Walking into the warren of untenanted storefronts beside the Scrap Exchange, I find them anything but vacant. The corridor inside teems with hurried industry and strange tableauxa mad scientist’s lab here, a sort of Viking vanity table there. Someone carrying a large, ridiculous bird puppet scurries by. Flickering lights beckon from the doors lining the […]
Brian Howe
Posted inArt
A Durham Press and National Poets Put Their Money Where Their Mouth Is with Anti-Police-Brutality Anthology Resisting Arrest
RESISTING ARREST: POEMS TO STRETCH THE SKY Wednesday, February 22, 7 p.m., free Letters Bookshop, Durham www.jacarpress.com Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky, published by Durham’s Jacar Press last spring, begins with two epigraphs. The first, “Writing is fighting,” comes from Ishmael Reed, who is included in the anthology. It establishes the book’s contested […]
Posted inArt
In John Darnielle’s Universal Harvester, Found-Footage Fiction Slowly Shatters Into Something Even Stranger
JOHN DARNIELLE: UNIVERSAL HARVESTER Monday, Feb. 13, 7:30 p.m., $10 Motorco Music Hall, Durham www.motorcomusic.com Wednesday, Feb. 15, 7 p.m., free Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh www.quailridgebooks.com You can get through John Darnielle‘s second novel in the time it takes a house wren to set up shop inside a gourd, which is about half a day. […]
Posted inMusic
Glass at 80: The INDY Interview
Before the premiere of his eleventh symphony, Glass discusses his resistance to retrospection, his renewed political focus, and the code connecting classical and contemporary in his music. INDY: Your eleventh symphony is coming to UNC on Wednesday, the day after its premiere in New York and your eightieth birthday. Did working on it cross over […]
Posted inArt
Horse & Buggy Press Is Moving. Foster Street’s Loss Will Be Broad Street’s Gain.
JESSINA LEONARD: THE WEIGHT WE LEAVE BEHIND Friday, Jan. 20, 6–9 p.m., free Bull City Arts Collaborative, Durham www.bullcityarts.org Jessina Leonard, a twenty-four-year-old art photographer who lives in Durham, just installed a small but compelling exhibit of her work in the Upfront Gallery at Horse & Buggy Press in the Bull City Arts Collaborative on […]
Posted inCulture
New Podcast Don’t You Lie to Me Warmly Colors in the Personalities of Area Artists
Nothing is more mysterious to the uninitiated than the local art world, with its obscure names and rarified codes. Who made these pictures, and why? By what arrangement did they get on these walls, and what are they supposed to do there? Don’t You Lie to Me, a new podcast, aims to demystify this milieu, […]
Posted inArt
Refreshers and Updates on the Top Stories of a Vigorous, Volatile 2016 in the Arts Scene
Adark year in the Triangle started on a deceptively light note when Chatham County got mixed up with an Oscar-gobbling movie. In JANUARY, we profiled Pittsboro tool shop owner Ed Lebetkin, whose antique tool collection was sought out by The Revenant‘s producers to add authenticity to the 1823 setting. Has Ed gotten more movie work […]
Posted inArt
The Year in Arts & Culture
This year, for good and for ill, the nation’s attention turned to North Carolina. House Bill 2 made national headlines and sent violent ripples through the art world, as creators and presenters banded together against the discriminatory lesgislationor against the state. But as we became a national laughingstock and battle lines were drawn, our artists […]
Posted inArt
Honoring the Winners of the 2016 Indies Arts Awards
2016 Winners Kelly McChesney N.C. Opera Sarah Shook Durham Artists Movement Women’s Theatre Festival Culture Mill Previous winners Art’s mandateespecially after HB 2 and Trumpis to change the world not by force, but by enlarging coalitions. After all, art’s effects are limited in scope only when its participants are. When the art world includes enough […]
Posted inArt
Durham Artists Movement Is a Safe Space and a Strong Voice for Artists Who Need It Most
The Indies Arts Awards often honor outward-facing entities that aim for the broadest audience possible. But the most important thing that happened in the Triangle art world this year happened largely out of public view, and it benefitted the few dozen people who were part of it more obviously than it benefitted the public. This […]
