Tag: North Carolina

Be Like MLK, Give Back to the Community!

· Leave a comment ·

The arts non-profit for which I work is currently having an Indiegogo to help raise money for our Emerging Artists Grant program, and I would LOVE for you to contribute to it.  Money raised during the Indiegogo will go directly to the sixteen artists who received the award this year.  Here is a bit about the program:

“Durham Arts Council seeks your partnership and investment to help launch and develop the careers of highly skilled and promising artists who have mastered the basics of their discipline, and are at a critical development moment in their artistic lives where they need funding, encouragement, and recognition of their work.  The DAC’s Emerging Artist Program serves artists in visual, performing, literary, and media arts in five North Carolina counties in the central Piedmont area and has been a vital part of developing artist careers for 29 years.

Each year, 12-16 grants are awarded to artists selected from a highly competitive applicant pool of over 100 artists who apply from Durham, Chatham, Orange, Granville and Person counties.  Each grant of approximately $1,500 funds a project pivotal to the advancement of the artist’s work.”

Image

To learn more about the program, including this year’s winners and also PHOTOS and VIDEO and PERKS, please go to the Indiegogo site.  If you care about the arts AT ALL you’ll want to contribute to this program.  A city without art is not a city, and these artists make our cities awesome in so many ways.  Also, please spread the word around your own communities, we need all the help we can get!

And here is one more link to that Indiegogo site, please go check it out! 

 

The Belated Passover Seder Run-Down

· Leave a comment ·

Passover was about two weeks ago, and I suggested to my parents and sister and grandmother that they all come up to North Carolina, where my uncles and I live, and we all do Passover up here together.  I’ll do one night, I naively suggested, and my uncles would do another.  Somehow everyone agreed to this idea, and that’s how I found myself with the task of cooking the first night of Seder on a Friday night in early April.

I’m not going to bother explaining the terms Passover and Seder.  Other people have done it better than I can.  Just Google it.  I’m hoping that most of you know what these things are anyways, but I’m always surprised by how many people have never met a Jewish person, or how many people know nothing about Jewish culture.  What can I say, I grew up in Florida.

Anyways, doing Passover Seder is sort of like doing any other dinner party (which I have done), except not really.  Because you have to time the multiple courses of food to the end of the saying of various prayers and the reciting of various stories and the hopefully having of various discussions.  So you never exactly know when that food that is warming in the oven and hopefully not drying out at all will be served, because a Seder doesn’t really have a set end time.  Also, did I mention the multiple courses?

Anyways, I was doing just fine in my cooking of the food, and then my sink garbage disposal broke, and my sink started clogging, and that’s when my family arrived.  So that was fun!  Regardless all the food turned out just fine, and everyone seemed happy.  From what I could tell.

So here are some pictures of my family (maternal side only) assembled at my small-ish apartment for the first night of Seder.

An here are some pictures of my mother and uncles misbehaving themselves during the Seder.

That green thing my uncle is holding is one of our 10 Plagues, we’re all about fun representations of serious happenings.

And here is my dad, being exasperated by our relative’s antics.  That white thing he is wearing is a kittel, you probably remember me talking about it back in my post about Raffi and Rachel’s wedding.

Anyways, onto the food.

(more…)

A Day Trip to Greensboro

· 3 Comments ·

Hey guys.  I know, I’ve been gone.  Work is really busy.  Like, really busy.  We have two giant events this week, and then our Spring Art Walk the weekend after this one, and I am mega-planning and organizing all of it and, yeah.  Also my entire family was here for Passover and then I went to New York City this past weekend.  AND I AM TOTALLY GOING TO TELL YOU ALL ABOUT THAT.  But first, I’m going to go waaaaay back to the last Saturday in March, when Jon and I took a day trip to downtown Greensboro!

My awesome friend Heather Gordon was part of a group show at the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art.  The show closed April 1st and, of course, we waited until March 31st to go to Greensboro to see it.  Hey, at least we went!  Anyways, I’ve been living in North Carolina for over four years and I’ve never been to Greensboro, which is ridiculous because it is only an hour away.  So I figured we’d take this opportunity to explore downtown Greensboro.

We spent most of our time around Elm Street (see convenient street sign).  We got there around lunch time, so we had some lunch at Natty Greene’s Pub & Brewing Co.   I had a mediocre caesar salad and Jon had some kind of a wrap but we split some home made potato chips and those things were awesome and delicious.

We then headed down to Green Hill to see the show, which was called Word Maps.  It featured the work of four artists, all of whom do things with codes and languages and what not.  Here are lots of pictures of some art and the installation, it was a gorgeous gallery so I took a lot of photos. Oh also Heather had some work based on the game Parcheesi, which I have never played, but that is why a bunch of the pictures are of games and stuff.

Okay so all of that stuff above is by Heather, who is awesome.  The stuff below is by Vicky Essig, Paul Rousso, and Merrill Shatzman, respectively.  There aren’t a lot of photos, so you can chill.

(more…)

Marry Durham One Year Anniversary

· 2 Comments ·

On March 19th, 2011, a mass of Durhamites gathered on Rigsbee near Motorco and Fullsteam to marry Durham–to pledge to live a conscious, sustainable, community-focused, Durham-loving lifestyle.  I was not at Marry Durham because I was in D.C., visiting some friends.  Luckily, Marry Durham held its one-year anniversary this past Saturday, and I was able to attend.  Since Saturday was St. Patrick’s Day, the anniversary celebration had a green tinge to it, but for those of us think St. Patrick’s Day is dumb (truly, it is the frattiest and bro-iest “holiday” ever) the event thankfully had more of a Durham feeling than a frat-boy Irish feeling.

We arrived a little late, and so missed the parade and the brief vow renewal service.  However, we got there in time to grab a pretzel from Cafe Prost (a new-ish food truck that does good, fresh soft pretzels) to see the klezmer band Freylach Time play at Fullsteam.  Klezmer is the music you associate with traditional Jewish celebrations–Hava nagilah etc.  I was all over that, lord knows I love my people’s music.  They were awesome.  People danced, I danced too!

There was a lot of anti-Amendment 1 protesting going on at the event, which was positive; Amendment 1 is this horrible thing that is maybe happening in North Carolina that not only will write a statement defining marriage as ONLY between a man and a woman into the state constitution, but will also do a bunch of other awful things that you can read about here.   Anyways, I’m all about anti-Amendment 1, but all the lovely people–including this woman and her awesome cake hat–were basically preaching to the choir.  The Marry Durham celebration wasn’t really a place where pro-Amendment 1 people would hang out, I’d love to take the message to them. Regardless, VOTE NO ON AMENDMENT 1 FOR REALSIES Y’ALL.

Anyways, enough politics, here are more dancing photos.

A lot of people were dressed up, either in St. Patrick’s Day themed garb or in wedding garb, like the very committed woman above and this awesome lady in her awesome dress and awesome mask.

(more…)

Why I am Thankful This Thanksgiving: I HAVE AN ART JOB.

· 5 Comments ·

So, guys, after over two and a half years of searching and doubt and self-loathing and anger and sadness and misery at the state of the economy, I finally achieved my goal: I have attained a job in the art world.  I promised myself that this blog would not be a venting place for my fury at the universe during my job search, and I also promised myself that I could write a big, long, venty post chronicling my journey–but only when I achieved my goal of attaining a professional, full-time position in the art world.  So here’s my post.  I am glad to finally share it with you.

This is a big deal.  I have wanted to work in the arts since I was sixteen and I took Advanced Placement Art History with the amazing Pat Johnston at Pine View School for the Gifted.  I loved the course, excelled in the classwork, and got my well-earned 5 on my AP exam (I’m not still proud of that or anything).  After the class I decided that a job in the arts, preferably in a museum or gallery setting, would be my thing, and I behaved accordingly, so accordingly that I can summarize it in bullet points y’all:

-I majored in Art History and English at the University of Florida.  I wrote an honor’s thesis for my Art History major and graduated summa cum laude (I’m not still proud of that or anything either).

-I interned at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, the University of Florida’s art museum, for a good year and a half.  I spent one semester in the education department as part of a group initiative to plan programming for the undergraduate population at UF and I spent a year interning for the curator of contemporary art.

The Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida, a great museum, you should go!

-I then launched myself straight into graduate school in Art History, heading to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to pursue my Master’s and eventually (I hoped, back then) my Ph.D.

-While at UNC I interned at the North Carolina Museum of Art, co-curated an exhibit at UNC’s affiliate museum the Ackland Art Museum, and secured a summer internship at the Whitney Museum of American Art.  This was the spring of 2009 and this, guys, this is where the bullet points need to end, because things get messy.

(more…)