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
raleighrambles.com
portrait by Guillermo Velasco
Raleigh Rambles 