The Portuguese & Lusophone-world Lecture Series presents: Manuel F. Costa Jr., Director of the Regional Museum of Pico

Join us for a special evening – a combination of lecture and live music – featuring lecturer Manuel F. Costa, Jr., the Director of the Regional Museum of Pico, with his son Francisco Costa for the music portion of the evening.

Musicians from the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra, Daniel Nerger on piano and Nick Francese on bass, will join Manuel and Francisco for a portion of the music program.

Son and grandson of people from the land and the sea, Manuel F. Costa, Jr. is has served as President of the Regional Whaling Heritage Advisory Commission since 2000. Prior to holding this position, he was a professor at various institutions. Currently, Costa is also the Coordinator of the Executive Committee of the Network of Museums and Visitable Collections of the Azores.

Costa has lectured and presented in numerous cultural initiatives and projects, both at home in Pico and abroad in the United States of America, Canada, Brazil, Spain and Bermuda. He has also participated in films, and in several television programs and projects – regional, national and international – related to Azorean culture and museology, with particular emphasis on the island of Pico and the Museum of Pico.

Costa has also developed, collaborated and participated, as manager and cultural producer, in numerous projects in the field of museology, museography, scientific and cultural dissemination, the promotion and animation of heritage and museology, the arts of the stage, and performative communication, at home and abroad.

As musician, Costa has participated in numerous musical projects, around the dissemination of Azorean music (traditional and contemporary), and of Azorean/insular expression.

As an interpreter, he has made known, in the Azorean Diaspora, in the spaces of Lusophony, in mainland Portugal and in all the islands of the Azores, poetry, composers, authors and Azorean creators.

For more than thirty years, Costa has also been soloist and instrumentalist, in the group Coral das Lajes do Pico. With this emblematic Choir of the Azores he recorded five CDs, and performed in numerous concerts on the island, in the Archipelago, in the Portuguese Continent, in Canada and in Spain.

In 2017, he recorded “I am an island”. The work is a tribute and a re-visitation, poetic and aesthetic, to some of the most emblematic themes of traditional and contemporary Azorean music. The album was considered as one of the most expressive contributions produced recently on the Azorean lyric. “I am an Island” was released at the Whalers' Week, in Lajes do Pico, in 2018. In 2019, the album was also presented, in a concert, at the Teatro Micaelense, recorded for television.

Doors open at 5:30 PM, with program starting promptly at 6:00 PM in the Cook Memorial Theater. A lite cocktail reception will follow at 7:00 PM in the Jacobs Family Gallery. Free admission.