BOWDOINHAM — The Merrymeeting Arts Center has announced its fall 2013 show “Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address” featuring Lincoln portraits by the late Carlo Pittore to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg and the address. The show will open Monday, Nov. 4, at the center adjacent to the river on Main Street.
Area artists are encouraged to interpret Abraham Lincoln and this iconic 1863 speech in any medium working with images, words and icons. Space for the show is limited and artists creating a piece for the show should call 207-504-1132.
Merrymeeting Arts Center encourages art, education and community celebrating the cultural heritage and natural environment of Merrymeeting Bay. The center is open from 10 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturdays, other hours by appointment.
The Gettysburg Address
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate — we cannot consecrate — we cannot hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Editor’s note: See the original Abraham Lincoln, Draft of the Gettysburg Address: Nicolay Copy, November 1863; Series 3, General Correspondence, 1837-1897; The Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division (Washington, D. C.: American Memory Project, [2000-02]), http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/alhome.html.
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