Tourism News

“En plein air,” a French term that means “in the open air,” refers to the practice of painting entire finished artworks out of doors. On Saturday, November 5th, Adkins Arboretum will host the inaugural Plein Air Adkins, a plein air paint-out, exhibit and sale, on the Arboretum grounds. The public is invited to explore the Arboretum forest, meadows and wetland and observe as artists paint their original works.

Artists will begin painting the Arboretum’s spectacular autumn landscape at 10 a.m. At 12:30 p.m., they will bring their completed works to the Visitor’s Center for exhibition and sale beginning at 1 p.m. The juror, Bernard J. Dellario, will award first, second and third places and two honorable mentions at 2 p.m. Dellario is a painter and instructor who exhibits widely across the Maryland Eastern Shore and Washington, D.C., regions.

Dellario studied art at the Art League School in Alexandria, Va., and has attended workshops with several nationally known artists. He has been a member of the Washington Society of Landscape Painters, one of the oldest active artist organizations in the Washington area, since 2003 and currently serves as president.

Fine Times will provide live music during the exhibit and sale, and Blue Monkey Tacos will be on site to sell food beginning at 11 a.m.

All works created during Plein Air Adkins will be for sale beginning at 1 p.m. The event is open to any artist who wishes to participate. Artists may register in advance or on the day of the event. The artist registration fee is $10. A registration form and event agenda are available at adkinsarboretum.org. Fee waivers are available upon request. Admission for observers is free for members and $5, which includes Arboretum admission, for non-members.

For more information, visit adkinsarboretum.org or call 410-634-2847, ext. 0.

Adkins Arboretum is a 400-acre native garden and preserve at the headwaters of the Tuckahoe Creek in Caroline County. For more information, visit adkinsarboretum.org or call 410-634-2847, ext. 0.

Adkins Arboretum, 12610 Eveland Road, Ridgely, MD 21620

410.634.2847  |  adkinsarboretum.org  |  info@adkinsarboretum.org

The Fiber Arts Center of the Eastern Shore, located at 7 N. 4th Street in historic Denton, invites you to an exhibit featuring the work of Laura Waggner Boehl, on view now through September 3, 2022.  Quilting is Laura’s passion and fabric her artistic medium. The quilts she makes are what is in her head or what suites her fancy at the time, and she is always open to inspiration and new techniques to express herself.

Laura became a quilter in 1984 when her passion was ignited by her mother-in-law, Marie Boehl. Shortly after starting her first quilt, Laura attended a lecture on quilting given by Pat Long Gardner, a Baltimore fiber artist and teacher of fiber art at Maryland Institute of Art. Pat also taught quilting classes in her home and Laura soon joined the other 20+ women who quilted with them. She has always considered these women her mentors and the group her quilting Master’s degree.

Partially due to her quilting group who all encouraged risk taking and forward thinking, Laura has always had a modern twist to her work. She especially enjoys piecing her backs which become a canvas for artistic exploration. She uses all the leftovers from the front, plus extras from her stash and pieces it all together in a random, artistic improv fashion. 

The exhibit runs through September 3rd, 2022 in the FACES gallery, 7 N. 4th Street, Denton, Maryland.  FACES is open Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 12-4pm.  The exhibit is free of charge.

Join the Caroline County Humane Society and guest bartenders at the Market Street Pub on Wednesday, July 20, 2022 from 5-9 pm. Live music generously provided by Reagan Kent and The Glooms.

Reagan is a young talent from Caroline County. He loves to play everything from country to classic rock. Starting his professional career at age 13, he is now a seasoned pro at 16. He will be playing 5– p.m. The Glooms are a four-part teen band based in Ridgely, Maryland. Playing music from decades both before and after they were born, they are always sure to put their own dark folk spin on their songs. It’s always the season of the witch when The Glooms are around. They will be playing 7–9 p.m.

Guest bartenders include: Tracey Synder, Executive Director of the Caroline County Chamber of Commerce from 5-6 pm, Bonnie Johnson, Realtor for Long & Foster and Caroline County Humane Society Board President from 6-7 pm, Sue Simmons, Director of Caroline County Recreation & Parks from 7-8 pm, and Dennis Farina, Denton Lawyer from 8-9 pm. All tips for the bartenders will be donated to the Humane Society.

There will be a raffle for a Summerfield 44 in. x 24.5 in. Square Steel Propane Fire Pit with Wood-Look Tile Top (value $479) $2 for one ticket, $10 for six. Donate supplies and get a free raffle ticket: Kitten Milk Replacer (available at Petco), or go to Chewy.com for wish list under “give back.” There is also a link at carolinehumane.org under “Donate.”

No admission charge. Let’s pack the pub and have a great time for the animals!

Like enormous 3-D drawings, vines sweep and spiral, bend and corkscrew around the trees in Howard and Mary McCoy’s outdoor sculpture exhibit, Re-Vision, at Adkins Arboretum. Interspersed with Mary’s poems directly inspired by the Adkins landscape, they are on view through Sept. 30. On Sat., June 4, from 2 to 4 p.m., there will be a reception for the McCoys’ outdoor show and Chinese painter and calligrapher Kit-Keung Kan’s exhibit in the Visitor’s Center, including a guided sculpture and poetry walk.

Grapevines swirl up from the forest floor in “Reconfigure,” and pale bittersweet vines twirl in wide arcs around a tree trunk in a tall sculpture called “Reorganize.” Nearby, a poem called “Not for the Faint of Heart” is wrapped around the prickly trunk of a devil’s walking stick plant.

These two Centreville artists have served as Resident Artists at the Arboretum for more than two decades, helping with the art program and periodically exhibiting their own work. This is their twelfth show of site-specific sculpture and the first to include several of Mary’s poems.

A map showing the location of the sculptures is available in the Visitor’s Center, and each sculpture is marked with a bright blue sign on the ground. To find the poems, however, you must keep an eye out for the same blue—perhaps on a tree, a signpost or even the railing of one of the wooden bridges that cross the Arboretum’s stream.

“I want the poems to be surprises that you come upon unexpectedly,” said Mary, who is a 2022 recipient of a Regional Individual Artist’s Award in Literary Arts from the Maryland State Arts Council. “For me, they were gifts from the landscape itself—feelings and ideas that came to me while I was walking through the forest or just sitting quietly on a log.”

The McCoys also walked the forest paths together, keeping an eye out for vines growing up into the treetops.

“Vines are like three-dimensional drawings,” Howard explained. “We both used to like to draw and paint a lot. It’s sort of like the paintings of Jackson Pollock or some of the other Abstract Expressionist painters—gesture painting. It has art historical context, and it’s sometimes hysterical what it ends up doing.”

The two artists chose to call their show Re-Vision not only because their work offers new ways of seeing nature, but also because they have “revised” the way the vines were growing and because both the vine sculptures and Mary’s poems were created by experimenting with trying one thing, then another, revising each work until it finally felt lively, balanced and whole.

As to why they cut vines out of the trees, Howard said, “We’ve talked about it with a couple visitors who came by while we were working—the importance of clearing vines off the trees so that you save the tree from the choking vines, and at the same time, you’re making sculpture, making art.”

“They are wonderful materials,” Mary said. “But you have to follow what they dictate. You want it to curve one direction, but because of the way it grew with an elbow or some tight curvature, it’ll want to go the exact opposite. So it’s a real collaboration with nature. We feel like the idea of collaboration is important not only when we’re making art in nature but in the larger context, that if we all were more interested in collaborating with nature instead of dominating it, we might be better off.”

Re-Vision is part of Adkins Arboretum’s ongoing exhibition series of work on natural themes by regional artists. It is on view through Sept. 30 at the Arboretum, located at 12610 Eveland Road near Tuckahoe State Park in Ridgely. Contact the Arboretum at 410–634–2847, ext. 0 or info@adkinsarboretum.org for more information.

A special installation ceremony will be held at 1pm on Saturday April 30 at the Caroline County Courthouse to honor Thomas Carney, a free-born black man from Denton who served in Maryland’s Revolutionary militia in several crucial battles and won widespread recognition for saving the life of another Maryland patriot, General Perry Benson. The General Perry Benson chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution has joined with the NAACP Caroline County Branch to host the ceremony, with Thomas Carney descendants and state and local officials invited as special guests. The Caroline County Commissioners and the Office of Tourism proposed the site on the Courthouse Greens, as it is a cornerstone of Denton’s historic downtown. A grant from the Maryland Historic Trust, and the State Highway Administration made it possible to find the appropriate site.

Historians claim Thomas Carney, described in the 20th century as an African-American, actually was born free on the Eastern Shore of Maryland with Irish roots, and was described as a “light-skinned colored man” with white brothers. Tom’s life on the family farm ended in 1777 when he enlisted in Maryland’s 5th Regiment  in time to take part in the October, 1777 Battle of Germantown. He also fought in the Battle of the Guilford Court House, in which he reportedly boasted of using his bayonet to kill 7 enemy soldiers.

Thomas Carney enlisted as a private, but in short order was promoted to corporal after his transfer to Maryland’s  7th regiment. History claims only four African-American soldiers ever achieved that rank. There is no record of an African-American being promoted to sergeant or beyond until years later.  Carney fought in a number of other memorable battles at Camden, Hobkirk’s Hill and The Ninety-Six in South Carolina. During The Ninety-Six, the 7th Regiment’s Captain Perry Benson received a life-threatening wound in his arm, with non-stop bleeding.

Described as a man “above the common size” Carney carried Capt. Benson on his shoulders through the battlefield, keeping hold of his musket, until they reached the company surgeon. Carney asked to return to his company, but the commanding officer ordered him to remain to protect his captain. A grateful Capt. Benson was instrumental in granting Carney 50 acres of land in Caroline County, and always made sure to visit Tom first when he was in the area. Their relationship only strengthened through the years as then Brigadier General Perry Benson had Tom serve with him in the Battle of St. Michaels in the War of 1812. An obituary in 1828 reported the death “of a colored man, at the advanced age of 74”, describing Thomas Carney as courageous, kind, brave and loyal.

The General Perry Benson Chapter of the DAR, founded in Talbot County, actively researches and honors Maryland Revolutionary War patriots, and five years ago longtime member Helen “Betty” Seymour began her research into the man who saved the life of the chapter Patriot. Thanks to her, the Maryland Historic Trust and the NAACP Caroline County Branch, now celebrating its 75th anniversary, and the Caroline County Commissioners agreed that native son Thomas Carney deserved permanent recognition. The monument will be located on the Courthouse Greens, adjacent to other landmarks celebrating African Americans who served in the Civil War, Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, and the Emancipation Proclamation. The marker will be located on the in the front of the courthouse, (east side) in proximity to the miniature information center on the greens.

The installation ceremony will begin at 1pm, Saturday, April 30 at 109 Market St., Denton. Parking is available.

Adkins Arboretum has announced the 2022 lineup for its popular Soup ’n Walk programs. Discover early blooms and wildlife, ephemeral flowers, sure signs of spring, meadow grasses, fall color and autumn nuts and berries. Following a guided walk through the Arboretum’s forest, meadow and wetland communities, enjoy a delicious lunch and a short talk about nutrition. Copies of recipes are provided, and all gift shop purchases on these days receive a 20% discount. This year’s offerings include:

Early Blooms, Songbirds & Spring Frogs

Sat., March 19, 11 a.m.–1:30 p.m.
Listen for songbirds and spring frogs while searching for early purple, pink and white blooms. Plants of interest include skunk cabbage, paw paw, spring beauty and bloodroot. Menu: country bean and red cabbage soup, quinoa-red pepper salad, pumpernickel bread with spinach spread, Black Forest cake with cherries.

Spring Ephemerals & Pollinators

Sat., April 16, 11 a.m.–1:30 p.m.

Look again! The blooms of ephemeral plants, trees and shrubs are here and gone in the blink of an eye. Look for pink, white and yellow blooms and listen for early pollinators. Plants of interest include pink spring beauty, may apple, dogwood, golden groundsel, spicebush, sassafras and white beech. Menu: ginger sweet potato soup, Eastern Shore crunchy coleslaw, wheat flaxseed bread with peach jam, almond cupcake with lemon frosting.

Beavers, Tuckahoe Creek & Beyond
Sat., May 21, 11 a.m.–1:30 p.m.

Observe the beautiful Tuckahoe Creek view while scouting for signs of beavers. Plants of interest include mountain laurel, beech, tulip tree, pink lady’s slipper, Solomon’s seal and may apple. Menu: minestrone, oven-roasted red beets and carrots, brown rice bread with raspberry jam, cinnamon crunch apple cake.

Sunny Meadows
Sat., Sept. 17, 11 a.m.–1:30 p.m.
Walk the meadows in search of golden-brown grasses and yellow and purple flowers while watching and listening for bluebirds and dragonflies. Plants of interest include milkweed, black-eyed Susan, goldenrod, Indian grass, big bluestem and sumac berries. Menu: lentil and greens soup, wild rice berry salad, anadama cornbread with salsa, ginger oatmeal walnut cookies.

Dazzling Fall Color

Sat., Oct. 15, 11 a.m.–1:30 p.m.

Fall colors dazzle the eye and pique the appetite. Listen for migrating birds and woodpeckers while watching for changing color on sweet gum, sassafras, tupelo, sumac, dogwood, paw paw, hickory, beech and tulip trees. Menu: cream of broccoli soup, black-eyed pea salad, dill cottage cheese bread with strawberry jam, old-fashioned pear cobbler.

Autumn Harvest

Sat., Nov. 19, 11 a.m.–1:30 p.m.

Enjoy the autumn harvest as we hunt for nutritious berries, nuts and seeds and check for signs of beaver. Plants of interest include dogwood, hibiscus, partridge berry, oak, loblolly pine, juniper, verbena, ironwood and strawberry bush. Menu: kale and chicken soup, apple date salad, cinnamon raisin bread, baked cranberry apples.

Soup ’n Walk programs are $25 for members and $30 for non-members. Advance registration is required; early registration is recommended. Visit adkinsarboretum.org or call 410-634-2847, ext. 0 for more information or to register.

Adkins Arboretum, in partnership with the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park and Visitor Center, will commemorate the 200th anniversary of Tubman’s birth with the virtual launch of a guided experience, Rooted Wisdom: Nature’s Role in the Underground Railroad, on Fri., March 11 at 7 p.m. The event includes a short documentary film that will premiere via livestream, hosted by the Avalon Foundation and viewable on the project’s website, naturesrole.org. Following the premiere, audiences can watch a panel discussion with historians and the filmmakers and participate in a Q&A with the panel.

The 25-minute film and virtual companion explore how self-liberators used the natural landscape to forge a path to freedom. Historian and Menare Foundation President Anthony Cohen—who retraced 1,200 miles of this history by foot, boat and rail—guides viewers through the Adkins Arboretum landscape, revealing freedom seekers’ methods for navigation, concealment, evasion and nourishment.

Historian and seminal Tubman biographer Kate Clifford Larson noted, “Beautifully filmed and narrated, Rooted Wisdom reveals the remarkable literacies that self-liberators possessed and used to navigate and sustain themselves during their flights to freedom along the Underground Railroad. This remarkable film confirms freedom seekers and their families as early naturalists with enormous wells of knowledge about the flora and fauna of their worlds and offers us a fresh look at history on landscapes teeming with life. Simply breathtaking!”

After the virtual launch of the film, visitors to naturesrole.org will be able to view the documentary as a five-part series enhanced by information that invites a deeper understanding through detailed accounts of self-liberators, related historical sites and resources relating to the landscape then and now.

“The Arboretum’s restored landscape makes it an ideal setting for exploring the history of the Underground Railroad,” said Adkins Executive Director Ginna Tiernan. “It looks similar to how the region would have appeared when Harriet Tubman and other self-liberators were making their way to freedom.”

Jointly produced by Adkins Arboretum and Schoolhouse Farmhouse Studio (SHFH) in collaboration with Cohen, Rooted Wisdom was filmed at the Arboretum over the course of a year. The project was supported in part by a grant from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), funded by the Department of the Interior, National Park Service. Funding from the Dock Street Foundation and private donors was also received to promote and broaden the project.

Adam Goodheart, historian and director of Washington College’s Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, said, “The Chesapeake watershed is the heartland of African-American history in the United States. In the fields and forests, we can trace the pathways of countless freedom seekers who used nature to guide and protect them on their northward journeys. This film captures them beautifully.”

The Rooted Wisdom: Nature’s Role in the Underground Railroad launch and documentary film will stream live on Fri., March 11 at 7 p.m. The virtual event is free and open to all, though registration is encouraged at bit.ly/RootedWisdomPremiere. The program will include a panel discussion with the filmmakers, SHFH’s Lauren Giordano and George Burroughs, and project collaborator and narrator Anthony Cohen. Goodheart will moderate the discussion.

Located at the headwaters of the Tuckahoe Creek in Caroline County, Maryland, Adkins Arboretum is one of the few botanical institutions focused on conserving and promoting the flora of the Mid-Atlantic Coastal Plain. The Arboretum’s collection comprises 400 acres of native plant communities in cultivated gardens and in successional patterns of meadows, old fields, pine plantations, young hardwood forests, mature bottomland forests and wetlands. The Arboretum strives to inspire environmental stewardship, provide respite and healing, and celebrate natural and cultural diversity through the joy and wonder of the natural world. Learn more at adkinsarboretum.org.

John Moran’s paintings are like stories in the process of unfolding. On view at the Adkins Arboretum Visitor’s Center through Feb. 26, Journeys Imagined, his exhibit of watercolor, oil and acrylic paintings, brims with rich, glowing color and animated trees, hills, clouds and abstract forms. There will be a reception to meet the artist on Sat., Feb. 19 from 2 to 4 p.m.

Although his paintings almost always suggest landscapes, they hover strangely between representation and abstraction. Colorful, inviting and often playful, they are full of the dreamlike, half-formed shapes you might glimpse in your imagination.

There’s a curved, cream-colored shape in “Nearing the Distance” that seems like a boat afloat in a sea of purple and violet water with islands and dark hills beyond. But none of it is distinct. The “boat” might just be a reflection of a pale cloud in the upper left or a shimmer of moonlight across the water.

Moran’s paintings are evocative of many things, but you can never be quite sure of what, and it’s this uncertainty that makes them so appealing. With no idea how a painting will turn out, Moran begins with some washes of color, then he paints in more colors and shapes, alters them, scrapes some paint away and paints some more. It’s a process of continual change as he experiments with how colors and shapes react to one another.

“It’s never planned,” he said. “I’m working on a painting now that’s all blue, but yesterday or the day before it was all red.”

Now living in Chester, Moran grew up in Washington, D.C., and began taking art classes in his late twenties at the American Academy of Art in Chicago. For 25 years, he lived in West Virginia and continued to paint, mostly creating plein air watercolor landscapes, while raising his family, farming and working at a government job. After his retirement in 1997, he chose to concentrate on art and in 2006 earned an MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Over the years, Moran has developed his own very distinctive style, though occasionally there’s a nod to Arshile Gorky, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali or some other artist. Because he is so fascinated with the process of painting, he relishes the work of many different kinds of painters, listing Francis Bacon, David Hockney and Wayne Thiebaud as some of his favorites.

For Moran, the process of painting is almost more important than the finished work, and he enjoys the unexpected accidents that happen along the way. Dripping paint might turn into tree trunks or a coal-black mass might suggest a rocky seacoast, while a band of sooty red and luminous scarlet shapes below it call to mind molten lava churning deep in the earth.

There is much that is unpredictable and even slightly mystical in his paintings. Moran likes to think of them as visual poetry, never static and always open to new interpretations.

“I don’t know why these are what they are, and I can’t explain it,” he said. “I think it’s another language. Painting expresses something that can’t be said in words.”

Journeys Imagined is part of Adkins Arboretum’s ongoing exhibition series of work on natural themes by regional artists. It is on view through Feb. 26 at the Arboretum Visitor’s Center located at 12610 Eveland Road near Tuckahoe State Park in Ridgely. Contact the Arboretum at 410–634–2847, ext. 0 or info@adkinsarboretum.org for gallery hours.

Do you have a heritage tourism related project in mind for your organization? Perhaps you are planning to restore a historic building, create a new museum exhibit, build a visitor center, develop a walking tour mobile application, or undertake some other project that showcases Maryland’s unique historical, cultural, or natural resources. Will the project take place in a certified heritage area?

A Maryland Heritage Areas project grant may be the funding source for you! The Maryland Heritage Areas Authority (MHAA) is pleased to announce that MHAA is now seeking applications for its FY 2023 grants cycle.

The deadlines are as follows:

Intent to Apply Deadline: January 28th, 2022

Application Deadline: March 1st, 2022

Webinars and Virtual “Office Hours”

Learn more about the opportunity by attending a live webinar, watching a recording of a webinar, or calling into MHAA staff’s virtual “office hours” to talk with about your project!

Click here to register for the upcoming webinars and virtual office hours.

January 12th – 11am: Questions and Answers
January 20th – 6pm:  Questions and Answers
January 26th – 4:30pm: Questions and Answers

MHAA Grant Program Basics

MHAA provides dollar-for-dollar matching grants for capital and non-capital projects located within Maryland’s 13 certified heritage areas. Non-profit organizations, local jurisdictions, state agencies, and federal agencies are all eligible to apply.

Non-capital MHAA grants are awarded for up to $50,000 per project, while capital MHAA grants are awarded for up to $100,000 per project.

Projects seeking less than $5,000 in grant funding are not eligible for MHAA project grants. MHAA requires that both capital and non-capital projects support heritage tourism related activities or infrastructure.

Match Policy

Applicants may propose any combination of cash and in-kind match. This means a project might be matched entirely by volunteer time spent on the project if that makes sense for the application budget. Read more about this and the entire application process in MHAA’s FY 2023 Guidelines.

The first step in the application process–aside from attending one of the highly-encouraged webinars and/or office hour sessions–is to submit a simple online questionnaire called an “Intent to Apply” form. This form is due no later than 11:59 pm on January 28, 2022. To begin a new Intent to Apply form, please click here. 

Full applications in the Stories of the Chesapeake are due online March 11, 2022. Grant awards will be announced in July 2022.

Questions?

For more information about the application process, please refer to the webinars and to MHAA’s FY 2023 Guidelines. These guidelines are updated each year to reflect policy changes.

For projects in the Stories of the Chesapeake Heritage Area, please contact:

Gail Owings, Executive Director
Stories of the Chesapeake Heritage Area
410-778-1460  | info@storiesofthechesapeake.org