In Contemporary Showcase People Get Ready, The Nasher’s Progressive Vision Snaps into Blazing Focus
PEOPLE GET READY: BUILDING A CONTEMPORARY COLLECTION Sep. 1–Jan. 6 The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham www.nasher.duke.edu Created by Guatemalan artist Dario Escobar, who often turns sporting equipment into beautiful but unusable symbols, the silver surfboard stands more than six feet high. Its knobby floral embossing triggers a vivid memory of the faux-Colonial pewter tea…
SPARKcon Is Saved! But Why Did It Need to Be?
SPARKcon’s crisis is overat least for now. Raleigh’s annual open-source arts festival, founded in 2006 and run by arts nonprofit VAE Raleigh for the last eight years, will fill downtown with a wide array of programming as usual Sep. 13–16. But at the start of August, SPARKcon’s funding was $22,500 short of its operating budget,…
In The Long Dance, Two Journalists Reporting on a Cold Murder Case in Durham Become Podcasters Participating in an Investigation
I met Drew Adamek in a Chapel Hill bar. He’d emailed me after reading a piece of mine in the INDY, where he was also a contributor at the time. He said he thought I’d be a good collaborator for an idea he had brewing: to find a story with local interest and write a…
Shen Wei’s Greatest Challenge Yet Is to Seek Beauty in an Anti-Opera by Inscrutable Artists Morton Feldman and Samuel Beckett
SHEN WEI DANCE ARTS Saturday, Jun. 16 & Sunday, Jun. 17, 7 p.m., $12–$62 Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham www.americandancefestival.org As the legend goes, when the minimalist composer Morton Feldman first met the avant-garde writer Samuel Beckett, he stumbled on a curtain and fell flat on his face before they finished shaking hands. This was…
ADF’s Wondrous Women Program Reconnects Modern Dance to Traditional Roots with Solos Women Made for Themselves
WONDROUS WOMEN: SOLOS CREATED BY THE ARTISTS FOR THEMSELVES Friday, July 13 (8 p.m.) & Saturday, July 14 (7 p.m.), $12–$51 The Carolina Theatre, Durham www.americandancefestival.org Over the past few years, I’ve found myself at a number of shows that are what I like to call post-post-postmodern dance: performances that might feature text and props,…
An Old Tobacco Complex Turned Arts Hub Evolves as the Carrack Appoints a New Leader and SPECTRE Arts Closes
The Carrack Modern Art and SPECTRE Arts are separate entities, but fate seems intent on linking them. First, SPECTRE founding director Alicia Lange paved the way for the Carrack’s relocation from Parrish Street to the Golden Belt area. Now, by coincidence, both galleries are undergoing major transitions at the same time. SPECTRE closed at the…
ADF Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Ronald K. Brown Rewrote the Theory-Drunk Playbook of Modern Dance with Emotion, Musicality, and Storytelling
RONALD K. BROWN/EVIDENCE Thursday, Jun. 28–Saturday, Jun. 30, various times, $12–$43 Reynolds Industries Theater, Durham www.americandancefestival.org When the great intersectional feminist writer Audre Lorde asked a question, you wanted to answer, but Ronald K. Brown didn’t have one yet. “She’d always ask her audiences, ‘Are you doing your work,’” the choreographer says. “And I was…
More Arts Feature Coverage
Modern Masters: The American Dance Festival Doesn’t Just Trace the Shape of Modern Dance. It Creates It.
The American Dance Festival is dedicated to modern dance. But this pat statement belies a complex and fluid state of affairs. In a tenure than spans nine decades, the last four of them spent drawing together local and international dance artists and audiences in Durham, the festival has earned enough global influence to play a…
Michelle Obama Painter Amy Sherald Visits Chapel Hill for a Portrait Exhibit that Looks Refreshingly Like America Today
THE OUTWIN: AMERICAN PORTRAITURE TODAY Through Sunday, Aug. 26 Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill www.ackland.org With her statuesque proportions and freckled complexion encasing a megawatt smile, Amy Sherald, one of today’s leading painters, commands the attention of any room simply by walking in. Her sandy blonde afro is like a crown that adorns her stylish…
How a Blue Devil Statue that Was Raising Hell in Small-Town Mississippi Escaped, After a Brief Abduction, to Durham
Some vocal critics, informed by religious convictions, did not want a lifelike devil to become the face of their community.
How a Humble Chatham County Phytosaur Crawled into History Before the Mighty T. rex
If you visit the Hall of Vertebrate Origins at the American Museum of Natural History, you’ll find a mounted skeleton of Rutiodon carolinensis, a member of the superficially crocodile-like order Phytosauria. This long-lived and diverse group inhabited North America during the Triassic period, from around 250 million to 200 million years ago. If you look…
As a New Art and Community Space Run by and Focused on People of Color, The584 Is an Essential Addition to Downtown Durham
Michelle Gonzalez-Green’s elbows are covered with paint and she can’t stop smiling. “I sold my first artwork and we were barely open an hour,” she says at the opening of The AfroBombastic Exhibit, which launched The584, Gonzalez-Green’s downtown Durham design studio and community space, last Friday. “I’ve almost made my first month’s rent.” The584, named…
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