Old Dartmouth Lyceum

The Old Dartmouth Lyceum was established in 1828 and incorporated on June 12, 1829.  Their original goal was the "improvement of its members in useful knowledge and the advancement of popular education." When the Old Dartmouth Historical Society was formed in 1903, membership and property of the Lyceum was transferred to the ODHS.

This year the The Old Dartmouth Lyceum lecture series will focus around the exhibit Arctic Visions: Away then the Ice-Island. 

Projected dates and guest lecturers:

• September 19th, Russell Potter, Frozen Zones: Bradford, Arctic photography and nineteenth-century visual culture.

When the artist William Bradford chartered a voyage to the Arctic purely for the purposes of art -- including photographers -- he was revolutionizing both the scope and the immediacy of photography, bringing back a rich array of images, the first ever taken of Arctic by professional photographers. These photos he put to many uses -- projected as lantern slide lectures, printed and used as view-books for painting commissions, and -- most magnificently -- as illustrations for the groundbreaking book The Arctic Regions.  All these elements testify to the central role of the Arctic in visual culture in both the United States and Britain, and to the ways in which these visions of those regions of icebergs and lost explorers reached a kind of apex in the collaboration between Bradford and Dunmore and Critcherson.

• October 3rd, Kevin Avery
• October 24th, Douglas Wamsley
• November 14th, Kenn Harper

Each program will begin with a reception in the Jacobs Family Gallery at 6:30 pm, followed by a lecture in the Cook Memorial Theater at 7:30 pm.

More information to come for the 2013-2014 calendar year.