by Jane Porter | Oct 2, 2017 | Do, October 2017
Inspiring Beauty garment and related photography
Kimberly Kearse-Lane remembers walking runways across America in the Ebony Fashion Fair for a year in the late 1980s. The theme was “sizzling,” and Kearse-Lane says audiences went wild when the models strutted out in breathtaking designs from the leading names in high fashion.
“It could have been just a long dress, but it was the way you worked the runway and presented that dress; the audience just lost it,” recalls Kearse-Lane, who modeled professionally for five years and now works as an attorney in Charlotte. “It was absolutely the most amazing experience; I’ve never felt something like that before or since.”
Eunice Johnson, the co-owner of Johnson Publishing Co. and founder of Ebony Magazine, established the Ebony Fashion Fair in 1958. For fifty years, models toured the country, showcasing haute couture to African American audiences.
Late this month, the N.C. Museum of Art will open Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair, an exhibition exploring the touring fashion show’s extraordinary history. It will feature ensembles from world-famous fashion designers, archival photos and memorabilia and a series of lectures, workshops and other events.
“[She] was a tour de force,” says Vogue editor Andre Leon Talley, who worked closely with Johnson. “She crashed the glass ceiling. She was the first African-American to embrace the quality of high fashion, through her support of the European haute couture and American fashion when multicultural diversity didn’t exist in [the industry].”
Jennifer Dasal, a curator at the museum who helped bring the exhibition to Raleigh, describes how Johnson and the Ebony Fashion Fair made high fashion accessible to a broader audience and challenged conventions of beauty.
“In the 50s, particularly for African American women, you had to be solid in your conventions, conservative in the colors and types of clothing you wore,” Dasal says. “Seeing these conventions shattered with bright colors, eccentric designs and bold patterns and styles, it was shocking but also empowering. All of a sudden, you had the implicit permission to dress any way you wanted to.”
Johnson was also a visionary when it came to the models she used. She hired women, and some men, of all different sizes and shapes. Her African American models, who comprised the majority, represented all different skin tones from the lightest to the darkest shades of the spectrum.
Kearse-Lane, who describes herself as a tall, skinny tomboy growing up, went to the Ebony Fashion Fair every year with her mother. Those experiences, and ultimately her experience walking in the show, shaped her vision of herself and her understanding of what is considered beautiful.
“Being an African American girl from Topeka, Kansas, you would question yourself,” she says. “I had an idea of what beauty was, but [the fair] started a whole new way of me seeing myself, and seeing other people that look like me. When they called me up to tell me they wanted me in the show, I was like, ‘Wow, maybe I am cute.’”
The Ebony Fashion Fair stopped touring in 2009, and Eunice Johnson died the next year. No one seems to know for sure why the fair isn’t around any longer, but Kearse-Lane has a theory.
“You could see Ms. Johnson’s passion for women, the African American woman but also the woman, period,” she says. “Her passion was to make sure every woman knew her worth and beauty inside, and it was bringing that inside out. I don’t think the average person has that type of passion; it was drawn from some place deep inside. You can see that from what she created.”
Inspiring Beauty: 50 Years of Ebony Fashion Fair runs from October 28—January 21, 2018.
by Alexandra Drosu | Jul 24, 2017 | July 2017 / August 2017, Retreat, Stuff
Can’t get to the florist? She’ll come to you.
Petals on the Go, the Triangle’s first mobile florist has been blooming for just over a year, offering reasonably priced bouquets, custom floral designs and party activities, like DIY flower crowns.
“I like the idea of going to our customers and not waiting for them to come to our doors,” says owner Amanda Malone, who turned a passion for floral arranging into a business but eschewed a brick-and-mortar shop.
She keeps her price point fair and offers high quality blooms so that flowers are accessible to everyone,
earning herself a loyal following.
Indeed, the family has a 15-acre farm by Lake Jordan where they have planted several floral varieties to grow and sell locally. They have snapdragons, dahlias and sunflowers, to name a few.
The truck is also available for parties including flower crown packages for kids and adult design activities. Malone says this part of her business has become increasingly popular with birthday parties, bridal or baby showers and even “Girls Night In” get-togethers, where the guests pay individually to make flower crowns or centerpieces.
“It gives attendees something fun to do,” she says.
Malone also creates custom designed floral arrangements for parties or events when her bright blue truck decorated with pastel flowers isn’t parked outside of Bruegger’s Bagels in North Hills or in front of corporate offices, where patrons often buy bouquets to bring home or keep in their office.
For more information visit petalsonthego.com.
by Alexandra Drosu | Jun 30, 2017 | Do, July 2017 / August 2017
Artist Phil America talks with fellow artist Dorian Lynde about her new show at CAM
From her first life-sized painting in Los Angeles to opening her solo museum exhibition, I have watched Dorian Lynde create “No Damsel.” It is a groundbreaking series that forces us to rethink what we know about Disney princesses and about the representations of women we show to our children. Shortly after finishing her installation of the show at CAM, I sat down with the Canadian-born artist.
For the last two years I have watched the development of this project. What has been your artistic process?
It began as outdoor wall paintings around downtown Los Angeles to re-imagine the princesses as modern women. The response was really positive, and I decided to develop the idea further. I learned that there was so much more than just altering their images and iconography.
Can you take me through the history behind the princesses?
Animated films were made up of about 500,000 hand-painted images (animation “cels”), and the process was segregated by gender at Disney Studios. Women were not hired for any creative positions. However, women were hired in the ink and paint department, which was extremely difficult. The Disney princesses had no women that were contributing to them, resulting in one-dimensional characters that mainly cooked, cleaned, sang, and got married.
The project has so many layers but what I really love is how even in its simplest form, it is a strong project. Then you go deeper and it becomes more complex.
I wanted to create a work that was easily accessible, especially to young women. The imagery is simple and easy to understand, but the more you learn, the more compelling it becomes. The exhibition at CAM is something that you can spend five minutes or five hours in, taking in the paintings, video, sketches and animation cels.
Tell me more about the animation cels.
The women in the ink and paint department spent countless hours creating them. The early Disney films would not exist without them, but their contributions have gone ignored and erased. I had to create my own as an homage to these forgotten artists.
I found that the materials needed were extremely rare—the special vinyl paint used is now made in only one place in the U.S. The process is extremely difficult and delicate.
Do you see yourself continuing to work with this medium?
Absolutely. I’ve never seen it used in a fine art context, and I love the way they look—the colors are extremely vibrant.
Lastly, what has made you the happiest about working with CAM and showing your work in Raleigh?
I love Raleigh, and CAM is an unbelievably forward-thinking museum. There’s nowhere I’d rather show
these princesses than here. Exhibiti
ons Director Eric Gaard and Executive Director Gab Smith have done
so much for both the museum
and the city and are great visionaries. “No Damsel” works well with their many youth engagement programs, and I’m so happy I got the opportunity to work with them.
by Grayson Haver Currin | Apr 28, 2017 | Arts & Culture, May 2017
When Kim Curry-Evans arrived in Raleigh in 2010 to take a new job as the city’s public art director, most every new acquaintance she made wanted to know why.
“I would be at different meetings or cocktail parties, so I would announce my job as the one doing public art for the City of Raleigh. People would pull me aside and say, ‘Well, you know about our history, right?’” she remembers with a laugh and a short sigh. “It was, ‘Oh my goodness, what are you going to do?’”
Kim Curry-Evans, Public Art Director of Raleigh, in front of permanent film art installation on Fayetteville Street.
Curry-Evans soon enough learned what that history was. It was evident enough from a simple tour of the town that public art had seldom been a planning priority; massive municipal walls or warehouse sites or parking lots had rarely been reimagined in Raleigh. And then there was the bile for one of the city’s most prominent public pieces, Dale Eldred’s Light+Time Tower, a gangly aluminum obelisk equipped with light-diffracting panels and installed on a particularly harried section of Capital Boulevard in 1995. The piece polarized the city, with its many critics lampooning it as a useless cell phone tower and its (few) champions simply happy to see art prompting any response in Raleigh. Given that reception, it was little wonder when, a decade later, a proposal for acclaimed Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa to turn a square in Fayetteville Street into a surreal, shimmering art installation failed to muster adequate city support, despite Capitol Broadcasting Company’s Jim Goodmon pledging to pay for the whole thing. Durham got the Plensa sculpture two years later.
“Part of my job, in addition to getting the public art program started, became helping people understand that public art was a positive thing, as opposed to a detriment,” Curry-Evans says. In particular, she had to convince fellow city staff members that her program wasn’t taking money away from their programs but was instead enriching their work and the city at large, making everything more appealing. “When the first couple of projects started rolling out, they started to see it as a good thing. But it took quite a bit.”
In the seven years since Curry-Evans arrived in Raleigh, she has seen the city’s public spaces and the city’s perception of public art shift dramatically. Raleigh has suddenly become a hotbed for it, a place where entire walls and sidewalks have become canvases and the possibilities now seem endless, not empty.
There’s a permanent film art installation on Fayetteville Street downtown and a fascinating police memorial on Hargett Street, plus an esoteric, 18-foot-tall sculpture slated for Sandy Forks Road in North Raleigh. The state-run North Carolina Museum of Art has been pivotal, too, overhauling its grounds to become a sort of walking museum, full of unexpected ways for people to interact with art.
But all of this momentum isn’t city- or state-funded. Instead, much of Raleigh’s public art energy stems from ordinary, enthusiastic citizens who unintentionally helped drive the city to embrace public art by simply doing it themselves. To date, all of the city’s murals have been privately driven by individuals or organizations, such as the Raleigh Murals Project and Flight, the new arts-funding group that coordinated Lincoln Hancock’s popular effort to turn a downtown storefront into an interactive rainbow flag last year during the state’s HB 2 crisis. The boarded windows of Stone’s Warehouse, a sprawling bus-repair depot being redeveloped into a commercial center on downtown’s east side, are temporarily covered by playful, colorful paintings from local elementary schools—a project led by the developers themselves.
“For a while, we felt like, ‘Are we the only ones who care about public art?’” says Terri Dollar, the Program Director at Raleigh’s Artsplosure for nearly two decades and a longtime local arts activist and educator before that. “But now there are so many great things happening, and, in a sense, it’s been demanded. Raleigh has become a cooler place for people to live, and you get these cool people saying, ‘Hey, I’d like to see what we could do if a bunch of us got together.’ It’s nice to see when individuals don’t expect their government just to pay for it.”
Artist Emily Alexander
Jedidiah Gant certainly falls into Dollar’s classification. A few years ago, Gant was struck by the wealth of empty, boring walls as he wandered through downtown Raleigh. A North Carolina native, he’d lived in London for a spell and become an avid fan of Banksy and fellow street artists. He loved the way a painting could suddenly activate a whole community, making an entire place that much more intriguing. He began posting photos of those unadorned walls via New Raleigh, the social media news channel he’s managed since 2007, with the hashtag #putamuralhere.
“It was a public awareness campaign,” Gant says. “That’s all I was thinking.”
But people responded. In particular, a friend named JT Moore told Gant he needed a creative outlet apart from his job, so they decided to turn the hashtag into a legitimate operation, the Raleigh Murals Project, in an attempt to begin putting art on the walls Gant had identified.
When the pair launched the project, the concept was so new in town that the first mural was actually an advertisement for more murals. Beneath a pedestrian overpass on the campus of Shaw University, Lisa Gaither painted a call for entries, asking artists to submit sketches for how they might transform the drab concrete walls along Blount Street for the school’s 150th anniversary.
Eventually, Chapel Hill artist Scott Nurkin turned the overlooked space into a reliquary of Raleigh’s past and present, where images of iconic Shaw alumni and primers on the neighboring South Park community commingled with profiles of the growing Raleigh skyline. During the last two years, the Raleigh Murals Project has facilitated nearly three dozen more pieces across the city, with many more in the queue.
It’s been so busy, in fact, that one of the project’s earliest collaborators, Sean Kernick, has even launched a full-time business, Oak City Mural Co., to put art on the side of buildings. One of his biggest projects to date is a colorful underwater scene on the side of the Raleigh institution, Earp’s Seafood.
“I have a fire-in-my-belly passion about painting, but I have never fully given myself to it. But it seemed like the time was now,” says Kernick. When he first launched the business, he wasn’t sure if he’d have enough business to sustain himself. But he’s now enlisted his wife, Ann Marie, to help navigate his schedule and keep commitments.
“In the beginning, it was super rough and scary,” he remembers. “I am still trying to figure out how to manage the amount of work coming through. We have production meetings weekly now.”
The city has taken notice of this tizzy and is now helping push all of these artistic efforts forward. Working with the Raleigh Murals Project and Flight, the city will soon fund murals on the construction fences that surround the overdue Moore Square renovation. Still, Gant isn’t content with that.
“Early on, we made a goal of getting one mural on a city building at some point. That hasn’t happened yet,” he says. “But it may finally happen this year, through OPTIC.”
In early October, OPTIC will become the premier public face of Raleigh’s municipal arts ambition. A ten-day mural festival in which artists from around the world will transform surfaces and lead events across the city, OPTIC represents a potential, necessary public-private nexus for this movement. The city is collaborating closely with the likes of Gant, artist and arts advocate Emily Alexander and downtown gallery the Visual Art Exchange to produce a different sort of Raleigh festival, following the string of fall events such as Hopscotch and IBMA’s Wide Open Bluegrass.
A Raleigh native whose mother, Lynn Jones Ennis, was the curator at N.C. State’s Gregg Museum of Art and Design, Alexander is working to raise $150,000 through in-kind donations and grants in order to pay the artists and sustain the idea. It’s an audacious event with plans for ten major murals and many more small-scale sites spread across town.
“I feel pretty happy for us—not just OPTIC, but that a lot of people on a lot of levels are making public art happen. It’s changed my relationship to my hometown,” says Alexander. “Public art is a deeper expression of a place’s commitment to people’s voices. It shouldn’t be something that everybody agrees on, or it will completely disappear into the background. If we can, as a city, get comfortable with that belief in public art, then we may actually catch up to our idea of ourselves and our growth.”
Alexander’s aspiration touches on a central tenet of Raleigh’s public art enthusiasts: They see what’s happening now very much as a long-delayed beginning, the start of a never-ending conversation about the aesthetics and priorities of our community. There’s a long way to go. Curry-Evans, for instance, knows that the onus is on the city to make public art easier for private citizens, so that anyone with an idea can put it into play with less worry about burdensome regulations. Gant, meanwhile, emphasizes that murals aren’t meant merely to beautify blank walls, and that public art must start conversations and stand for values.
Likewise, Kernick dreams of pushing murals outside of downtown, so that all communities can experience public art more easily. Anderson shares that passion and wants to use public art not as a symbol of gentrification, but as a tool to fight against it, a way to represent what communities have and do stand for.
“Public art doesn’t have to be about making something pretty. When it’s good and strong, it conveys in a way that gets folks talking,” says Curry-Evans. “Even better, it allows people to participate and share in their city.”
by Alexandra Drosu | Apr 10, 2017 | April 2017, Do
Last year an Untitled painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat sold for more than $57 million, so it’s no surprise that collecting art can seem cost prohibitive to many. Not so! The NC State Student Art Sale offers locals an opportunity to own works by up-and-coming talents for $400 or less.
Segment of Sessions of a Woman
by Tracy Spencer
History/Art and Design, Senior
The sale, which has a pop-up gallery feel to it, offers students an opportunity to showcase their best works, and they receive 100 percent of the proceeds from the sale. “It’s so rewarding to witness the students, many whom are selling their work for the first time, learn how the art selling process works, and, even more rewarding, to give them a check if their work is purchased,” says Amy Sawyers-Williams, coordinator of arts outreach at NC State.
Each year, the university purchases two to three works for the permanent collection on display in the Talley and Witherspoon Student Centers on campus. “We want the student art sale to be a chance for any student on campus who creates visual art to have the opportunity to be recognized for their work,” she adds.
