Person Street rambles out to the big wide world!
Here we go and you are welcome for the ride. Raleigh Rambles. A Raleigh native’s rambles. Raleighites making art and making good. The city of Raleigh rambles out to the big wide world. The big wide world rambles into Raleigh. All of the above. This is my personal blog – mostly art and culture, but whatever else as well, because it is all good, all is good. Everything we do is art – or can be. Welcome to my new blog.
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This online world is a hoot and a holler, isn’t it? It’s been fun to watch and even more fun to join. I’ve been very lucky. My school had a Nando account, allowing us to use gophers and ftp’s to look at a few data bases, before the World Wide Web came to exist. I have watched my buddy Clyde take the Net by the horns and shake it like a money tree for some time, while building his hip hop web empire. My friend Richard has been hand-rolling a blog since before there were blogs – I guess that means he helped create the blog culture. Blogs seem very much to be the universal multi-media uberform that Clyde and I dreamed about in the late seventies. I like them very very much.
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Raleigh is blessed with great local blogs. Raleighing was fun while it lasted. New Raleigh does a most professional job, as recently with their slideshow of Rebusfest, and a review of my new neighbor, Rosie’s Plate. And RDUwtf, of course, has my biased adoration, and is back in business after a nasty spamlink attack. Here, I’m not trying to review Raleigh – I’m portraying myself and my cultural mileu as a native Raleighite.
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A fine cultural mileu indeed! World class museums, enough of a city to be a city but rural scenes a ten minute drive away. Greenways galore, which I blog about at Raleigh Nature. A decent music scene, I understand, but you will not read much about any music other than jazz here. My favorite piece of Raleigh is the whole scene anchored by The College of Design -with Sadlacks’s as its lodestone. I love to run into old friends or find out what young art entreprenuers like Sarah Blackmon are up to. And I still get to enjoy catching somebody up on The Paper Plant and being reminded it is still remembered.
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So here goes my personal take on Raleigh, old and new, work and play – living the examined life in the New South. Join me when you have a chance!
CAM staying alive at Moore Square Museum Magnet
Lee Moore and Nicole Welch conduct an afterschool program each year at Wake County’s Moore Square Museum Magnet Middle School. CAM, Contemporary Art Museum, has sponsored art programs associated with the school “since its first conception,” said Welch at the recent culminating event for the program. It was held at the Raleigh City Museum, which was the perfect venue. Amidst large images of Raleigh’s history, the young students got up in front of a good crowd of parents, friends and artsy fartsies like me, and described their efforts at coming to grips with the real history of Moore Square, essentially part of their schoolyard, and also the ways in which downtown Raleigh operates. They shared research photographs, artwork and tales about the urban history surrounding Moore Square. The Raleigh trivia game they conducted was a riot, and it’s clear that Lee Moore has found a wonderful venue for her wonderful mix of interest and talents. Lee has enriched the Raleigh art scene in so many different ways, with her music, her art, her studio, curating and promoting art through Rebus Works, participating in global art exchanges which have brought fascinating and important art workers into the area – and so much more.
Lee Moore, artist and educator, speaks at the Raleigh City Museum
Lucky kids. And lucky CAM, which has used programs such as this to maintain a presence and demonstrate viability during its long hiatus as a public space. Hopes are high with the new director, who says work to bring the West Street building up to code will begin soon. NewRaleigh just posted on the most recent design plans.
Below is the window display at the Raleigh City Museum in the old Briggs building on Fayetteville Street.
The visual products of the program are on display at several locations in downtown.
Way to go, Lee, Nichole, and Luke! hang in there, CAM!
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Elise Witt – local girl gone global
Elise
Elise Witt is a proud product of Knightdale, UNC-CH, and the Raleigh area. She is in Atlanta now and always doing amazing things. Her wonderful music is informed by classical training, world-wide folk traditions – and Elise’s unique, enthralling and amazing voice! She writes, performs and produces wonderful music, and betters the world while she’s at it – working with Alternate Roots over many years as it has grown, traveling around the country giving workshops about enriching your life with music, and exemplifying with her own life and career the commitment to enlightened, positive existence.
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Where to start! In the last year, she has visited China:
From December 9-18, 2007, I was invited as a guest to fly to China, to sing with the Chiang-Su State Chorus from Nanjing, and the Beijing Central Conservatory Chorus, along with the Jiangsu Province Symphony Orchestra, with guests from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, and Russia, under the direction of reknowned Chinese conductor Mu-Hai Tang (former assistant conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, under Maestro Karajan).
She has sung in support of the natural environment.
She sang to help meld a world of differences.
She has also presented and/or participated in her usual plethora of workshops focused on using singing and music for personal enrichment, attainment of harmony and peace, and for plain old fun. Check out her website and buy her stuff! Go Elise!
Grimanesa Amoros
This in my inbox – an international art fair to “give visibility to the Caribbean art world.” Participant Grimanesa Amoros was a resident artist at Artspace several years ago. She was making paper then, for a wonderful kind of seaweed documentary I will get back to sometime, but she really does whatever in the world she needs to do in order to create art in the most fantastic and sometimes unlikely venues. The one below was visible each day to certain New York City commuters, from the MTA Metro North platform, as well as people walking the Harlem streets below. Commisioned by real estate developer Eugene Giscombe for the Lee Building at 125th Street and Park Avenue, the installation was inspired by “his passionate interest in exotic, wild animals, and Harlem itself.” Check out the video to get a better idea.
The installation was created by projecting colored lights in a deliberate, looped sequence, controlled by a computer onto rear projection screens covering large windows. Over-sized silhouettes of animals made of foamboard, painted black create moving shadows in the windows. The sequence begins just before sunset and ends just before sunrise. The lighting controller calculates these astronomical events based on the location of New York City (40° 46’N x 73° 58’W) and its five time zone west difference from Greenwich /Mean Time.
June 3 – June 8, 2008
Both 205
Uferstrasse 80
CH-4057 Basel, Switzerland
Moore Square history project
I got to spend some time Thursday with that great art lady, Lee Moore, as she worked with students at the Moore Square Museum Magnet middle school. The students learn about the history of the area around their downtown school and then create art and documentation, which is displayed in local storefronts. This day they were preparing collage images for tiles, some of which will be used in an outdoor installation. I will be folllowing this admirable project ( http://www.cam.ncsu.edu/programs-educational-moore.html ) and hopefully posting at RDUwtf about Lee and her myriad inputs into Raleigh culture.
raleighrambles.com
portrait by Guillermo Velasco
Raleigh Rambles 