< Smithy-Pioneer Gallery

This has been an historical year for Cooperstown’s Winter Carnival, thanks to the Smithy and friends. Each February Cooperstown celebrates the cold, depressing weather by organizing a week of ice sculpting, eating contests, and other such heartwarming activities. The festivities begin with a parade, to which we contributed the greatest float of all time.

The village’s theme this year was The Wild West, which we so cleverly spun as The Wild East and staged a procession similar in its aesthetic to one that might follow a hostile Soviet takeover. Our march comprised a full color guard, a giant bear puppet who bore some resemblance to Lenin, and a truck-turned-stage carrying, among other things, our most holy symbol of creative power: the Anvil.

The float won second place, just a hair behind the Girl Scouts. To experience our float, play the sound clip and click on the pictures to see them full-size.

Excerpt from the Parade Music

Photos by Ulysses Jackson and Ian Austin.

Color guard

Big Lenin Bear

Main Street

Anvil

Bystanders

We owe many thanks for the success of the parade. Clint Henderson, proprietor of the Seen Unseen, lent his skills in carpentry and imagination and allowed us to use his space for construction. Tony Pinotti lent his Ford F-150 and also mixed the music, copies of which are available through the gallery for the low price of three dollars. John Ryan built and donated the big Lenin bear puppet, and Simone Mantellassi painted and pushed the icon that led the procession. Thank you everyone for making this happen!

Things at the Smithy have been pretty boring lately. Not to say there isn’t anything going on, just that you’d regret reading about it. Paying bills, applying for grants, living the life of a non-profit. You know, no big. Fortunately, there have been lots of interesting things happening within our parallel institutions and with our friends in the area.

Ariell, Alyssa and I partook in Play, a performance driven by audience participation at the Foothills Performing Arts Center in Oneonta. The city of Play, constructed of tents, cardboard, foam, and whatever else we could find, made home to a small population of hardworking citizens living under constant police pressure to work hard all day and show no sign of happiness or enjoyment. For the first hour we slept, and dreamed a long dream in which we were free to close our businesses and roam the city, not-so-secretly smiling to each other and caring little for the officer around the corner. But then we were awakened by a thundering gong, and coming to our senses, indifferently assumed our daily chores. Visitors wandered the streets (with our precious currency, thongs! in their hands), and we did what we could to lure them into our shops and snares. Impoverished later, these visitors would work for us, and a ruckus at the city jail would awaken us to the injustice of our bondage. It is a performance that we hope to repeat next year, and every year that follows. Hopefully the fire dancers come back.

The Smithy Institute of Uncoordinated Sports is ramping up its promotion of hula hooping, and if our negotiations with them conclude amicably (why wouldn’t they?) we will be selling hoops and literature in both the Smithy and the Seen Unseen, located on Main Street, Oneonta. This spring we will also join the seenunseen to host Oneonta’s First Annual Hula Hoop Festival, so watch the papers.

Hoops by Ariell. Photo by Karin Bremer.

Hooping in the city of Play.

The Folk Fest has come and gone, and the music and turnout were excellent both. Ommegang and Cooperstown Brewery sponsored the event, so the crowd was nice and loose for dancing and hula hooping. We were also honored to hang a special one-night show featuring the paintings of Oneonta avant-gardist Terry Fox, and altogether the show went beautifully. Check it out.

With the floor mopped and the bottles rinsed, we’re now moving on to our winter projects. The Smithy will collaborate this year with the Unadilla Liberation Front to construct a float to pull in Cooperstown’s Winter Carnival parade on February 7^th. Donations of materials are tax deductible, and we’d be endlessly grateful for lumber, fabric, duct tape, conduit and cardboard. The theme is a mix of avant-garde and Soviet disco, and we invite anyone and everyone to bring a decorated bicycle and ride with us around the float as it passes the shocked and confused gazes of C-town’s citizenry. Hula hoops will be provided, but pride flags, peace banners, and other revolutionary colors are BYO. Email your interest of you’d like to participate.

Pottery classes begin January 18^th, so give us a call if you’d like to take classes or attend open studio sessions. More updates to come.

We’ve been doing a ton of deep cleaning and organizing here at the Smithy. Over the last few decades there’s been a lot of junk accumulating here, and in the past couple of months we’ve been going through it all and moving things out the door. We also went through the entirety of the gallery’s paper archives, where, in addition to every phone message taken since 1979, we found such useful items as Gallery 53 letterhead, eighty dollars in cash, and our certificate of incorporation. Check it out:

Archivin'.

With the cleaning nearly finished, we’ll be able to spend much more time planning events for the winter. Our Folk Fest will commence at 7 PM on Saturday, November 20. Tickets are $20 and can be reserved by calling the gallery: (607) 547-8671. We’re also in the early stages of a silent film festival, which will feature a live band improvising a musical score. In addition, we have begun a collaborative effort with The Smithy Institute of Uncoordinated Sports to jointly host open hula-hoop sessions on the corner of Main Street and Pioneer Street. These will, in all probability, be unannounced. But if you’re driving down Main Street and you see us out there, do pull over.