Read Our Fall Arts Issue!

I’m so jazzed to share our annual Fall Arts Issue. Each year, it’s a welcome opportunity to make some phone calls, visit some shows, and do a pulse check on the artists and institutions that give the Triangle soul. This is the effort of several freelancers and writers! 

And while calls to support the arts have, over time, become so common as to seem almost anodyne, this year—with ongoing slashes to arts funding and attacks on free speech and censorship rampant—has pulled that need into sharp relief. We need artists to keep documenting, questioning, challenging, and creating new ways to see. 

Plenty to say about that, always, but I’ll leave you with a quote from photojournalist Cornell Watson’s artist statement for God’s Country, his new show at Peel Gallery. On his photos: “[These] are fragments of the contradictions I’ve witnessed: how we proclaim love for our neighbor while deporting them; how we honor the poor in scripture while criminalizing the unhoused; how we speak of liberty while upholding systems that deny it.” You can learn more about Watson’s show in this roundup I put together of five exciting arts exhibits to see this fall. 

Thanks for reading. No newsletter next week as I’ll be on vacation. Much more below!

Wake County and Durham County (in partnership with the city) are both working through planning initiatives for cultural funding and programming. 

What this means in each county, practically speaking, can be intimidating to untangle, but Jane Porter and Justin Laidlaw do just that in two companion pieces on the challenges—which aren’t as straightforward as they may seem—facing the arts in Wake County and Durham County. If you care about the future of local arts, please read these stories!

Lauren Wingenroth has picks for what to see on Triangle stages this fall, from Taylor Mac’s Holiday Sauce at Duke Arts to a dance performance that takes place within two giant nets. 

Here are two local author interviews: With poet Jameela F. Dallis, author of Encounters for the Living and the Dead, and with Riverside High School teacher Bryan Christopher, author of Stopping the Deportation Machine. 

If you’ve driven through Northgate Park, you may have spotted a sparkling fever dream of a house. That’s the home of Gene Dillard, a retired repairman whose mosaic-covered home, on Google Maps, is a location named “Gene Dillard’s Fantasy Land.” (He didn’t create that page, but he has done all the work on the house.)

Colony Little wrote a beautiful feature on the way two local photography and multimedia exhibitions reflect on notions of memory, family, food, and home. Both shows are closing by the end of September, so go see them while you can! 

ICYMI: Deborah F. Rutter‘s move from the Kennedy Center to Duke Arts. A raisin drink at Global Suq. Skating with Carolina Roller Derby. Joseph Giampino paints the town red (and yellow, and green, and many other colors).

CenterFest’s 50th anniversary takes place in downtown Durham this weekend. Durham is getting a new sports bar this month (and will have another one opening later this fall). Dix Park just won a bunch of awards. Is Raleigh struggling to keep longtime restaurants? PBS North Carolina has begun layoffs, following federal cuts. Popular local band Weirs has a new song out. 

— Sarah Edwards —
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