Strange Fruit Long Leaf Opera Company Closed June 17 It takes a very long time for art to process history, and when an artwork comes along that makes a righteous step down that path toward understanding, it is very exciting. Such a work was presented in UNC-Chapel Hill’s Memorial Hall last weekend, as a kickoff […]
Kate Dobbs Ariail
Bio: Kate Dobbs Ariail writes about the arts.
Posted inArt
Manbites Dog concludes its 20th season with the sterling At the Vanishing Point
At the Vanishing Point Manbites Dog Theater Through June 9 Manbites Dog Theater has been a mainstay of Durham and Triangle culture through many years of adventurous theater, but rarely has the company brought us a script as beautiful as Naomi Iizuka’s At the Vanishing Point, which closes out the company’s 20th season. As directed […]
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The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant Common Ground Theatre Through May 19 The Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern (always delightful in its difference from all the little pink pigs) is following up last year’s Russian season with a German season, which opened May 3 at Common Ground Theatre of Durham, with a production of […]
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Eyes on the prizery
Independent readers know by now that the paper has moved its Durham office to someplace called the Venable. Those who have followed visual art in Durham for a while will know of that place as a funky warehouse complex on the ragged southeastern edge of downtown, and may think of it still as the studio […]
Posted inNews
Moving Midway, or … Godfrey changes focus
Moving Midway website Medium shot: A slender white man, all in black, shoulders slumped, stands alone on the knoll before a neat rectangular cavity. He stands perfectly still, his red hair damp in the brassy heat of late June, the powdery pale earth of eastern Wake County dusting his black shoes. His back expresses a […]
Posted inGuides
How high?
Looking south from Main Street in downtown Durham, alongside the handsome buildings of the American Tobacco campus on one side and the dignified North Carolina Mutual Insurance building on the other, you can see some big visual mistakes. In the middle distance sits one of them, the depressing gray bulk of the J.J. Henderson senior […]
Posted inGuides
Who will buy high-rise condos?
Another part of the density equation is getting the right number of units at the right price for the developer to make money. If the City of Durham limited the number of residential units allowed too severely, the Ashton Place project might not get built at all. Says L.E. Tuckett, the local architect, “the cost […]
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Fall-ternative: Art
Pssst! Longing to look at something beautiful? Something non-representational, apolitical, highly emotive; something you can mentally fall into as if it were a cool soft bed on a hot afternoon? Then go by Raleigh Contemporary Gallery, through Sept. 29, to see Graham Auman‘s new paintings. They are mightily refreshing. Auman comes from a background in […]
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Art to Art
This is my last regular column for The Independent. Whew. It was hard getting that out. I’ve written about visual art for this paper week in and week out for more than a decade, and while I’ll continue to be an occasional contributor, this is goodbye to that weekly regimen. Next month, new writers with […]
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So 20th Century
Now that I’m old enough to have a historical perspective myself, I’m increasingly interested in how our understanding of our own past is manipulated, even controlled, by the words and images chosen to represent it. Even while absorbed in the 106 photographs on view at the N.C. Museum of History, in a show organized by […]