. The film series is curated by John Craddock, Assistant Director of the Syracuse International Film Festival.

The Dan Elliott Duo
Liverpool is the Place

Price: Free
Johnson Park
Corner of Vine and Oswego Streets, Liverpool

A concert of music from the Great American Songbook performed by one of CNY's most prominent vocalists. Rain Date: Thurs., June 19.

Menopause The Musical
Syracuse Stage

Archbold Theater, Syracuse Stage
820 E. Genesee St., Syracuse

Menopause The Musical brings together four women (a Power Woman, Earth Mother, Soap Star and an Iowa Housewife) at a NYC Bloomingdale's lingerie sale, who have nothing in common but a black lace bra and hot flashes, night sweats, memory loss, chocolate binges, not enough sex, too much sex, plastic surgery and more! Menopause The Musical joyfully parodies 25 of the top "baby boomer" songs of the '60s and '70s celebrating women who are or will be experiencing The Change.

Read a review!