Night at the Museum

Camping at the Arkell in Canajoharie

I was first introduced to Kelso Mayo, the Head Curator at the Arkell Museum, at Guy Park Manor on a site visit prior to installing our Glass Canoe. In fact, it was Kelso’s brilliant idea to create a zine to distribute to the public along our route. A meeting with Marie Lorenz (if you don’t know her work- you should! She was a huge inspiration to our trip having rowed downstream Buffalo to the Atlantic in a homemade boat ten years ago) coined the term Broadsheet- she said “y’all are broads” …and so the faux vintage newspaper known as MULE’s PASSAGE was born.

Kim had the innovative idea to put the Mule onto the canoe itself as a figurehead, and our friend Cars Stewart showed up to “hammer” tiny tin shoes onto our mule feet and legs…these became outriggers which instead of helping the boat stay balanced in the water, more often became soggy and drooped, adding undesirable drag to the vessel and rendering themselves decoration only.

The Arkell Museum is an incredible place— a bizarre combination of the family’s private collection (featuring mostly 19th c European and American paintings) and an homage to the Beech-Nut Packing Company that manifested the fortune which afforded these works. One of the most exciting features of the museum is a large glass-walled Great Hall on the first floor. I believe it was the second of three additions, the architecture of each is dated to a specific period and yet magically they all work together as one. What makes this room unique, besides its light filled airy atmosphere and educational wall dressings, is the floor. The stained concrete slab mural hand painted by Tom Schultz depicts a map of the Mohawk Valley with the Erie Canal winding through it. We shot video of this on our DV Cam while visiting the museum for our local programming. The event, conceived by Kelso and myself, included hand-stamping releases of the Broadsheet in the museum, along with a how-to workshop in Lino cuts.

Kim inked the brayer and rolled out prints on paper (hand torn by Juan Cuadros before we left) while I drew and carved a new block print — Chapter 2– the $2 Canal Buck. These prints, made exclusively along the trip route, depict the various beats of our journey. The first illustrated our launch party, leaving from Peebles Bridge. The second, the Glass Canoe at Guy Park Manor. These bucks are available in a limited (open) edition, during the course of Mule’s Passage. The asking price is $20 or whatever you can give. Some have given much more, others less. All is welcome.

When we found out that our project was a finalist candidate for the Erie Canal Residency program, I had to speak to a panel of 12 or so administrators, pitching the project in all its imagined glory. While the jurors were impressed and excited, they voiced serious concerns about the breadth of the proposal and our capacity to complete it on such a small budget and timeline. I left the zoom and emailed them all, asking them to recognize that my decision to undervalue my own labor (and Kim’s choice to include herself in that feat) was a choice I/we were entitled to make— not a reason to dismiss the project.

We have in fact garnered multiple sponsorships — Badger for Sunscreen and Bug Repellant, RecPak for Protein, Campchow for delicious dehydrated meals and last but most important: Bixpy for our electric trolling motor— however none of these came with cash. In our minds, selling canal bucks to all of the lovely and eager folks we met along the canalway would be as easy as doing so on land, but I forgot about the difficulty of packing and unpacking dry bags.

Much as camping on the lawn of the Arkell Museum was a romantic notion, dashed to pieces by the constant veering of trucks off the thruway around our corner curb of grass into town, the canal bucks have been a similar plight…in notion, nothing is more romantic than a night at the museum, but in reality, we are asking you, if you desire, to contribute to our project by donating for a canal buck.

Tax deductible donations are here, https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/mule-s-passage-erie-canal-art-voyage

or you can pledge to substack if you prefer that, or simply Venmo us @z-behl with your address in a private message and we can mail you some of our homemade adventure currency. Thank you for following!