Photo from The Providence Athenaeum
Friday 5/3, 5-7pm: The Providence Athenaeum presents this week’s SALON: “Curating the City: Temporary Installations, Permanent Impressions,” Part 3: Artist/Researcher Adj Marshall in conversation with Marc Levitt, host of AS220′s Action Speaks, on Marshall’s “Wasteland National Park” project, a museo-memorial for the interstitial space between the Providence East Side Railroad Tunnel and the Providence Drawbridge.
Interstices, the empty spaces or gaps between spaces full of structures or matter, are easily overlooked and forgotten. Wasteland National Park, a project of Wasteland Twinning (wasteland-twinning.net) an international network of artists who are developing creative research practices to explore the role of wasteland spaces in contemporary cityscapes, seeks to explore and understand this interstitial Providence space by means of creative research and collaborative interpretation with the community. Marshall will discuss cultural, economic, historical, and ecological interpretations of space, industrial ruins, “place making,” and heterotopias.
Series curated by James Brayton Hall. Sponsor: Knoll Environmental Inc., knollenvironmental.com. At the Providence Athenaeum, 251 Benefit Street (corner of College Street) in Providence. Free and open to the public! ProvidenceAthenaeum.org
In the John Carter Brown Library is a book, the margins of which are filled with a mysterious code, or shorthand, long believed to be the writing of Roger Williams, the seventeenth-century theologian and founder of Rhode Island. Although the shorthand went undeciphered for over three hundred years, in 2012, a team of Brown University undergraduate researchers, with the support of several faculty members, was able to crack the code. Contained within the shorthand was a previously untranslated essay written by Roger Williams late in his life, titled, “A Brief Reply to a Small Book Written by John Eliot,” which was part of an ongoing Protestant theological debate between those who believed the Bible supported the baptism of infants and those who were certain that adult baptism was the only biblically defensible practice.
The evening will feature Providence-based startup 
Providence Children’s Museum, the Providence Athenaeum and Kidoinfo present “Speaking of Play,” a series of panel discussions about the critical importance of self-directed play for children’s healthy growth and development. The second conversation – What Happened to Recess? – takes place Tuesday, April 2 from 7:00 – 8:30 PM at the Athenaeum (
