Pre-K Playdate
Toys, games, and, of course, books!
From 10.00 am until 11.00 am
All kids and their caregivers are welcome!
Poetry Open Mic Night
From 6.00 pm until 7.00 pm
MC Catherine Weiss, local poet and artist, hosts SPL's monthly Poetry Open Mic Night. Share a poem, lyric, (super) short story—read an original piece or share a favorite poem. Don't have any material? We'll have some on hand you can choose from. All voices welcome.
Story Time & Craft
Celebrate spring by making paper flowers & butterflies @ SPL Story Time & Craft
From 10.00 am until 11.00 am
Mark your calendars: SPL Story Time & Craft on the second Saturday of every month, 10-11am! Roll out of bed, come down to the library, and pull up a cushion for some read-aloud stories. Followed by glitter, glue, and oodles of crafts fun.
Lo Que Los Animales Me Dicen
a Spanish storytelling series with Joshua McCarey
From 2.00 pm until 3.00 pm
Join us the third Saturday of each month at 2pm for an immersive Spanish performance for all ages.
Costume Design: hanna b. designs
Original Music: Meg Chittenden and Joshua McCarey
Full series schedule:
1/21 @ Chase Emerson Memorial Library
2/18 @ Stonington Public Library
3/18 @ Chase Emerson Memorial Library
4/15 @ Stonington Public Library
5/20 @ Island Heritage Trust
Dear Theo by Vincent van Gogh
SPL book club's third selection in a yearlong reading journey through art and art history
From 6.30 pm until 7.30 pm
SPL book club readers can join discussions either via Zoom or in person at the library. Register below to receive the Zoom link.
Each night, Vincent van Gogh put pen to paper and poured out his heart through letters to his brother Theo. Van Gogh's letters lay bare his deepest feelings, as well as his everyday concerns and his views of the world of art.
Register for this event
Enter your details below
Poetry Open Mic Night
From 6.00 pm until 7.00 pm
MC Catherine Weiss, local poet and artist, hosts SPL's monthly Poetry Open Mic Night. Share a poem, lyric, (super) short story—read an original piece or share a favorite poem. Don't have any material? We'll have some on hand you can choose from. All voices welcome.
Story Time & Craft
Make a special Mother's Day gift @ SPL Story Time & Craft
From 10.00 am until 11.00 am
Mark your calendars: SPL Story Time & Craft on the second Saturday of every month, 10-11am! Roll out of bed, come down to the library, and pull up a cushion for some read-aloud stories. Followed by glitter, glue, and oodles of crafts fun.
How to See by David Salle
SPL book club's sixth selection in a yearlong reading journey through art and art history
From 6.30 pm until 7.30 pm
SPL book club readers can join discussions either via Zoom or in person at the library. Register below to receive the Zoom link.
How does art work? How does it move us, inform us, challenge us? Internationally renowned painter David Salle's incisive essay collection illuminates the work of many of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Engaging with a wide range of Salle's friends and contemporaries--from painters to conceptual artists such as Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, Roy Lichtenstein, and Alex Katz, among others--How to See explores not only the multilayered personalities of the artists themselves but also the distinctive character of their oeuvres. Salle writes with humor and verve, replacing the jargon of art theory with precise and evocative descriptions that help the listener develop a personal and intuitive engagement with art. The result: a master class on how to see with an artist's eye.
Register for this event
Enter your details below
Story Time & Craft
Make a special Father's Day gift @ SPL Story Time & Craft
From 10.00 am until 11.00 am
Mark your calendars: SPL Story Time & Craft on the second Saturday of every month, 10-11am! Roll out of bed, come down to the library, and pull up a cushion for some read-aloud stories. Followed by glitter, glue, and oodles of crafts fun.
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon by Mark Doty
SPL book club's fifth selection in a yearlong reading journey through art and art history
From 6.30 pm until 7.30 pm
SPL book club readers can join discussions either via Zoom or in person at the library. Register below to receive the Zoom link.
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon
Although at first glance this slim volume appears to be a quick read, it should be lingered over and reread to uncover the full depth of its beauty and insight. Combining memoir with artistic and philosophical musings, the poet and National Book Critics Circle Award winner (for My Alexandria) begins by confessing his obsession with the 17th-century Dutch still life that serves as the title of this book. As he analyzes the items depicted in the painting, he skillfully introduces his thoughts on our intimate relationships to objects and subsequently explains how they are often inextricably bound to the people and places of an individual lifetime. Further defined by imperfections attained from use, each object from an aging oak table to a chipped blue and white china platter forms a springboard for reflection. Doty intersperses personal reminiscences throughout, but he always returns to the subject of still-life painting and its silent eloquence. Doty's observations on balance, grief, beauty, space, love, and time are imparted with wisdom and poetic grace.
Register for this event
Enter your details below
Air Guitar by Dave Hickey
SPL book club's ninth selection in a yearlong reading journey through art and art history
From 6.30 pm until 7.30 pm
SPL book club readers can join discussions either via Zoom or in person at the library. Register below to receive the Zoom link.
Air Guitar
The 23 essays (or "love songs") that make up the now classic volume Air Guitar trawl a "vast, invisible underground empire" of pleasure, through record stores, honky-tonks, art galleries, jazz clubs, cocktail lounges, surf shops and hot-rod stores, as restlessly on the move as the America they depict. Air Guitar pioneered a kind of plain-talking in cultural criticism, willingly subjective and always candid and direct. A valuable reading tool for art lovers, neophytes, students and teachers alike, Hickey's book--now in its eighth printing--has galvanized a generation of art lovers, with new takes on Norman Rockwell, Robert Mapplethorpe, Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol and Perry Mason. In June 2009, Newsweek voted Air Guitar one of the top 50 books that "open a window on the times we live in, whether they deal directly with the issues of today or simply help us see ourselves in new and surprising ways," and described the book as "a seamless blend of criticism, personal history, and a deep appreciation for the sheer nuttiness of American life."
Register for this event
Enter your details below
The Mirror and the Palette by Jennifer Higgie
SPL book club's tenth selection in a yearlong reading journey through art and art history
From 6.30 pm until 7.30 pm
SPL book club readers can join discussions either via Zoom or in person at the library. Register below to receive the Zoom link.
Until the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have – and, of course, continue to do so – often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to the pressures of family and public disapproval.
In The Mirror and the Palette, Jennifer Higgie introduces us to a cross-section of women artists who embody the fact that there is more than one way to understand our planet, more than one way to live in it and more than one way to make art about it. Spanning 500 years, biography and cultural history intertwine in a narrative packed with tales of rebellion, adventure, revolution, travel and tragedy enacted by women who turned their back on convention and lived lives of great resilience, creativity and bravery. This is a dazzlingly original and ambitious book by one of the most well-respected art critics at work today.
Register for this event
Enter your details below
The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer
SPL book club's eighth selection in a yearlong reading journey through art and art history
From 6.30 pm until 7.30 pm
SPL book club readers can join discussions either via Zoom or in person at the library. Register below to receive the Zoom link.
In his last book, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, Geoff Dyer confessed that not only did he not take pictures in the course of his travels but that he did not own a camera. With characteristic perversity - and trademark originality - The Ongoing Moment is Dyer's unique and idiosyncratic history of photography. Seeking to identify their signature styles Dyer looks at the ways that canonical figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Kertesz, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus and William Eggleston have photographed the same scenes and objects (benches, hats, hands, roads). In doing so Dyer constructs a narrative in which those photographers - many of whom never met in their lives - constantly come into contact with each other. Great photographs change the way we see the world; The Ongoing Moment changes the way we look at both. It is the most ambitious example to date of a form of writing that Dyer has made his own: the non-fiction work of art.
Register for this event
Enter your details below
Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay
SPL book club's fourth selection in a yearlong reading journey through art and art history
From 6.30 pm until 7.30 pm
SPL book club readers can join discussions either via Zoom or in person at the library. Register below to receive the Zoom link.
Discover the tantalizing true stories behind your favorite colors. For example: Cleopatra used saffron—a source of the color yellow—for seduction. Extracted from an Afghan mine, the blue “ultramarine” paint used by Michelangelo was so expensive he couldn’t afford to buy it himself. Since ancient times, carmine red—still found in lipsticks and Cherry Coke today—has come from the blood of insects.
Register for this event
Enter your details below
The Shape of a Pocket by John Berger
SPL book club's seventh selection in a yearlong reading journey through art and art history
From 6.30 pm until 7.30 pm
SPL book club readers can join discussions either via Zoom or in person at the library. Register below to receive the Zoom link.
The pocket in question is a small pocket of resistance. A pocket is formed when two or more people come together in agreement. The resistance is against the inhumanity of the New World Economic Order. The people coming together are the reader, me, and those the essays are about–Rembrandt, Paleolithic cave painters, a Romanian peasant, ancient Egyptians, an expert in the loneliness of a certain hotel bedroom, dogs at dusk, a man in a radio station. And unexpectedly, our exchanges strengthen each of us in our conviction that what is happening in the world today is wrong, and that what is often said about it is a lie. I’ve never written a book with a greater sense of urgency.
Register for this event
Enter your details below
Wall and Piece by Banksy & Why Art? by Eleanor Davis
SPL book club's eleventh selection in a yearlong reading journey through art and art history
From 6.30 pm until 7.30 pm
SPL book club readers can join discussions either via Zoom or in person at the library. Register below to receive the Zoom link.
Wall and Piece by Banksy
Banksy, Britain's now-legendary "guerilla" street artist, has painted the walls, streets, and bridges of towns and cities throughout the world. Not only did he smuggle his pieces into four of New York City's major art museums, he's also "hung" his work at London's Tate Gallery and adorned Israel's West Bank barrier with satirical images. Banksy's identity remains unknown, but his work is unmistakable with prints selling for as much as $45,000.
Why Art? by Eleanor Davis
What is “Art”? It’s widely accepted that art serves an important function in society. But the concept falls under such an absurdly large umbrella and can manifest in so many different ways. Art can be self indulgent, goofy, serious, altruistic, evil, or expressive, or any number of other things. But how can it truly make lasting, positive change? In Why Art?, acclaimed graphic novelist Eleanor Davis (How To Be Happy) unpacks some of these concepts in ways both critical and positive, in an attempt to illuminate the highest possible potential an artwork might hope to achieve. A work of art unto itself, Davis leavens her exploration with a sense of humor and a thirst for challenging preconceptions of art worth of Magritte, instantly drawing the reader in as a willing accomplice in her quest.
Register for this event
Enter your details below
On Photography by Susan Sontag
SPL book club's final selection in a yearlong reading journey through art and art history
From 6.30 pm until 7.30 pm
SPL book club readers can join discussions either via Zoom or in person at the library. Register below to receive the Zoom link.
One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, On Photography first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as “a progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs.” It begins with the famous “In Plato’s Cave”essay, then offers five other prose meditations on this topic, and concludes with a fascinating and far-reaching “Brief Anthology of Quotations.”
Register for this event
Enter your details below