Special events at Museum L-A for Festival

Festival-goers are invited to visit Museum L-A and participate in special activities to be held during the 2009 Great Falls Balloon Festival. Admission to the Museum will be free on Saturday, August 22.
Visitors will have the opportunity to experience the newly-opened special exhibit Portraits & Voices: Brickyard Roads telling the stories of Lewiston-Auburn’s brickmaking industry – the people, the places and the processes. This multi-media exhibit includes 26 portraits of brickworkers taken by documentary photographer Mark Silber of brickworkers and interviewed by award-winning oral historian Andrea L’Hommedieu. Photographs donated by Morin Brick Company, the Morin family, the Dennis family of Dennis Brick Company, and Ralph Metayer of Rumford of Minot and others illustrate the brick-making process of old. Visitors will get a feel for the impact and the longevity of local brickyards – both small and large – identified on a map and a timeline dating from the 1850’s to today. Videos show the process – then and now – and the Dennis family’s videotaped interview tells a great story. Art specially created for this exhibit includes a painting by Ray Michaud of Lewiston titled “Laying Brick in the Yard (Morin Brick)” and a carpet woven of bricks by artist and Maine College of Art faculty member Christina Bechstein. The exhibit was made possible in part through grants from the USDA Rural Business Enterprise Grant program, the Maine Community Foundation’s Androscoggin County Fund, and the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts
On Saturday, Aug. 22 from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. the museum will host the Mudmobile, a program through the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Newcastle. The Mudmoblie is a traveling ceramics resource center in a van that allows Watershed to bring clay workshops to diverse sites and populations throughout Maine. Participants will learn the clay-making process and will create their own piece of pottery. Five sessions will be held throughout the day. The fee is $5 per person which covers materials and the cost of creating a finished piece. Registration is required and limited to the first 100 registrants. There will be separate sessions for adults and children, with a limit of 20 participants per session. Adult sessions are at: 8 a.m., 11 a.m., and 2:30 p.m. Children’s (age 3 and up) sessions are at 9:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. Call the Museum at 207-333-3881 for more information and to register.
Come and hear about plans for the new Museum L-A from 1-2 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 22 at the Museum. Learn about work that is currently being done at the site of the former Camden Yarns mill property on Beech Street and what the future holds.
Museum L-A will be paddling with the balloons hosted by the Androscoggin Land Trust every morning and evening balloon launch. They will be meeting at Little Andy Park and boat launch on Second Street in New Auburn by 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. to head up river. Come and enjoy a nice paddle.  More information at www.androscogginlandtrust.org or 782-2302
Museum L-A: The Story of Work and Community in Lewiston-Auburn is located at 35 Canal Street, Lewiston – at the corner of Canal and Chestnut streets in Lewiston. Regular hours are Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.