Blood may be the last substance of real symbolic power left to us. Nearly everything else has been trivialized, virtualized, demeaned, cleaned up, or turned into a marketing tool. But blood remains defiantly actual; dangerous and distinct, it is at once the basis of our reality and life’s supreme metaphor. Blood is naturally sanctified, and […]
Kate Dobbs Ariail
Bio: Kate Dobbs Ariail writes about the arts.
Posted inArt
Makers from Mata Ortiz
Cross-cultural exchange. Goodwill ambassador. Terms like these bring to mind government programs or other large-scale endeavors designed to bring strangers greater knowledge of each other. This kind of program can be wonderful, but sometimes the best cultural exchanges happen on a small scale, like the one that occurred in Durham last week when Graciela and […]
Posted inGuides
The kitchen dance
If you’ve ever cooked any kind of a meal, you know that timing is everything. It’s as if you are dancing with the food, each component a partner in a complicated pattern of steps, and one move out of tempo can ruin the whole sequence. It is no good to cook the perfect rare lamb […]
Posted inNews
Vernon Pratt: 1940-2000
Vernon Pratt went out riding on Dec. 14, five days after his 59th birthday, on a country road near the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, an artists’ retreat where he’d been working on his painting. He was found by the roadside, badly injured and unconscious. Was Pratt hit by a car or did his […]
Posted inArt
Love of looking
Collaboration in art has been a topic of much interest for the past three decades, and it can still excite discussion and disagreement. Many people–including a lot of artists–prefer to think of the artist as a lonely hero, creating in pure and powerful isolation. Others favor a less exalted role for the artist; they want […]
Posted inArt
A museum blooms
The North Carolina Museum of Art has grown and changed in many ways in the last few years: The Museum Park Theater has been completed, the sculpture garden begun, the museum entrance redesigned, and many of the galleries revamped. The most recent of these improvements was completed last weekend, when the galleries for African, Oceanic […]
Posted inArt
Who’s a painting for?
Who’s a painting really for: the artist who makes it, or the viewers who see it? Artists do love to run on about the importance of process, and how that is really where the art is–not so much in the product. It’s the thoughts, the choices made, perhaps even the back-and-forth with the materials, that […]
Posted inArt
Cuba vive
When I first started writing for The Independent in the late ’80s, multicultural in the Triangle pretty much meant you could see art by African Americans in February. We’ve come a ways since then: We now regularly see art by and about people from all over the world, and in the process have begun to […]
Posted inGuides
Intentionally elegant
Bill Neville likes to talk about energy, synergy and intentionality as much as about form or function. He talks like the artist that he is–by training and temperament–as much as like the designer and craftsman he has become in his years as a furniture maker. And what a furniture maker he is. His forms may […]
Posted inArt
Spirit and light
We had all kinds of tiring hoopla surrounding the end of the year–the century, the “millennium”–but hang on, folks, it’s not over yet. Now we get a round of “new” and “fresh.” I’m not saying this is such a bad thing, just that I’ll be glad when we get to some less portentous days on […]