An Artist Reimagines Their Home as Queen Street Magic Boat, a Community Arts Space

Over the years, Catherine Edgerton’s home at 406 North Queen Street has served as a kind of informal nerve center for Durham artists and organizers. A cheerful, canary-colored house a block from the county’s Main Library, it has welcomed musicians teaching drums, hosted lively banner-making events from organizations like Durham Beyond Policing and Jewish Voices for Peace, and served as a recuperative space for artists struggling with addiction and mental health issues. 

Also: scuba diving classes.  

When I first speak to Edgerton in late July, the boat they are working on is docking in Miami, skirting a tropical storm. 

“It’s not even that the winds are that high, but they build up a lot of swell in the Gulf Stream,” Edgerton explains with a laugh. “So, the boat would be pitching from side to side.” 

Since 2014, Edgerton, formerly of ramshackle folk outfit Midtown Dickens, has balanced a truly bohemian schedule—painting part-time and then working, for weeks-long stretches, as a cook on a scuba diving charter boat. When home, Edgerton, who has a scuba diving certification and is working on a captain’s license, brings marine life to Durham teaching scuba diving. 

Talking about the classes, Edgerton lights up. 

“When I started teaching diving, it was for people who have limited access, either cultural, financial, or physical, to diving and swimming,” Edgerton says. “We use it as a hub and through that process, recognize all these wild Black feminist and surrealist lessons that can come from immersion and trust-building and magic through diving.”  

It’s been a fruitful era. Now, Edgerton says, it’s time to make things more official and reimagine the house as an arts space: Queen Street Magic Boat, a “surrealist hub for building and sustaining visionary community connections through water, the arts, and wild imagination.” 

That may sound amorphous and, as a DIY space, it is—by design: “I feel like it’s important to be fluid, no pun intended,” Edgerton says, adding that they want to be flexible to the community’s needs and wants. 

“There’s a rich culture here amongst Durham artists and cultural workers who are pushing against, and asking important questions about, what an art space can be.” 

Still, it’s evident that this is more than just a home with an open-door policy: now formally recognized with an LLC and fiscal sponsorship by Fractured Atlas, Queen Street Magic Boat is a practical space that reflects Edgerton’s and other community arts organizers’ decades of trying to work and live with integrity as artists in the area. That’s never been an easy mandate, but inflation, shrinking consumer budgets and attention spans, and the near impossibility of finding an affordable studio space—let alone an affordable home—have made things more difficult. 

There’s a lot to contend with. An accessible community arts space, though, is a promising start. 

“There’s a rich culture here amongst Durham artists and cultural workers,” says Edgerton, “who are pushing against, and asking important questions about, what an art space can be.” 

Beginning in September, a sprawling, immersive exhibition will take over the rooms, outbuilding, and grounds of Queen Street Magic Boat. The commission-free exhibition is a partnership with Pop Box Gallery cofounders Laura Ritchie and Mavis Gragg and Gail Belvett, principal of organization The Art Chose Me. Entitled Death Planted a Garden, the exhibition offers a broad call to explore the “loss of a loved one, a culture, an identity, a pet, a neighborhood, a potted fern, a coral reef” and features 22 Triangle multimedia artists.

One, Ivy Nicole-Jonét, is exhibiting a multimedia piece, “Ancestral Planes”—an immersive work that pulls together a mirror, projection-mapping software, and a documentary about North Carolina and Blackness alongside aromatic herbs from Nicole-Jonét’s grandmother’s garden into an ambitious portal to the past. A 2022 graduate of Duke University’s Experimental and Documentary Arts MFA program, Nicole-Jonét moved to the area during the thick of the pandemic and experienced, in short succession, the loss of her father and several close family members. 

“It’s a shrine, but it’s also blending these realms into one space, and trying to imagine Blackness in spaces where we weren’t imagined before,” Nicole-Jonét explains. “I was trying to figure out ‘How do I grieve but still honor their legacy?’ I realized that memorizing them and holding their memory is still me having conversations with them.” 

The exhibition’s run is a packed one: Launching September 6 with an opening reception, subsequent free programming includes a September 15 workspace for artists to learn “creative legal and psychiatric advance directives to advocate for themselves,” slow art walks, two artist talks, and more. Death Planted a Garden closes on October 20. 

Like Nicole-Jonét, artist Destiny Hemphill is exhibiting a multimedia piece that activates the house—a site-specific installation, “wet nest of sweet rot,” that features a soundscape called “Grief Chatter.”

“It started as a way to metabolize grief because of the ways that mourning can exceed language,” Hemphill says of the piece. “My primary tool is language, and I’ve been in a moment of feeling very languageless.” 

It’s the first time Hemphill, a poet, has exhibited a visual piece. 

“The relationships that I have and am growing with Catherine, Laura, Gail, Mavis, and the other artists who are being exhibited grounded me and encouraged me to take a risk,” Hemphill says. “The communal focus, versus a formal institution focus, is aligned with my ethos.” 

“There are so many spaces that have been completely nebulous in the same way, before any of us,” Edgerton says. “It’s in the bones of the city.” 

Edgerton is talking about Blind Boy Fuller, the renowned Wadesboro-born bluesman who made a living—and eventual legacy—busking by the American Tobacco warehouses, an area that, outside of institutional support and alongside the nearby Hayti District, became an animating force in Southern music. 

We’re sitting in the front room of Queen Street Magic Boat—mostly empty, for the moment, save a small teetering table on which Ritchie and Edgerton have, with characteristic Southern hospitality, balanced a plate with crackers, pimento cheese, and sliced peaches. They nod to the city’s lineage of experimental arts spaces, like early-aughts PeaceFire Gallery which exhibited work that “might not fall into easily recognizable categories,” per a 2006 INDY feature on the since-closed gallery. They say they’re energized by current arts spaces like NorthStar Church of the Arts, Night School Bar, and Perfect Lovers, as well as citywide efforts like the Durham Cultural Roadmap. 

“We haven’t had one since 2004 and it’s a big deal for there to be resources and effort put toward creating a plan that protects our arts community and stewards it,” says Ritchie, a board member on the Cultural Advisory Board. “But it’s hard to continue waiting for that.”  

Then there’s the Carrack Modern Art, the downtown art gallery that Ritchie co-founded, which hosted more than 1,000 visual artists and 150 exhibitions before it closed in 2019 following financial struggles. (The press release at the time cited “rising organizational costs, pressures to institutionalize, relocation away from downtown, and recognizing the dire necessity to pay staff fair, living wages.”)

There’s a rich history of communal DIY spaces locally in Durham. There’s been several iterations of spaces like this—and nationally, globally, these spaces are increasingly harder to sustain because of the ravages of capitalism.”

Edgerton was one of the first artists to show work at the Carrack and describes the space as having balanced a DIY ethos with a “formality that felt legitimizing and an important step forward in a career.” 

“My experience there completely opened up this excitement about how artists could be empowered and cared for in a space,” Edgerton says, describing how The Carrack’s organized, artist-forward, zero-commission practices helped lay the groundwork for Queen Street Magic Boat. 

When the Carrack was founded, in 2011—around the time that Edgerton purchased their home—Durham’s cost of living was a bit friendlier to experimentation. “There was no question about whether you could be an artist,” Edgerton says. “Because it didn’t matter—it was affordable to be here.”

The 406 North Queen Street property cost $50,000 and the mortgage was $465 a month; upon purchase, Edgerton remembers their landlord casually expressing “veiled racist shit” about being glad Edgerton would be making the neighborhood, which was mostly Black at the time, better. That was a pivotal moment for Edgerton, who speaks candidly about the ways artists become “pawns for gentrification” by making lower-income communities more palatable to developers and new residents—a well-documented phenomenon that has repeatedly played out across the country and the Triangle. 

“Resourcing for artists, as in so many places, is challenging, especially in the face of escalating gentrification,” says Hemphill. “There’s a rich history of communal DIY spaces locally in Durham. There’s been several iterations of spaces like this—and nationally, globally, these spaces are increasingly harder to sustain because of the ravages of capitalism.”

“Artists are not the problem,” Ritchie says. “Art spaces are not the problem. But that speculation and circling that happens as a result—because something about our presence signals, ‘OK, now it’s your time to jump in here’—that’s the problem, because it does not actually involve the people who live in a place.” 

Grappling with these realities, Edgerton says, they wanted to make a space “accessible for other people to do things that I was aligned with, believed in, which surrounded the arts and music.” With the opening of Queen Street Magic Boat, they’ve moved to a one-room unit in the backyard, making the house accessible to artists and organizers. Sculpted with handmade paintings and stained glass, the treehouse-esque unit fleshes out the “magic” part of the equation, with references to both a beloved past and a hopeful future. 

“One thing that’s exciting to me about this space,” says Hemphill, “in terms of how it’s being tended to, is that it’s already embedded with rigor around artistic expression as political expression and exploring how artistic expression can unsettle.” 

On the day I drop by, several weeks out from its opening, the house is lively with buckets of paint and plastic-wrapped canvases. Queen Street Magic Boat’s walls are still blank, though, save for one thing hanging: “Quiet Cartographies,” a map of Durham by public artist and city planner R Stein Wexler.

On the map, the city’s roads are overlaid with the ghostly traces of one-time roads in Hayti—the flourishing Durham district named for the Republic of Haiti, the only nation borne from a successful Black slave revolt—razed in the construction of Highway 147 and the false promise of urban renewal. Attached to the map, lines of twine lead to index cards scribbled with memories of bygone places.

The tethered cards, though, do not gesture at constraint. Rather, they seem like a dialectical way to honor, to metabolize, and to move forward with the past. 

Or, as the curatorial statement for this inaugural exhibition puts it: “Despite (or because of) our grief, Death Planted a Garden reflects on the reverberations of severed connection—and the awakening to our inevitable place in the infinite salt water of things.”

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