Monkey Day
Monkey Day is an unofficial holiday celebrated internationally on every year December 14.The holiday was started in 2000 when founder Casey Sorrow jokingly scribbled Monkey Day on a friend's calendar, and first celebrated by Lansing residents and art students at Michigan State University. It gained notoriety when Casey Sorrow and Eric Millikin's own comic strip, Fetus-X, began promoting it online along with other cartoonists.
Since then, Monkey Day has been celebrated internationally, across
countries like the U.S., Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The holiday is primarily celebrated with costume parties intended to help draw attention to issues related to simians, including medical research, animal rights, and evolution. Often there are competitions to see who has the best costumes, who can act like a monkey the longest. Other Monkey Day activities include going on shopping sprees for Paul Frank "Julius the Monkey" fashions, eating Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey ice cream, and spending the day at the zoo.
By the way for Monkey Day 2012, "USA Weekend" published "The 12 Stars of Monkey Day", a series of paintings by Eric Millikin that were "in part inspired by the many pioneering space monkeys who rode into the stars on rockets, leading the way for human space flight."
ReplyDeleteThe activities on Monkey Day
ReplyDeleteThe day is made of parties and costumes to reflect animal in all of us and begin attention to the simian. Some celebrate the history of the simian and others try to pick forth the issues of today with simian. Which includes the medical research, animal rights and evolution. It also gives time for all those monkey stories.
The activities at the parties can range from dressing up as a monkey to knitting monkey dolls. The holiday and parties are around the same time alot of us get stressed for Christmas. A time to get silly and let go of all that is on your mind. Go monkey. Casey Sorrow states, "is to celebrate these noble creatures who embody the best of human characteristics, such as intelligence, family values, kindness, humour and compassion, while also promoting education and recognition of these simian species and their fragile habitat."
http://www.monkeyday.org/2012/12/happy-monkey-day-2012.html
ReplyDeleteUseful link)
Monkey Day is an annual celebration of all things simian, a festival of primates, a chance to scream like a monkey and throw feces at whomever you choose. Or perhaps just a reason to hang out with your friends while grunting and picking fleas off each other.
Traditional celebrations
ReplyDeleteOften, celebrations involve raising money for primate-related issues. In 2008, the official Monkey Day celebrations included an art show and silent auction to benefit the Chimps Inc. animal sanctuary; the show and auction included art by human artists as well as paintings from chimps Jackson and Kimie, residents of the sanctuary. The Biddle Gallery in Detroit also celebrated Monkey Day in 2008 with an annual Monkey Day art sale that included a free banana with each purchase
Roger Eliot Fry (14 December 1866 – 9 September 1934) was an English artist and art critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism. He was the first figure to raise public awareness of modern art in Britain, and emphasized the formal properties of paintings over the "associated ideas" conjured in the viewer by their representational content. He was described by the art historian Kenneth Clark as "incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin... In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry"
ReplyDeleteWell, I think it's rather interesting to mention some gifts for this unusual holiday:
ReplyDeleteKing Kong DVD
Curious George themed gift
Donate to your favorite monkey charity
Visit the monkeys at your local zoo
A Sock Monkey
Long before homo sapiens observed the miracle of oil that burned for eight days, long before they traveled under a guiding star to meet a child in a manger, long before Maulana Karenga invoked Ujama, there was a winter holiday commemorating the contributions of all our primate brothers and sisters: Monkey Day.
ReplyDeleteWell, that's not exactly true. While primates have had their day(s) for about 65 million years, Monkey Day has been celebrated as an unofficial holiday since 2000. That's when a group of Lansing area art students and their friends from Michigan State University got together and proclaimed Dec. 14 the day to celebrate all things simian.