Upcoming Events at the Blowing Rock Art and History Museum

August 18, 2016 at 6 PM - Junaluska, the African American Neighborhood in Boone. Dr. Susan E. Keefe will present a talk at BRAHM on the history of the Junaluska community. Junaluska is a small

neighborhood two blocks north of King Street, Boone’s main street. African Americans have called Junaluska home since the middle of the 19th century.

One of the few black congregations of Mennonite Brethren in the United States is located in Junaluska. The community has seen considerable progress over the course of the last century and retains a remarkable spirit of resilience despite gentrification in the area and the out-migration of many younger residents.

The TAC Talk will highlight BRAHM’s exhibition, A Town within a Town: History of the Junaluska Community, on view from August 6, 2016 through March 11, 2017.

August 23, 2017 at 6 PM - Movies at the Museum: Desperate Man Blues. Directed by Ed Gillan, Desperate Man Blues tells the story of self-proclaimed king of record collectors Joseph E. Bussard, Jr. of Frederick, Maryland. Joe has amassed probably the greatest collection of 78 rpm recordings of country, blues, jazz, Cajun, and gospel music in the world. He has spent most of his waking hours in pursuit of old 78s. To call it a hobby would be an insult: It’s his life.

The film will be followed by a discussion with Marshall Wyatt, founder of Old Hat Records in Raleigh NC. In 2003, Old Hat released Down in the Basement, a compilation created from Bussard’s huge collection.

After the film and discussion, wander over to one of the wonderful participating restaurants for dinner, drinks, and conversation. Present your film ticket for 10% off your meal! *Discount is good for Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights after the screening.

August 28, 2016 at 5:30 PM - Summer Concert Series: Lorena Guillen Tango Ensemble. The Lorena Guillen Tango Ensemble will present two of its original pieces: “A Future of Tango” and its latest project ‘The Other Side of My Heart,” based on the real stories of Latino women that immigrated to North Carolina. For the rest of the program, the ensemble will invite the audience to a tour of some tango standards executed in crafted and original arrangements.

Recorded Matter: Ceramics in Motion Exhibit at The Center for Crafts and Creative Design

Now - May 21, 2016; Tuesday through Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM at the Center for Crafts and Creative Design, 67 Broadway Street in Asheville NC: Recorded Matter: Ceramics in Motion showcases the work of eleven artists who effortlessly integrate video into their studio practice. Others use video to document a process that is perhaps more important to them than finished, fired objects. All of these pieces have a life of their own on the Internet, where they can be shared in ways that physical objects cannot.

Cover Image: Ben Harlecourtesy of CCCD

Associated events:

February 11, 6:30 PM: Showing/Making: Curator's Talk with Garth Johnson. This 60-minute multimedia lecture by Garth Johnson explores the work of a new generation of young artists who grew up with easy access to video and social media. Recent years have seen an explosion of work that uses video to not only document process, but to show the use (and abuse) of the work and extend their studio practice. Warning: THIS LECTURE CONTAINS AN EROTIC POETRY READING that may be unsuitable for some audiences. 

April 21, 6:30 PM: Artist's Talk with Thomas Schmidt. Discussion with Recycled China co-founder Thomas Schmidt.

AAAC_logo_colorRecorded Matter: Ceramics in Motion is organized and curated by Arizona State University Art Museum Ceramics Research Center Curator, Garth Johnson. This program is funded in part by the N.C. Arts Council’s Grassroots Arts Program through the Asheville Area Arts Council. 

New Exhibit at the Blowing Rock Art and History Museum

"Floating Sculpture" a new exhibition, opens this weekend at BRAHM (Blowing Rock Art and History Museum, 159 Chestnut Street -corner of Chestnut and Main - in Blowing Rock NC.  The ducks have arrived bringing treasures from the coast to the mountains.  

This prestigious collection of duck decoys explores the careful craftsmanship involved in creating these beautiful sculptures, allowing them to stand alone as highly appreciated works of art. Bruce Barclay Cameron was a collector, sportsman, and philanthropist, and by the 1970s, Cameron was collecting duck decoys from all across the country.  He learned all about the careful craft involved in making one of these sculptures, from the nuances of the paint quality and form to the spirit of the bird itself. 

Within just a few decades, Cameron had amassed a grand collection of over three-hundred decoy sculptures, sixty-one of which are on display at BRAHM this summer. Artistans included are A. Elmer Crowell from Cape Cod, MA; Joseph Lincoln from Accord, MA; Hucks Caines from Georgetown, SC; the Ward Brothers, Lemuel and Stephen, from Crisfield, MD; Mitchell Fulcher of Stacy, NC; and Ned Burgess of Duck, NC. 

Moonlight Film’s Spirit of the Bird, directed by James Spione, will be playing on loop in the gallery.  The film explores how this uniquely American folk tradition has evolved over the centuries. The exhibition is organized by  the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, NC. 

A reception for this exhibition along with "1923: The Blowing Rock Fire" will be held on Saturday, May 9th from 5:30 - 7 PM. Museum members as well as the general public are invited to attend.

Penland School of Crafts Campus Exhibits Four Installations in Conjunction with NCMA 0 - 60

On view simultaneously with the NCMA's exhibition are four temporary installations on the Penland campus. Dan Bailey, Kyoung Ae Cho, Alison Collins, and Anne Lemanski were commissioned by Penland and the NCMA to create these new works for 0 to 60. Each of these works were partially created at Penland where the artists gathered materials, worked in the studios, and did the final work of installation.

Opening events:

Friday, April 19, 8:00 PM, Northlight Building at Penland

Linda Dougherty, chief curator and curator of contemporary art at the NCMA, will present an overview of the project followed by slide presentations from each of the four installation artists.

Saturday, April 20, 1:30 PM, Pines Portico at Penland
Walking tour of the installations: Penland's director, Jean McLaughlin, will make some introductory remarks at the Pines Portico. and then each of the four artists will speak when the group visits their installation.

Information about the installations:    

Filmmaker, animator, and photographer Dan Bailey has created a two-part work using time-lapse and low-altitude aerial photography. Presented on a large monitor, Looking Up is a time-lapse witness of the slowly changing sky, offered to the viewer in silence. This piece allows us to engage with complex patterns and movements that we cannot process in real time. The vantage point is reversed in

Looking Down, a large printed wall piece that combines photographs made from low-altitude helium balloons with satellite imagery, maps, and the artist's personal history of place. In this collage of viewing angles, time shifts, and seasonal variances, an inconsistent and organic perspective undermines the technology and grounds the viewer in a distinctly human journey through the landscape.

Rust gathered from decaying steel sculptures-a remnant of her past creative endeavors-became the muse for Alison Collins' Temps Perdu. Combining that rust with soy milk to create a dye, Collins used a brush to transcribe sections of Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) onto 300 yards of muslin. This cloth will be used, she says, "to protect or mummify the interior of the Dye Shed - walls, stairs, rafters, etc. - to preserve that forgotten space or the memory of its past with Proust's reconstruction of his past." Within that space she will install hundreds of muslin leaves, pinned together to create vines. On the leaves she has painted (also with the rust dye) text that refers to people and things she has lost. "The pins," she says, "act as a means of temporary connection-working as our memory does, resulting in a fragmentary collection of memories that seem to create a whole."

Anne Lemanski's Extirpated reflects the artist's interest in evolutionary time, and also presented her with the technical challenge of making a piece that can withstand the elements. The term "extirpated" refers to a species that once inhabited a region, but has since disappeared, with no hope of return. Lemanski's piece will create a series of clotheslines suspended between steel supports based on the form of Kentucky long rifles. Hanging from the lines will be silhouette images of species that have been extirpated from Mitchell County, where Penland is located: the American bison, the gray wolf, the North American porcupine, the snowshoe hare, the fisher, the Carolina parakeet, and the passenger pigeon. Placing images of these animals back into this environment creates a graphic reminder of how a landscape changes over time and points to the dichotomy of human admiration and exploitation of the animal world.

Kyoung Ae Cho begins each piece as a hunter-gatherer in search of organic matter or manufactured discards-a slow, deliberate process that sets the tone for her work. Shining Ground, Cho's installation at Penland, involves what she calls environmental processing and time-marking. She discovered mica-a flat, shiny mineral-while teaching at Penland in 2004. She gathered a bag of mica particles from a riverbed and kept it as a memory of "the gem" that was her Penland experience. Shining Ground incorporates that same collected material into vertical panels made of silk organza and pins, which will be prominently installed at the Northlight building. The piece is her attempt to recapture, many years later, the moment of quiet surprise when she first saw the ground covered with the sheen of mica sand.