Past Events

Mask work and puppetry have long been used as instruments for storytelling, both theatrically and therapeutically. The inanimate objects are vessels to be endowed with power, stemming from imagination, creativity, and memory. What drives us to utilize puppets and masks to tell stories of our origins, of our struggles, of our hardships? How do these objects give us permission to interact in unexpected ways and explore topics that might be considered taboo? How does interacting with a puppet or a mask change the performer? Or the audience? We’ve been leaning on these objects since prehistoric times to tell our stories and reenact our rituals. How do we use puppets and masks today?

Join Ronee Penoi and Professor Felice Amato, Dr. Jason Butler, and director Veronica Barron to explore the history and contemporary use of puppets and masks in ritual, performance, and therapies and learn how these vehicles unlock difficult topics.

About The Point
At ArtsEmerson, the art is the provocation; conversation is the point. The Point is a conversation series that invites audiences to explore big questions in intimate settings. Hosted by a member of the ArtsEmerson team, local and national luminaries will offer their points of view on the urgent questions surfaced by the artists on our stages.

Photojournalist Ulrike Welsch, Chair of Health Studies at MassBay Community College Denise Garrow-Pruitt, and Photo Editor of The Boston Globe Bill Greene discuss Boston's desegregation efforts in the 1960s, through the lens of many photographs of the times, moderated by Melissa Taboada Editor of the Great Divide Education Team at The Boston Globe.

Join us at the GBH Studios at the Boston Public Library for a nerdy night of NOVA science trivia! Get ready for creative categories and exciting prizes as we test your knowledge of the natural world, space, the history of science, and more!

This month, in honor of our new documentary, What are UFOs?, premiering on Wednesday January 22, we will be quizzing you on the history of UFOs among other categories.

Registration is encouraged for this free event.

What can a 19th-century mill disaster teach us about workplace safety today?

Join Professor Robert Forrant (UMass Lowell) and Gabriel Porter (Safety and Health Specialist/Process Safety Management Coordinator OSHA Boston Regional Office) for a compelling discussion moderated by Charles River Museum’s Director of Education, Stephen Guerriero. Forrant will delve into the catastrophic Pemberton Mill collapse of 1860—an industrial tragedy that claimed 98 lives, revealed systemic failures, and left questions of accountability unresolved. Porter will explore how OSHA builds on lessons from such events to safeguard workers in today’s industries. Together, they’ll connect history to modern-day practices, offering insights into the ongoing fight for safer workplaces.

Cambridge Forum takes an incisive look at America’s public health system in the light of another potential pandemic, and the prospect of an incoming president who is set to dismantle our current public health care science which is regarded by many, as the best in the world. Alarm bells were sounded early last December when The Lancet, the world’s top medical journal, published an issue dedicated to U.S. public health lauding its remarkable global record and worrying for its future, under a second Trump administration.

Join Ford Hall Forum at Suffolk University, in partnership with Brandeis University Press and American Ancestors for a wide-ranging discussion about a fascinating period of global history as experts from both sides of the Atlantic discuss maritime commerce--the innovation, benefits, and damages of the spice trade.

Learn how the drive of sea captains, worldwide consumers’ taste, and technical innovations—improvements in ship design, compasses, and mapping— enabled navigation across unprecedented distances, from such embarkation points as Venice, Amsterdam, Lisbon to the exotic ports of Malacca, Goa, Bombay, where they tracked down elusive spices. Such travels impacted art, literature, and science worldwide; and they were often disastrous for local populations, who were frequently exploited as slave plantation labor. This wide-ranging account of a fascinating period of global history uses original maps and contemporary artists’ views to tell the story of how each port developed individually; while also encouraging us to consider contrasting points of view of the benefits and the damages of the maritime spice trade.

Dark matter accounts for some 27 percent of the universe but is invisible. One promising technique to reveal it is the analysis of gravitational lensing that very occasionally aligns galaxy clusters.

The much-noted “cosmic question mark” image for this event is the result of a rare alignment between two distant galaxies due to gravitational lensing. Professor Jacqueline McCleary explains how cosmologists use such examples of weak gravitational lensing between galaxy clusters to explore the nature of elusive dark matter and its interaction with galaxies. She discusses how cosmologists gather and analyze data from observatories on mountaintops, in the stratosphere, and in space.

Dr. McCleary is a collaborator in the Local Volume Complete Cluster Survey (LoVoCCS), the SuperpressureBalloon-borne Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT), and COSMOS-Web (a JWST collaboration).

SOLD OUT

GBH, Flour Bakery and Chef Joanne Chang present Sticky Bun School on
Saturday, Jan 11, 2025, 11am-12noon

Sweeten your weekend with an interactive baking event. GBH is partnering with Chef Joanne Chang and Flour Bakery for a special Saturday morning treat. Your $150 ticket includes a baking kit with ingredients to make 8 signature sticky buns, mailed directly to your home. We’ll also email you a Zoom link for special access to the one-hour virtual baking class led by Joanne Chang, the renowned pastry chef and founder of Flour Bakery.

On Saturday, January 11 at 11am, you’ll join Joanne live in a Zoom virtual event and follow along as she demonstrates how to make her signature sticky buns. She’ll share some baking tips with you. At the end of the class, she’ll answer some of your baking questions, too!

This activity is a great way to engage your whole family or gather your friends to make this delightful treat. Learn how to make warm, gooey, delicious sticky buns that will become a new baking tradition in your household.

And this event is the kind that keeps on giving. Whether you buy a ticket for yourself, or a loved one, know that your contribution will also go toward supporting GBH and public media.

Your ticket includes a sticky bun kit that is mailed to your house and the live hour Zoom Webinar class featuring Joanne Chang.
* $150 sticky bun kits shipped to continental USA locations
and
* $170 for sticky bun kits shipped to Canada, Alaska and Hawaiian residents


IMPORTANT: Ticket sales have ended for this event, so that we have time to mail out your sticky bun baking kits.

Photo Credit: Kristin Teig

This month, Vessela Stoyanova plays jazz inspired by Balkan folk music, with her electric marimba, Valerie Thompson on cello, and Fabio Pirozzolo on percussion.

The record-breaking heat of the last few years is, climate scientists say, “not just summer.” Two distinguished researchers, Mathew Barlow and Jeffrey Basara, discuss their recent important article about the sudden uptick in global temperature, why is worrying climate experts, how they analyze the global heat patternsand what must be done to address the problem.