Beckie Kravetz

This “human sundial” is built with path of months, somewhat like a hopscotch board, along with vertical hour markers arranged in an ellipse around the date path. Standing on the square for the current month, a person acts as the sundial’s gnomon, with their shadow pointing to the hour. 

The sundial is located behind the Parsonage building at the Cummington Historical Museum (Kingman Tavern Museum), and the hour markers also tell local history through sculpture, text and painted images. Four of the markers are pedestals displaying sculptures of historic figures:  William Cullen Bryant, 19th century suffragette Henrietta Nahmer, historian Bill Streeter, and Colonel John Cuming, after whom our town is named (he spelled it with only 1 “m”).  

The rest of the hour markers are built from pieces of the timber frame barn that used to stand behind the Parsonage.  Mounted on some of these timbers are poems about town history written by Olive Thayer, a former resident from a historic Cummington family, for our 1979 bicentennial.  A town-wide poetry contest will provide poems that bring our history up to the present day. Other markers reference the pre-colonial indigenous presence on our land, Cummington’s cultural and literary legacies, and our support of the abolitionist movement.  A workshop in tile painting will be offered to residents and visitors in late July, and these tiles will be added to the installation.  

The sundial is a fun interactive local history experience. If the Historical Commission agrees, the piece can stay in place beyond the time-frame of this exhibition and continue to evolve with additional contributions from the artist and the community.