A Raleigh Art Ramble
The Paper Plant presents an Open Studio Saturday, August 22 from 10 AM to 6 PM. John and Cara will be demonstrating papermaking, marbling, printmaking and letterpress printing. A retail display of notecards, blank books and paper, with opportunities for hands-on interactions.
528 N. Person Street, 919-618-6883
Starting with the shameless self-promotion above, here is my current outlook on Raleigh creative endeavors. I dearly hope our open studio will attract (as it did last year) some of my Bain friends, new and old. Critter, a Bain documentor, has favored me with some mail art this summer and I’m dying to show him the new Ray Johnson material I picked up recently at the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center. Ray’s mail art show in 1976 was seminal for me: my Bain experience was galvanizing in just as big a way, here in my old age. I hope our open studio can stimulate: we will be marbling, printing and making sheets, and at 6 PM we will toast the day with all who have gathered. Please come!
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Lovejoy Pottery, August 1st, 9-4
Dan and Nancy Lovejoy are having an open studio this coming weekend at Lovejoy Pottery in Wendell. I posted about their show last summer in the first weeks of this blog’s existence, and it’s always great to see them and the other artists, who include Edge Barnes, John Garland & Mary Paul, Alan Leland, Julie Olson, Susan Myers, and Nancy & Kathleen Redman. As described in the earlier post, Dan Lovejoy was a founding member of Raleigh Artists Community in the seventies, and the Lovejoy Pottery show is well worth the drive to 6117 Watkins Road off Rolesville Highway. (919)266-6053.
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David Beaver, media theorist
I had the best chat with David Beaver the other day at Borders. David earned eternal endearment in the Raleigh art community by acting as jovial scorekeeper for the Poetry Slams at Forum+Function in the late nineties. He is my emblem for a 21st century shaman, being a magician, virtual reality enterprenuer, and now key member of the emerging Overview movement, which posits that seeing Earth from space is so life-changing, common space-flights could fundamentally change humanity’s perspective on the planet. Though David is working on transforming the world, he is still affable and charming as ever, and he’s got my mental cogs churning about several of his fascinating ideas.
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photo by David Simonton
NandO featured David Simonton recently and turned me on to a fantastic blog – Prison Photography, now featured on my blogroll. Their post about David’s photographs of Polk Youth Center before it was razed for the art museum shows powerful work; a stark portrait of neglect and abandonment. David’s earlier photographic work reflects “his calling as a poet of the ignored or the ruined place, the lost or forgotten landscape,” as described in this Indy profile.
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by Susan Soper
Below is a sending from Susan Soper, printmaker.
Susan Soper — Lithographs
Clayton Center Gallery
Clayton, NC 27520
August 1-30 2009
Gallery Hours M-F, 9-5
Public opening reception Thursday August 6th, 6–7:30 pm
Sponsored by Clayton Visual Arts
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Carter Hubbard, a papermaking contact from way back, touched base recently about an interesting project. She and partner Sara Botwick are putting together an art exhibition in the downtown warehouse where Bill and Otho created “antiques” for Niemann-Marcus and employed several dear friends in the process. The MUSA website is a bit inscrutable, but the show will offer an “interpretive visual perspective … on what it means to be ‘made in the USA.'” I’ll get back to this project soon.
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Poppy Bear on Porch by Walter Stanford
Joel Haas just held a signing for his new book, Poppy Bear, illustrated by Walter Stanford. Joel’s book is his own writing, based on the “most enduring character” of his late father, the prolific novelist Ben Haas, who entertained his three boys with endless “Poppy Bear” tales but never wrote them down. Joel wrote up a prototype “Poppy Bear” story and then hooked up with Walter. The book is available from either of their websites.
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Thanks for your kind attention. As always, this is just a smattering of the wonderful Raleigh culture that has come my way. Back at ya’ soon!
Art is where you find it.
With a heads-up from Ron at Sadlacks, though I got my postcard (but mislaid it), I was off to Wendell Saturday morning. Time for another show at Lovejoy Pottery. Dan and Nancy have become old friends, but they were old guard and I was new when I first met them in the mid eighties. Dan was a big part of the Raleigh Artists Community, a late seventies art entity that I wrote a feature article about in FARCE!, the newsletter of The Paper Plant. RAC was a huge part of the development of the arts community in Raleigh, and provided some interesting memories along the way. Quoting that piece:
The house at 908 West Morgan Street [just across from Irregardless] served as gallery, studio, hang-out and apartment house to various NCSU and Raleigh artists. The atmosphere was informal, very informal by all accounts. Lovejoy, who lived in the house, described the atmosphere as “totally chaotic but a lot of fun.”
Copper Rain, Joy Haymore, Jeff Emma, Willis Williams, and Jeannie Thompson were all founding members. Later current Raleigh artists such as Sharron Parker and Madonna Phillips joined. The group organized art festivals on Fayetteville Street Mall and at Pullen Park, proposed the art center that eventually became Artspace, and in 1979 joined with the new Raleigh Arts Commission to sponsor “Downtown September,” which now goes by the name Artsplosure.
The Lovejoys proudly display this sign and continue to do their pottery. Dan paints his huge, mythical figurative acrylics. Nancy has made most of the bowls and ceramic cups in my house. They have these shows, with an open studio feel, and 6 to 8 local artisans, all well established pros, come in and display their work. Besides the Lovejoys, Marsha Owen, Nancy Redman, John Garland & Mary Paul, and Alan Tingen all participated this year. Cara and I have shown there several times in the past and probably will again.
Lovejoy Pottery is on Watkins Road, just off Rolesville Highway, off 70 East out of Raleigh. It was fun to mix purveying art and visiting with some country driving. I always take the back way home – Watkins to old Milburnie and past the Milburnie Dam. The rural scenes were nifty!
And then to cap it off, here come these young fellows, barreling along in their buggy!
raleighrambles.com
portrait by Guillermo Velasco
Raleigh Rambles 