What To Do at the SM&NC
Featured Events & Programs
Take-A-Hike Week
Monday, April 15 – Saturday, April 20
9 – 5 pm
Join us for many different hikes, live animal programs, and much more throughout the week! A list of programs will be on our website as the week approaches. Get outside this spring and join us for some family adventure!
This year’s Take-a-Hike Week wraps up with our first-ever Farm & Forest All-Terrain 5K Run, sponsored by Riley Volvo Cars Stamford.
All Take a Hike Week programs are free for Members and free with admission for Non-Members.
Poetry Workshop
Thursday, April 18
6 pm – 8 pm
How do we want to look at art?
How can we interpret what we see?
Join Sophie Cabot Black, poet, activist, and local farmer, for an intimate writing workshop exploring themes of resilience and strength inspired by our current exhibition, Pat Musick: Our Fragile Home.
Sophie is the author of three collections. NPR called her “the poet’s poet,” her work was a “hot pick” on CNBC’s Topic A with Tina Brown, and from time to time she can be seen in the The New Yorker.
Refreshments and nibbles will be served.
Farm & Forest Run
SPONSORED BY
RILEY VOLVO CARS STAMFORD
Sunday, April 21
8 am start
Our exciting new benefit run explores the vast terrain and many wonders of the SM&NC’s extraordinary 118-acre site. Route starts at the Knobloch Family Farmhouse and will include paved paths throughout Heckscher Farm, scenic nature trails, wooden boardwalks and more. Rain or shine!
Sponsored by Riley Volvo Cars Stamford
Produced by Ridgefield Running Company
Pat Musick: Our Fragile Home
On view through May 27, 2024
in our Bendel Mansion Museum Galleries
Pat Musick: Our Fragile Home was inspired by the words astronauts have used universally upon viewing Earth from space for the first time: Fragile, Protect, Beauty, Steward, Sustain, Harmony, Nurture. In different languages and across many boundaries, their words were all the same. Through paint, sculpture, and mixed media, Pat Musick conveys the fragility of our planet, and its natural and eternal beauty.
Our Fragile Home exhibits Musick’s most astonishing work: the large-scale Ra made from branches of a fallen tree, polished and repurposed; the series The Instant of It All, which portrays trees as a metaphor for the impermanence of life; and Epilogue 6, a feat of engineering in steel and stone that represents renewal and rebirth.
Pat Musick’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and has over 50 permanent installations in public spaces. Musick was married to Marine Corps Colonel Gerald P. (Jerry) Carr, one of 19 Group 5 astronauts selected by NASA in 1966. He was Commander of the Skylab 4 84-day mission. Their life is the subject of the documentary The Artist & The Astronaut which had its Connecticut premiere at the Stamford Museum & Nature Center in May 2023 and will be shown again as a Nights Out program on March 8, 2024.
Phase II: Planetarium & Astronomy Center Underway
On the morning of May 23, 2023, the Stamford Museum & Nature Center officially broke ground on the Phase II Planetarium & Astronomy Center.
The 11,000-square-foot facility will reinvigorate a core pillar of the SM&NC’s Mission and bring our organization’s Planetarium and Observatory programs under the same roof for the first time in our 87-year history. Astronomy programming has long been a Mission signature ever since our first astronomy classes were held in 1941. They continue to this day, and will abound in the years to come.
