All Categories - Arden Craft Shop Museum

ACSM Celebrates Shakespeare

6/6/2018

This summer the Frank Stephens Memorial Theatre will once again resound with the Bard’s immortal words as the Shakespeare Gild presents Twelfth Night this month. At the ACSM we are also celebrating this entertaining comedy, as we present our summer exhibition - A Baker’s Dozen of Twelfth Nights. In researching this exhibition, we have found at least 12 previous productions of this particular play. There are shows as varied as The Young Actors Showcase, The Delaware Play Festival in the 1950’s, a performance in the Moonlight Theater, and a number of early efforts from the 1920’s. We have gathered together programs, artifacts, and drawings to celebrate this fun-filled Shakespearean tale.

The Museum will be open an hour before each performance held in the Field Theater. We invite all play-goers to get your tickets, save your seat at the theater, and then come over to the Museum for a look at the many other productions of Twelfth Night. It is exciting to know that this merry band of 21st Century players come from a long tradition of Shakespeare in The Ardens.

Our current exhibition Finding a Home in the Ardens is still open and contains many photographs and remembrances of the places we call home in The Ardens. The Museum is open Sunday afternoons from 1-3 and Wednesday evenings from 7:30 to 9; please stop in for a look – you will feel right at home.

Upcoming Lecture by Thomas A. Guiler on Arts & Crafts Communities

4/10/2018

The Arden Craft Shop Museum proudly presents...

"'This Isn't Hull House': Life at Arts and Crafts Communities in the Long-Twentieth Century"

A lecture by Dr. Thomas A. Guiler, Assistant Professor of History and Public Humanities at the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library.

Sunday, April 15, 2018, at 4pm at the Buzz Ware Village Center in Arden, Delaware.

In response to the trauma of industrialization and urbanization in the late-nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts Movement took America by storm. Art exhibits, factories, workshops, and societies dedicated to handicraft, worker dignity, and the promulgation of beautiful art to the masses sprouted from California to Boston. Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead, Elbert Hubbard, William Lightfoot Price, and Frank Stephens were so enamored with the movement that they decided to build entirely new worlds—intentional communities—dedicated to pursuing those ideals. Arden, Rose Valley, Roycroft, and Byrdcliffe not only produced beautiful handcrafted furniture, ceramics, textiles, and books, but also created a vibrant community-life, involving lectures, costume parties, classes, theater, and even baseball, where big personalities fell in love, clashed bitterly, and strove to form an alternative way to live in an industrial society. This presentation will examine the social and cultural lives of these communities, the individuals who inhabited them, and, in some cases, how these communities interacted with each other. But Arden, Rose Valley, Byrdcliffe, and Roycroft are not time capsules frozen in the early-twentieth century; they continue to be lively places for art, craft, and community. As such, this lecture will examine the long history of these communities to demonstrate how that history and spirit lives on in the present.

This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served. Donations to the BWVC are gratefully accepted.

ACSM00031. Fiske Warren, Eleanor Stephens, Inky Stephens, Will Price outside the Founder's House, ca. 1910s.

ACSM Closed Wednesday, March 21, 2018

3/21/2018

Due to the inclement weather, the Arden Craft Shop Museum will be closed tonight, Wednesday, March 21. Please join us when we reopen this Sunday at 1pm.

ACSM Photographic Collection Workshop and Database Training

3/21/2018

Interested in learning more about ACSM's photographic collection and how to find the images you're looking for? Please join us for a FREE workshop on Wednesday, March 28th, at 7:30pm at the museum. We will discuss our collection and the best ways to search for photographs in our on-line database. Please feel free to bring your laptop and any questions you may have!

Arden Archives Dinner Recap

3/20/2018

On March 10, the Arden Craft Shop Museum and Archives Committee prepared a wonderful crab cake feast for the Dinner Gild's Saturday night community dinner.

Linda Toman took the lead organizing and planning the menu, shopping, and dividing up the tasks for preparation to make dinner for 145 people.
Everyone participated and we had a great time while doing it. Everyone loved the crab cakes, herb-roasted potatoes, Asian fusion salad, zesty carrots, and apple-blueberry pizza.

It was all delicious!

Archives handed out a short survey about the Arden Craft Shop Museum and got back 48 responses from the packed house. We will review them at our next meeting.

Thanks also to Barbara Macklem for her kind donation of 26 tiny ceramic houses that we used to decorate the tables to call attention to our current museum exhibition, "Finding a Home in the Ardens: Camps, Cottages and Castles.” Someone at each table was randomly selected to take home the little house on their table. Everyone seemed to be thrilled to take home their very own houses!

Thanks to all the helpers and cooks: Linda Toman, Allan Kleban, Maria Burslem, Pat Morrison, Melissa Parsonson, Barbara Macklem, Elaine Hickey, Hans Francke, and Sadie Somerville.

--Sadie Somerville

Linda Toman showing the Archives committee cooks what she wants them to prepare. Right to Left: Elaine Hickey, Maria Burslem,
Allan Keban, Melissa Parsonson, Hans Francke, Linda Toman

Arden Craft Shop Museum well represented at Mid-Atlantic Small Museum Conference 2018

3/14/2018

Barbara Macklem and I were attendees at this year’s Small Museum Association Conference held in College Park, MD over Presidents' Day weekend. Our former ACSM curator, Kelsey Ransick, was one of the Small Museum Association’s coordinators, and she reported that they had the largest turnout yet – some 250 museum representatives.

Also part of the ACSM contingent were Liz Jones-Minsinger, our current ACSM Curator; Robin MacDonald, ACSM Inc.’s newest board member, Arden Archives volunteer, and former curator; and Sharon Hess, our recent Summer Intern from the University of Delaware Museum Studies Program.

After attending this conference for 6 years, our ACSM team has made connections with many other museum professionals, and learned museum best practices, conservation skills, and many other important and useful tools for our tiny spot here in the Ardens.

Each year we come back inspired with new and exciting ideas to apply to the Arden Craft Shop Museum. We may be small, but our history and collections are important and increasingly recognized by a much larger audience.

Sadie Somerville

Clockwise from upper left: Barbara Macklem, Liz Jones-Minsinger, Sadie Somerville, Kelsey Ransick, and Robin MacDonald

Arden featured In New Winterthur Exhibit

3/13/2018

Two images from the Arden Archives Photographic Collection are featured in a new exhibit at the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library.

The centerpiece of "Eye on the Iconic: Honus Wagner and Sports Memorabilia" is an incredibly rare 1909-11 Honus Wagner T206 baseball card. The exhibit also highlights images and objects related to American baseball history.

The exhibit includes a photograph of Margaret Stephens Ware at bat and a group picture of the Arden Women's Baseball Team, both taken in the early twentieth century.

The exhibit is open from March 9 to June 17, 2018.

Arden Craft Shop Museum closed this evening

3/7/2018

Hello everyone! Due to the inclement weather, we will not be open this evening. We will be reopen on Sunday, March 11 from 1 pm to 3 pm. Please stay safe and warm!

special events at the acsm

2/28/2018

Looking for a special way to celebrate the return to Daylight Savings Time? Plan to join the Museum & Archives Committee on Saturday, March 10th for the “three-peat” of our fabulous Crab Cake (with vegetarian zucchini option) Dinner. The crab cakes are from one of the Arden Cookbooks in the Museum’s collection. Arden cooks have been a talented group for many years and the M&A Committee is proud to continue their tradition. We hope to see you there!

With over 4500 photographs available on the Museum’s website (ardencraftshopmuseum.com), it can be a challenge to find just the image you want. On Wednesday, March 28th at 7:30 PM, we will hold a training session to review and explain the easiest ways to search for just that photograph or browse through the entire collection. Please feel free to bring your own laptop or other technology of choice to make things just a little easier.

Our current exhibition Finding a Home in the Ardens is open and contains many photographs and remembrances of the places we call home in The Ardens. Stop in and visit some old friends and favorite places – you never know just who might pop up in one of the photographs There is also a large map of The Ardens to plant a flag on your own leasehold – figuratively speaking, of course! Several new flags have been added in Ardencroft - let’s see how many more can be added! We are also collecting as many unique house names as possible – please share yours. In addition, an exclusive on-line exhibition – reviewing the history of The Ardens and created by our summer intern Sharon Hess and grad student colleagues, is also available at the ACSM.

The Museum is open Sunday afternoons from 1-3 and Wednesday evenings from 7:30 to 9; please stop in for a look – you will feel right at home.

Coming soon – a new supply of re-designed RDN stickers!

--Barbara Macklem

ACSM closed on December 24 and 31

12/19/2017

The Arden Craft Shop Museum will be closed on Sunday, December 24, and Sunday, December 31, to observe the holidays. We will be open on Wednesday, December 27, from 7:30-9pm. Please stop in and see us!