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We hear around the Island that…

The Shelter Island High School’s National Honor Society raised $926 in total, nearly double last year’s, for the Muscular Dystrophy Association through its Shamrock sales. The NHS sends out big thanks to many generous island businesses and individuals who turned them green and mostly gold this year.

Island artist Susan Schrott is featured in “Authenticity and Identity,” an exhibit in Washington, D.C. that will draw connections between Jewish artistic and religious Life in the 21st Century. Adas Israel Congregation is presenting the exhibition, which was originally scheduled to open in April 2020. It has been curated by Ori Z. Soltes, a professor at Georgetown University’s Center for the Study of Jewish Civilization, who for four decades has engaged critically with Jewish artwork, politics and culture.

“As Jewish participation in the visual arts has expanded in the past two centuries, one of the questions asked by Jewish artists has been: where exactly do we fit into the history of Western art which, for much of the past 15 centuries has been essentially Christian art,” Ori Z. Soltes said. “More recently, and with increasing intensity, for Jewish women artists, that question interweaves the double question of where they fit into the history of Western art not only as Jewish artists but as women artists, given the fairly consistent history of excluding women as artists, regardless of their talent — and where, on the other hand, they fit into the history of Judaism, with its traditional exclusions of women from many of its most important liturgical and other aspects.”

More information is available at AuthenticityandIdentity.com.

The Chamber of Commerce Art Show & Craft Fair is awaiting town approval, but plans call for it to take place on Aug. 21.

Stay tuned.

The Island’s beloved Perlman Music Program (PMP), a nonprofit musical education program led by Toby and Itzhak Perlman for young string musicians of rare and special talent, presents its latest virtual collaborative performance: “The Mendelssohn Project,” which premiered on Friday, March 26  and is now available on demand. The video will be available via the following links:

The Perlman Music Program website:

perlmanmusicprogram.org/pmp-from-home

The Perlman Music Program YouTube channel:

Youtube.com/PerlmanMusicProgram

instagram.com/ThePerlmanMusicProgram

facebook.com/PerlmanMusicProgram

More than 140 students, alumni, and faculty came together from around the world, spanning countries and time zones and representing all 26 years of PMP’s history, to record an excerpt from the “Presto” movement from Felix Mendelssohn’s Octet in E-flat Major, Op. 20.

The Mendelssohn Project was directed by Merry Peckham, Associate Director of The Perlman Music Program and Chair of Chamber Music at The New England Conservatory of Music. Ms. Peckham envisioned a virtual tribute to PMP’s cherished annual tradition of performing the Octet for welcoming audiences on the program’s Shelter Island campus and beyond.