June 6, 2011
6:30 pm	to	7:30 pm

STEWARTSTOWN – Sing! Draw! Dance! Read! Hoot! Growl! during the Big Paws Forest Jamboree at the Stewartstown Community School on Monday, June 6, from 6:30-7:30 p.m. Families with kids of all ages are invited to join artist Marek Bennett for a singing and drawing romp through the forests and fields of New Hampshire and beyond, with plenty of old and new songs about plants and animals, comics, stories, and games. A free participatory event, or just sit back and enjoy.

The Jamboree is sponsored by the Arts Alliance of Northern New Hampshire as part of the Weeks Centennial Celebration, which marks the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Weeks Act, historic federal legislation that allowed the Forest Service to purchase private land to turn into public forests, including the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire. Bennett will also be spending two days at the Community School working with K-8 students on nature-related comics projects, and some of the students’ work may be shared during the evening Jamboree.

Bennett, a New Hampshire cartoonist, musician and educator, has been selected as the official Comics Artist of the Weeks Centennial. Bennett will be working with the Arts Alliance and its partners to develop a series of comics and related school and community programming to celebrate the Centennial and explore the history of the Weeks Act and its meaning for present and future generations.

Bennett’s grandfather and grandmother were active in the Sandwich Range area of the White Mountains, hunting and trapping. “That’s actually where they met,” Bennett says. “When I was a kid, my grandfather would take me out fishing, or out on the trapline. Grandma took me walking in the woods, where we’d collect bones and interesting animal and plant specimens.”

Over the next couple of months, Bennett will be working with the Arts Alliance on many aspects of the Centennial celebrations. His activities will include special programs in participating schools. In the classroom Bennett says he wants to learn what parts of the story are the most relevant to today — and which are the most interesting to the students — and focus on those. Eventually he expects to pull together a whole collection of comics, his own, his students’, works of other artists, and collaborative works, ranging widely in content but all connected back to the Weeks Act of 1911.

Bennett holds an undergraduate degree from Brown University in mathematics and music. He has worked for a software company, traveled in Central America, worked in a bakery and picked apples. It was while he was drawing the menu board at the bakery that someone suggested doing a summer program with kids. He realized that he really liked working with kids and teaching, so he got a Master’s degree in education at Keene State College, and went into teaching. He has since taught Title I, literacy, elementary and middle school students, and is now a full-time teaching artist, who also tutors in Spanish and teaches music.

Call 323-7302 or email for more information, or click on the Arts Alliance website at www.aannh.org. For information about Weeks Act Centennial programs go to weekslegacy.org.

The Arts Alliance, a nonprofit working to promote, support and sustain cultural life throughout northern New Hampshire, is funded in part by an operating grant from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts.