Florence Griswald Museum, Lyme CT

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February 22–June 22, 2025

Their Kindred Earth: Photographs by William Earle Williams

Land holds history. Some histories are better known than others, preserved by those who valued particular stories and wanted them remembered. What do we know about the land we live on? Who preceded us and what transpired? History books leave holes and silences along with assumptions that have been passed down for generations. This exhibition aims to fill some of the absences by sharing lesser-known stories about Connecticut and its connections to other regions that played a role in bringing people of color to the shores of the future United States. Art has the power to help us see, and to encourage us to imagine the presence of those who had no agency or opportunity to record their own histories.

Over the past forty years artist William Earle Williams (born 1950) has made sites of African American history more visible through his exquisite photographs. Mentored in the 1970s by the famed photographer Walker Evans, who had a home in Lyme, Williams attended the Yale School of Art at Evans’s suggestion. From that Connecticut inception, Williams embarked on a decades-long journey to identify and photograph places across the country that hold histories of the slave trade, the Underground Railroad, and emancipation.

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Google Calendar removes default references for Indigenous People Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day and many other observance days (Raiza)

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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-calendar-removes-pride-day-black-history-month

Google’s online calendar has removed default references for a handful of holidays and cultural events — with users noticing that mentions of Pride and Black History Month, as well as other observances, no longer appear in their desktop and mobile applications.

The omissions gained attention online over the last week, particularly around upcoming events that are no longer automatically listed. But Google says it made the change midway through last year.

The California-based tech giant said it manually added “a broader set of cultural moments in a wide number of countries” for several years, supplementing public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com that have been used to populate Google Calendar for over a decade. Still, the company added, it received feedback about some other missing events and countries.

“Maintaining hundreds of moments manually and consistently globally wasn’t scalable or sustainable,” Google said in a statement sent to The Associated Press. “So in mid-2024 we returned to showing only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com globally, while allowing users to manually add other important moments.”

Google did not provide a full list of the cultural events it added prior to last year’s change — and therefore no longer appear by default today.

But social media users and product experts posting to online community boards have pointed to several holidays and cultural observances that they’re not seeing anymore. In addition to the first days of Pride Month and Black History Month, that includes the start of Indigenous Peoples Month and Hispanic Heritage Month, as well as Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Verge first reported on some of these omissions last week.

Norway-based Time and Date AS, which operates timeanddate.com, did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday. The website shows numerous country-by-country lists of holidays and observances from around the world — some of which include cultural awareness events like Pride and Black History Month — but those specific to public holidays are more limited.

Lecture by Patrick Greaney

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The German company Braun was founded in 1921 and became internationally prominent in the 1950s for its products designed in collaboration with Bauhaus alumni and the Ulm School of Design. Its radios, record players, and household appliances epitomized West Germany’s embrace of functionalism and quickly entered museum collections in Europe and the United States. This talk will examine the origins of Braun’s 1950s product designs in the National Socialist era and consider in particular the company’s indebtedness to forced labor.

Patrick Greaney is Professor of German and Humanities at University of Colorado Boulder. He is the author of Quotational Practices: Repeating the Future in Contemporary Art (2014) and Untimely Beggar: Poverty and Power from Baudelaire to Benjamin (2008). He has edited or co-edited six books, including An Austrian Avant-Garde (2020)and Conceptualism and Other Fictions: The Collected Writings of Eduardo Costa, 1965-2015 (2016), and his most recent literary translations and co-translations are Heimrad Bäcker’s Documentary Poetry (2024) and Carlos Soto Román’s 11 (2023).

Remembering Winfred Rembert

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The first anniversary of Winfred Rembert Day in Connecticut will be on Thursday, Feb. 6. You are invited to a special screening of “Ashes to Ashes.” This 25-minute documentary, produced by Dr. Shirley Whitaker and Taylor Reese, tells the story of master leatherwork artist, Winfred Rembert, who survived an attempted lynching in 1967. The film shows the extraordinary friendship built between Winfred and Dr. Whitaker, while she works to memorialize the 4,000 forgotten African Americans lynched during the Jim Crow era through a special home-going ceremony. The film screening will be followed by a conversation with members of the Rembert Family, Dr. Shirley Whitaker, Pierre Sylvain, and Wesleyan University film studies professor, Pedro Bermudez. Refreshments will be provided. RSVP here.

Time changed to: Saturday, February 8th, 2:00-4:00pm

Beckham Hall in Fayerweather (45 Wyllys Ave, Middletown, CT 06457) at Wesleyan University