ED Asner as FDR

3/5/10 - Merrill Auditorium, Portland, Maine

Ed Asner as FDR promo photo

Portland Ovations presents FDR, A play by Dore Schary on March 5, 2010 starring Ed Asner. Tickets cost from $34-50.  There are two related events that are free to the public listed below.

The Evening Lecture Series: A Portland Ovations & Maine Historical Society Collaboration
A New Deal for Art: Public Murals in Depression-Era Maine and America

Tuesday, February 23, 2010    7-8:30pm
Maine Historical Society

Join Donna Cassidy, USM professor of American & New England Studies and Art History, for a discussion of the range of visual art programs tied to the New Deal through a digital slide show.  As the 1930s economic stimulus package, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal (1934-1941) provided employment for visual artists through diverse programs from the Index of American Design to the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (FAP/WPA).  This lecture will give an overview of these programs with particular attention to the Treasury Section of Fine Arts which awarded commissions for over 1000 murals across the United States, including a dozen in Maine.  These public murals not only put artists to work but helped communities and the nation define themselves at an unstable economic and historical moment.

Cassidy’s articles on early twentieth-century American art and culture have appeared in Smithsonian Studies in American Art, American Art Journal, Winterthur Portfolio, and numerous anthologies and exhibition catalogues.  She is the author of Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, 1910-1940 (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997) and Marsden Hartley: Race, Region, and Nation (University Press of New England, 2005). A scholar of New England art, she served as editor for the art section of the Encyclopedia of New England (Yale University Press, 2005). She was awarded the USM Trustee Professorship for 2005-2006 for a new research project on transnationalism and American modernist art.  As part of this project, she is working on a book and exhibition entitled Beyond the Northern Border: U.S. Artists in Quebec and Atlantic Canada, 1880-1940.

Contact PortTix at 207-842-0800 for tickets to Portland Ovations’ presentation of Ed Asner as FDR, Friday, March 5, 2010 in Merrill Auditorium.

 

Pre-performance lectures are funded in part by a grant from the Maine Humanities Council.

 
Ed Asner as FDR: Maine and FDR’s Campobello

Friday, March 5, 2010    6:30-7:30 pm
Merrill Auditorium Rehearsal Hall

A speaker from the Canadian Consulate in Boston discusses the longtime political relationship between the United States and Canada and their co-ownership and administration of Campobello, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s beloved getaway in New Brunswick, now an international park. The Canadian speaker is joined by a Maine historian, who offers additional cultural and historical perspectives on Campobello Island, Maine’s nearby neighbor to the north. Precedes the 8 pm performance by Ed Asner as FDR.