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September 22, 2023

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Arts Arts Lead Arts Arts Portal Lead

Human Rights and a Right-on Vibe at the Avalon by Steve Parks

September 20, 2023 by Steve Parks Leave a Comment

“Just because I’m coming from a human-rights perspective doesn’t mean we don’t have fun in concert.” So says Leyla McCalla (her first name is pronounced like the Derek and the Dominos title song from their 1970 mega-hit double album “Layla.”) This Leyla and her band play the main stage at Avalon Theatre Saturday night.

While “Layla” and its “Other Assorted Love Songs” were short on issues of social justice, Leyla McCalla, born in New York to Haitian immigrant parents and an American citizen by birthright, is immersed in her heritage and Haiti’s historic struggle with democracy and basic survival from one catastrophe after another.

“Haiti’s always seemed like this faraway place,” McCalla says, “but we’re far more connected as Americans than we realize. Haiti was the first independent black nation in the Western Hemisphere. Its very existence,” she says, “is and remains a threat to colonial power.” (Slavery was abolished in Haiti decades before Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War Emancipation Proclamation.) “When we talk about ‘Black Lives Matter,’ Haiti is a huge part of that.” 

The largest population of Haitian immigrants in Maryland is located in Salisbury, with more than 2,300, doubling the population of Haitians living in Baltimore. Most are drawn to Salisbury for work in the poultry industry. About 200 or so live in the Mid-Shore area triangle of Easton, Cambridge, and Federalsburg. “About 20 percent of our clients are Haitian immigrants,” says Matthew Peters, executive director of the Easton-based Chesapeake Multicultural Resource Center. 

Earthquakes, hurricanes, attendant floods, plus the 30-year Duvalier dictatorship following an American occupation of Haiti, left the country bereft of leadership. It culminated in the 2021 assassination of its democratically elected president, Jovenel Moise. 

In 1995, at age 10, McCalla spent months visiting her grandmother in Haiti, exploring her roots and learning first-hand about the nation’s daunting challenges. She cannot visit Haiti now because it is ungovernable, ruled by gangs who raise “taxes” by kidnapping people of means and holding them hostage for ransom.

A multi-disciplinary arts project commissioned by Duke University based on Radio Haiti archives it acquired inspired McCalla’s most recent album, “Breaking the Thermometer,” released in 2022. The title is a recognition of the demise of a free press, or in this case, a free voice of a radio network spreading the truth across Haiti. 

The comparison of lost democracy in Haiti and the threat of authoritarianism overtaking American one-person/one-vote is hardly lost on McCalla. Her latest project is a four-song cycle called “Freedom Series,” of which two songs have been released so far.  

But while the concert on Saturday will call attention to injustice, it will not be a gospel or political sermon. Leyla McCalla and her band – drummer Shawn Myers, bassist Pete Olynciw, and guitarist Nhum Zdybel – know how to make “a big and joyous sound,” says McCalla. Check her out on YouTube, especially her banjo and vocal riffs with the Grammy-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops on a foot-stomping number called “Cornbread and Butterbeans.” 

I don’t know if that song is on her playlist, but it’s a good-time, makin’-love celebration of just being alive, which is itself a fundamental human right.

Leyla McCalla and Band in Concert
8 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 23, Avalon Theatre, 40 E. Dover St., Easton; avalonfoundation.org

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.

 

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Filed Under: Arts Lead, Arts Portal Lead

Spy Arts Diary: Avalon Jazz, Native Art, and Symphonic Strings by Steve Parks

August 27, 2023 by Steve Parks

For a decade, beginning in 2010, the Monty Alexander Jazz Festival was the centerpiece of the Avalon Foundation’s Labor Day weekend celebration, after which fashion custom decreed it no longer suitable to wear white in public. But since the festival played its last notes before the Monday holiday, it was OK for Alexander to take the stage wearing a white tuxedo jacket.

In 2021, Alexander ended his 10-year summer’s-end run in Easton. But the host team picked up the baton with the 2022 Avalon Jazz Experience, headlined by Marcus Roberts’ Modern Jazz Generation. The second Jazz Experience festival opens Friday night, Sept. 1, on the Avalon’s main stage with Sammy Miller and the Congregation, followed on Saturday night by a return engagement of Dominick Farinacci & Friends and Allan Harris in a Sunday matinee.

Sammy Miller and his seven-piece band have toured the world, more or less, with highlight stops at the jazz festivals at Monterey and Newport, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, the White House, and, before the invasion of Ukraine ordered by Vladimir Putin, the Prokofiev Concert Hall in Chelyabinsk, Russia.

Dominick Farinacci, trumpet

Trumpeter Farinacci, another globetrotter who’s played in Japan, Qatar, and the Eastern Shore – having opened the inaugural Jazz Experience festival last September – brings his Triad ensemble of pianist Jonathan Thomas, bassist Yasushi Nakamura, and drummer Jerome Jennings to the Avalon along with vocalist Ekep Nkwelle and flamenco dancer Alice Blumenfeld for a multifaceted program ranging from jazz standards to improvisational riffs.

The festival finale shines the spotlight on versatile Brooklyn-born, Harlem-based guitarist/vocalist/bandleader/composer Harris, whose unique interpretation of the Great American Songbook has drawn comparisons to Tony Bennett and Nat King Cole. Contemporary jazz, including Harris originals from his “Kate’s Soulfood” album, add a finishing touch to this wide-ranging Jazz Experience playlist. avalonfoundation.org

***
For a theatrical cabaret experience, Centre Stage presents the 2014 Broadway musical “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill,” which captures the demons and dramatic allure of Baltimore native Billie Holiday months before her 1959 death. Her songs accompanied on piano – among them “God Bless the Child” and the lynch-protest anthem “Strange Fruit” – are, of course, integral to the show, running Sept. 14 to Oct. 8. But her life story, spilling out between numbers, slurring into intoxicated incoherence, reveal a subtext even more compelling than the dark lyrics. The play marks the directorial debut of Pulitzer-nominated actress/author Nikkole Salter.
centrestage.org

***
An unprecedented National Gallery of Art group exhibition opening Sept. 22 along the Mall in D.C. features works by 50 living Native American artists across the United States. In mediums ranging from painting to performance art, from sculpture to sketches and beadwork to weaving, as well as video and film, “The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans” presents a collective visualization of indigenous reverence for and connection to land they inhabit or once inhabited.

Curated by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, an artist, and citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, the show, running through Jan. 15 in the National Gallery’s East Building, reflects thousands of years of spiritual concern for tribal land bases that have been invaded and annexed through serial treaty abrogations. The Flathead Indian Reservation, for instance, was home to three tribes in Montana, Idaho, and British Columbia, of which more than half a million acres slipped from their grasp through land re-allotments that began in 1904. The exhibit’s artistic statement calls for justice and recognition.
nga.gov

***
Meanwhile, an installation of indigenous art by Dakota-based Ogala-Sioux Marty Two Bulls Jr. puts a new face on Easton’s Academy Art Museum’s Atrium entranceway gallery, where “Hoesy Corona: Terrestrial Caravan” has been making its climate-change statement for a year.

Using the buffalo as a metaphor for overconsumption resulting in near-extinction, the artist critiques a culture that would lay waste to such iconic and powerful creatures. “Marty Two Bulls Jr.: Dominion” is an imagery wasteland of paper cutouts, soda cans, and assorted non-recyclables reflecting a disconnection from nature and a disregard for ancestral economy and wisdom. The installation opens on Sept. 15 and runs through next August. academyartmusuem.org
***

Jesse Montgomery

The Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra, led by Grammy winner Michael Repper, launches its 2023-24 subscription season of Masterworks concerts featuring Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and living American composer, violinist, and educator Jessie Montgomery.

The season-opening concert, 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 28, at Easton Church of God, introduces “Strum,” a song for string orchestra or chamber configurations by Montgomery, resident composer for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, whose “Soul Force” was among the recordings by African-American women on New York Youth Symphony Orchestra’s album that won the best-orchestral Grammy for the young musicians and music director Repper. Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings” follows on the program, anchored by Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4. The three-concert series continues at beach venues: Cape Henlopen High School in Lewes, Delaware, 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 30, and 3 p.m. Oct. 1, Community Church, Ocean Pines.

Here is your chance to welcome autumn with a classical and contemporary salutation.
midatlanticsymphony.org

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.

 

 

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Filed Under: Arts Lead, Arts Portal Lead

Spy Review : Much Ado About Something and a Decade of Shore Shakespeare

August 19, 2023 by Steve Parks

Judging from her fond recollections, Avra Sullivan, executive director and co-founder of the Shore Shakespeare Company, comes by her passion for the Bard genetically. “My parents read me Shakespeare as bedtime stories,” she said with a laugh, “but they may have thought Hamlet is a little rough for a 7-year-old.”

 

Opening on Labor Day weekend at Adkins Arboretum – where Shore Shakespeare got its start a decade ago – Sullivan directs Much Ado About Nothing, which moves on to Oxford Community Center’s backyard the following weekend and Chestertown’s Wilmer Park, Sept. 15-17. 

 

Avra Sullivan as Lady Macbeth

After being introduced to Shakespeare at such a young age and subsequently earning her high-school diploma, Sullivan met Chris Rogers, a fellow Shakespeare devotee, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where she was a Wilkes University theater/dance major. Post-college, they joined a Shakespearean troupe near Atlantic City. But after moving back home to her native Chestertown, Sullivan missed the experience of performing Shakespeare live and, together with Rogers, pursued their shared ambition to offer Shakespeare in the “way it was performed in his time,” Sullivan said – excluding the Elizabethan ban on women performing on stage. Their goal was and remains to present free open-air shows (with pay-what-you-wish or suggested-donation options) played on austere sets framing players in character costumes but not especially elaborate.

 

Their vision was realized in 2013 at Adkins Arboretum near Ridgely, where the inaugural Shore Shakespeare production, Twelfth Night, drew an audience of 300 who brought their own lawn chairs or beach blankets seating. A second performance in Chestertown followed.

 

The new company returned the following year with the ultimate romantic tragedy, Romeo and Juliet. Successive summers featured Comedy of Errors, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and As You Like It. In 2019, Shore Shakespeare moved indoors to Chestertown’s Garfield Center for a February staging of Don Nigro’s spoof, The Curate’s ‘As You Like It’ (lawn chairs unnecessary). 

 

Two tragic events – COVID-19 and the sudden and unexpected death by heart attack of co-founder Chris Rogers – wiped out plans for any performances. In 2021, though COVID still prevented most indoor performing arts – Shore Shakespeare recovered by presenting A Little Touch of Shakespeare on the Theme of Love, a collage of seven snippets put together by Rogers and performed as a tribute to him in Centreville’s Wharf Park. A full production of Measure for Measure, directed by company choreographer and actor Greg Miniahan, was last summer’s Shore Shakespeare offering. 

 

Much Ado About Nothing ostensibly centers on the courtship of Hero and her suitor Claudio. But they are upstaged by the witty repartee of Hero’s cousin Beatrice (played by Christine Kinlock) and Claudio’s friend Benedick (played by Howard Messick, a Shore Shakespearean from the company’s inception).

 

But besides live summer performances, while the most public face of Shore Shakespeare, there’s much more to its mission. “We do a ton of educational outreach,” Sullivan says, citing her team’s status as artists-in-residence for Caroline County schools – principally North Caroline High in Denton and Colonel Richardson near Federalsburg. “We do workshop classes on acting and stagecraft,” Sullivan says, adding that five students from the spring semester are in the cast of Much Ado.

 

When asked about the biggest challenge for Shore Shakespeare, Sullivan has a quick answer. “Weather. It’s not just performances that get rained out. So do our rehearsals. We’re an outdoor company, all right.”

 

As for Shore Shakespeare’s repertoire of plays over its 10-year history, only two have been tragedies. Hamlet was not one of them. After all, “to be or not to be” was out of the question as a young child’s bedtime story.

 

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.

 

Shore Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing

 

Adkins Arboretum: Sept. 2 at 2 p.m. and Sept. 3 at 3 p.m.

Oxford Community Center: Sept. 8 at 7 p.m., Sept. 9 at 6 p.m. & Sept. 10 at 3 p.m.

Wilmer Park: Sept.15 at 7 p.m., Sept. 16 at 6 p.m. & Sept. 17 at 3 p.m.

 

http://www.shoreshakespeare.org

 

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Filed Under: Arts Lead, Arts Portal Lead

Spy Review: Grand Masters, Photo Still-Lifes & More at the Academy by Steve Parks

August 10, 2023 by Steve Parks

Groundbreaking masters of the 20th century and a similarly groundbreaking still-life photographer who’s also the Academy Art Museum’s 2023 artist-in-residence shared the spotlight in the opening reception for three new exhibits at Easton’s Academy Art Museum Thursday evening, Aug. 3. 

Le Repas Frugal, by Pablo Picasso

“Spatial Reckoning: Morandi, Picasso and Villon” in the museum’s Healy Gallery focuses on how three famed European painters changed how representational art of the 19th century evolved into Modernism, Cubism, and, later, Post-Expressionism. Upon entering, the first image you’ll see what looks to be a 1931 unfinished drypoint etching, Le Peintre Decorateur (The Painter Decorator), a near-faceless ghostly image by French artist Jacques Villon (1875-1963). Next is a second etching of the same title with facial features filled in. Next are the Two Renees which depicts a girl on her bicycle (1906) and another, five years later – presumably of the same girl, this time with a pouting scowl on her face. 

Moving on, you can’t miss the true masterpiece, Le Repas Frugal, by Pablo Picasso of Spain (1881-1973), a 1913 print of the famous etching from a private collection picturing a despondent couple who’ve just shared a meal that did not satisfy either their physical or spiritual hunger. Another Picasso, a circa 1900 watercolor, depicts a painter named Carlos who, in profile, projects a clownishly prominent nose and ruby red lips. In between, we get a glimpse of Picasso’s Cubist future, a quite geometric 1912 pen-and-ink on paper of a man holding a cigar. The evolution toward Cubism advances with Villon’s 1941-42 engraving of a girl’s distorted, cross-hatched face, looking as if startled by a frightful event.

The show’s last third belongs to Italian painter Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), who devoted much of his career to painting or drawing ordinary kitchen objects – pitchers, cups, and vases. I can’t say that I get the appeal or what they have to do with the progression to modern art movements, other than his 1927 Still Life with Cloth on the Left, executed with far more textured detail than his other works on display here.

All three artists are said to have been inspired by Paul Cezanne, and a print of his oil portrait of his wife in a red dress is mounted next to text describing the influence he had on artists from his time.

Across the hall in the Lederer Gallery, Canadian-born/Chicago-based artist-in-residence Laura Letinsky changes the visual subject to the 21st century with her large, lens-based color still lifes and arranged domestic scenes of mostly residual disorder. Who Loves the Sun (Weather Report), a 2022 archival pigment print, looks like a messy forecast with something spilled all over it. A 2013 untitled series of chromogenic images printed on silver-based paper under the designation of Albeit features one of the sushi-roll slices beside an empty plate as if someone forgot to serve them properly. An untitled #9 diptych from a 2006 To Say It Isn’t So series places an unused Target shopping bag next to a depleted serving box of McDonald’s fries. This image is paired with an opened gift box and a broken fork stabbing a black ribbon. Go figure. I can only guess what it says about life in the new millennium, though it appears to suggest dysfunction. 

In the two smaller downstairs museum galleries, Baltimore-based artist Amy Boone-McCreesh’s Visual Currency presents wry commentary on what passes for high fashion and decorative arts in a setting of luxury and showy bad taste. Her 2019 Vanity Wall Hanging, a digital printed mixed-media on silk, depicts a charmingly vintage interpretation of a frilly but chintzy imitation of the rich life – possibly, we imagine, purchased with collapsed crypto-currency. Similarly, in Access to Beauty I and II, the 2021 mixed-media collages suggest that access to the scenic environs beyond are blocked by forbidding fencing. Don’t fence me in, country singers used to sing. How about don’t fence me out?======

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts critic and editor now living in Easton.

Three New Academy Art Shows
“Laura Letinsky, 2023 Artist-in-Residence: No More Than It Should Be,” “Spatial Reckoning: Morandi, Picasso and Villon,” both through Oct. 22, and “Amy Boone-McCreesh: Visual Currency,” through Nov. 5, Academy Museum of Art, 106 South St., Easton; academyartmuseum.org

 

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Filed Under: Brevities

Spy Review: BSO Makes Beautiful Music at the Todd Arts Center by Steve Parks

July 30, 2023 by Steve Parks

As part of its Music for Maryland summer tour, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra returned Saturday night to the Todd Performing Arts Center at Chesapeake College for the first time since 2016 – an absence due in part to the COVID pandemic that shut down the concert hall.

An appreciative audience of more than 400 welcomed the orchestra led by guest conductor Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser, who, after taking a bow, turned on the podium to direct the musicians in Dvorak’s rousing Slavonic Dance, Opus 72, No. 7 in C major. This spirited seventh tune in his series, inspired by a Serbian folk tale, was an instant hit when it was arranged for full orchestra in 1887. It was easy to imagine why with the joyfully rhythmic performance by the BSO, dressed in summer white jackets and blouses.

Turning to introduce the next in the series of short dance numbers, the gregarious conductor, a native of Canada, told the story of Florence Price, the first African-American woman composer to have her music performed by a major U.S. orchestra. Her prodigious works were thought to be lost until discovered in a home near Chicago long after Price’s death in 1953. Her posthumous renaissance was celebrated Saturday night with “Juba Dance,” the third movement of Price’s ground-breaking Symphony No. 1, which made its debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933. The jazzy Juba movement takes its name from foot-stomping, hand-clapping dances performed by Southern plantation slaves. The BSO string section set a vibrant pace with bass and drum beats marking time in percussive syncopation.

Two distinctly different waltzes followed, starting with Tchaikovsky’s traditional one from the opera “Eugene Onegin.” Fittingly romantic with the undercurrent of love’s unrequited intrigue, the heartbreaking string-led melody closes with a torrid finish. The thoroughly modern waltz movement of “Four Dances” by Towson University music professor and composer Jonathan Leshner “sounds very expensive in its elegance,” Bartholomew-Poyser noted of the jazz undertones that switch to robust outbursts before settling on a stylish minuet in conclusion. Bartok’s even more variant Romanian Folk Dances followed with seven rapid-fire mini-movements – from tenderly emotive to urgently impatient to an even faster pace as if played by Transylvania fiddlers in a race to finish.

The aptly named “Polyphonic Lively” borrows its title from a painting by Paul Klee. Written in 2016 by Canadian composer Dinuk Wijeratne, who says that his piece – indeed lively – “conjures up high-vibration, high-intensity chatter,” expressed in sharp turns in orchestral “voices” that stretch a melodic throughline with instrumental touches and flourishes in disparate brief solos.
Far more familiar to most of us is Piazzolla’s 1965 “Summer” entry in “The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires,” his answer to Vivaldi’s Northern Hemisphere “Four Seasons,” changing the order from that of the 18th-century Venetian-Viennese composer. Each Piazzolla “season” is written as quite different compositions rather than an all-encompassing suite. Chelsea Kim, BSO’s first violin, performed the extensive solo portion of this longest piece in the concert. The light accompaniment by the full orchestra grows more heated as if responding to the rising temperature of January in Buenos Aires. Kim’s expressive interpretation of the season’s variable moods – from restfully languid to breakouts of thunderous claps – on this evening echoed the thunderstorm that had just pierced the clammy humidity of the day.

The unpronounceable “Im Krapfenwald’l,” which translates roughly as the “Cuckoo Polka,” by Johann Strauss Jr., offered musical comic relief as birdsong chirps of the string section suggested a Viennese Woods setting. What begins as a standard polka concludes with
a bombastic surprise that scares the cuckoos from their perches.
Bartholomew-Poyser described the concert finale, the fourth and last movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, as “something like a perpetual motion machine.” In keeping with the dance idioms of the concert format, Beethoven’s thrilling finish to his masterpiece offers a whirl of dance-like energy, as reflected in a young boy in the front row who mimicked the conductor’s high-energy exhortations to his team of musicians. Besides the splendid and inspired performance that earned its standing ovation, the miracle of it all is that Beethoven’s 7th premiered in December 1813 when he was all but deaf.

An encore medley that included a Sousa march closed out the evening of highly varied and highly skilled performances of new and/or unfamiliar works, along with beloved classics. After two more concerts on this Music for Maryland tour, the BSO prepares for its 2023-24 season with its new music director, Jonathon Heyward.

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts critic now living in Easton.

MUSIC FOR MARYLAND BSO TOUR

Saturday night at Todd Performing Arts Performing Arts Center, Chesapeake College, Wye Mills. Remaining concerts on tour are at 3 p.m. Aug. 5, Dodge Performing Arts Center, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, St. Mary’s City, and 4 p.m. Aug. 6, Garrett College Performing Arts Center, McHenry; bsomusic.org/calendar

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Filed Under: Arts Lead, Arts Portal Lead

Spy Arts Diary: Art Times 3, Strike Buster & OC Plein Air by Steve Parks

July 22, 2023 by Steve Parks

A still-life photo by AAM artist-in-residence Laura Letinsky

As July gives way to August, the Academy Art Museum turns the page on most of its gallery space with three new exhibits, including one by its 2023 artist-in-residence and a triplicate exhibit tracing the influences on three 19th-to-20th century European masters who, in turn, changed the spatial perspective of the next generations of painters to pave the way to Modernism, Cubism, and Post-Expressionism. The third new show mocks contemporary notions of luxury, high fashion, and interior design with an abstract sensibility.

“Spatial Reckoning” features pioneering works in the evolving careers of classically schooled artists from France (Jacques Villon, 1875-1963), Italy (Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964), and Spain (Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973). Each was inspired by the works of Paul Cezanne, who turned early from Romanticism and, looking past 19th-century Impressionists, pointed toward a new way of seeing and then painting it that way.

Morandi painted still lifes throughout his career, depicting household bottles and vases, landscapes, and occasional figurative portraits. His style progressed gradually toward more subtle coloration, with objects emerging from a haze. At first, a devotee of Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, Villon tilted toward Fauvism and Cubism at the turn of the century, creating multiple perspectives on the same flat plane. At the same time, Picasso sought to evoke an emotional response to his novel artistic liberties with what might have been representational paintings in other hands. “Spatial Reckoning” opens Aug. 1 with artworks on loan from the National Gallery of Art, Cincinnati Art Museum, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and other collections.

First up among the three new AAM exhibits is Baltimore-based Amy Boone-McCreesh’s “Visual Currency” on July 28, with an Aug. 3 reception for each show. Working in sculpture, collage, and mixed media, McCreesh presents visual critiques of arbitrarily shifting tastes that rule high-end adornment, decoration, and fashion while speculating on what might lay in store for what could be considered posh in future abundance.

AAM’s 2023 artist-in-residence Laura Letinsky, a native of Canada now living in Chicago, is a still-life photographer who specializes in layering effects of human presence in the scenes she captures. A Guggenheim Fellow whose art comments on the role of women in domestic settings while questioning their context. Letinsky’s art is held in the collections of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Getty and Guggenheim museums, and the Winnipeg Art Gallery. As part of her residency, Letinsky will present an August masterclass on how the camera can shape a greater understanding of the world.
academyartmuseum.org
                                                                       ***

If you’re suffering from writers/actors strike withdrawal – or even if you aren’t – you might enjoy seeing and hearing the Emmy and Writer’s Guild award-winning wordsmith, comedian, and host of the HBO show “Last Week with John Oliver.”  Now on forced hiatus from his weekly gig, Oliver gets a chance to return to his roots as a touring stand-up comic. He comes to Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre in the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center for one show only at 7:30 p.m. Aug. 2. From 2006 to 2013, Oliver made his TV mark as a correspondent on another multi-award-winner, “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” guest-hosting for a long stretch near the end of its run.

If you miss the Hippodrome show or prefer to see him with another prime-time talk host, you can catch Oliver with the host of “The Late Show with Seth Meyers,” also sidelined by the strikes. Oliver and Meyers appear together in three shows at the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan, Aug. 17-19.
france-merrickpac.com, msg.com/beacon-theatre

                                                                    ***
Following the lead of Plein Air Easton, which just completed its 19th annual festival, Artists Paint OC: Plein Air 2023 opens on Aug. 9 as artists spread out along the Boardwalk, streets, harbors, the bay, and its marshes and, of course, the ocean beach to paint in the open sea air starting at 9 a.m. until whenever. Fifty invited artists will continue painting scenes all over Ocean City and Assateague Island until Aug. 12, when they show their works at a free reception for the Wet Paint Show & Sale, 5-7 p.m. at the OC Performing Arts Center. You can enjoy live music, hors d’oeuvres, and a cash bar while you peruse the paintings and maybe take one home (don’t forget your credit card). Artists Paint OC winds up Saturday morning, Aug. 13, with a quick-draw paint along the Boardwalk near Division Street, plus a Kids Paint OC Art Show at a closing reception, 1-3 p.m.
artleagueofoceancity.org
                                                                 ***
The Mainstay in Rock Hall brings the classic rock sounds of the Blake Thompson Band to its backyard stage – weather permitting – as July starts to make way for August at 6:30 on the evening of Sunday, the 30th. A Kent County native, Thompson’s musical taste ranges from classic rock and pop to blues, soul, and R&B, having toured with Little Feat, David Crosby, and the namesake bands of Steve Miller and Dave Matthews. Best known for his electric guitar chops, Thompson counts Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Alvin Lee among his heroes. Together with his wife, singer/songwriter, and violinist Kate Russo, the pair mixes in original songs of their own. 
mainstayrockhall.org 
                                                          ***
The Chicks, a dozen-time Grammy-winning trio – most of whose awards came when they were known as the Dixie Chicks – bring their 2023 world tour to Columbia’s Merriweather Post Pavilion at 7:30 p.m. Aug. 2. Joining them on the Maryland tour stop is the Canadian band, Wild Rivers. On June 25, 2020, in response to the Black Lives Matters movement and the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police, the Dixie Chicks changed their name following criticism that “Dixie” bore connotations of American slavery. In July that year, the Chicks released “Gaslighter,” their first album in 14 years. A month later, they performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, which nominated now-president Joe Biden.
merriweatherpostpavilion.com

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts editor and writer now living in Easton. 

 

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Filed Under: Arts Lead, Arts Portal Lead

Artists Paint the Farm After Shakespearean Thunder Opens Plein Air Easton

July 16, 2023 by Steve Parks

For Stephen Griffin, the 2023 Plein Air Easton (PAE) festival is his 17th in 18 years and his 13th in a row. “Plein Air is the reason I moved to Easton,” he said while dabbing finishing touches on his “Sheep at the Barn” oil painting as two horses tried to get in the picture. 

Griffin was living in Edgewater, along the South River near Annapolis, when Cedric Egeli, a friend who later painted the official portrait of then-Gov. Larry Hogan suggested he apply for a new outdoor painting competition across the Chesapeake Bay. “To me, Easton was just a place you drive by on the way to the ocean,” he recalls. But after his first-time painting scenes in and around town, “I told Cedric, ‘If you can find me a studio, I’m moving here.’ And two weeks later, I moved to Easton.”

Not all 57 artists from across the United States – plus one from Italy – are so impressed with Plein Air Easton, now in its 19th year, that they would move here. But all ten painters interviewed at Saturday’s sold-out Meet the Artists event sang their PAE praises. 

Christine Lashley of Reston, Virginia, calls the festival “an incredible event. Basically, all you have to do all week is to paint. It fosters creativity.” Lashley and her fellow artists compete for a juried ribbon and sales of one or more of their paintings. Olena Babak, who drove down from Hartland, Maine, for her eighth Plein Air Easton, says, “The way they treat us is completely unmatched.” Other festival organizers “are nice to us wherever else we go. But here, they treat us like kings and queens.” As a result, Babak says, she has completed up to 12 paintings during a week’s stay.

Kim VanDerHoek “Onward and Upward”

Kim VanDerHoek, who flew in for her eighth PAE from Orange, California, painted along the shoreline confluence of the Wye River with Gross and Lloyd creeks framing a view of Wye Island and, in the distance from Gross Coate Farm, Bennett’s Point in Queen Anne’s County. She joked about the clouds over the scene she was committing to her 24-by-36-inch canvas. “They don’t pose for you,” she said, adding that she chose her spot beneath a sprawling tree for the shade and a breeze off the water as relief from the smothering afternoon humidity.

Nearby, in the shade of a weeping willow, DK Palecek said she “drove like a banshee” for 15 hours from Kaukauna, Wisconsin, for her first Plein Air Easton. At Meet the Artists, she switched locations on the farm’s vast lawn where she had sketched a stand of trees in the blazing sun before moving to the waterfront for a respite, adding orange daylilies to her composite painting. 

Richard Sneary painting Gross Coate mansion

Placing his easel under a linden tree with a second-story veranda stretching across its hefty branches, Richard Sneary, a retired Kansas City, Missouri, architectural artist, painted the 1760 brick mansion of the Gross Coate estate. “I like the character of old buildings in their natural setting,” he said, noting that he’s done many new architectural wonders, including Oriole Park at Camden Yards and the Ravens’ stadium before it was named for a bank.

Near the foot of the lane leading to the mansion, Philip Carlton painted on a smaller scale – a 6-by-10-inch hardwood board. He chose a shady spot overlooking a large pond upon which a steady breeze and sparkling sun reflections created a constant ripple against a treeline background through which a field of sunflowers peeked. From western Colorado near the Utah border, Carlton was returning for his third PAE for its “very different landscape and bright greens,” as opposed to the desert hues where he lives. “But I don’t think I could live here,” he said of the heat and humidity. “I’ll take 105 degrees back home to 85 degrees here.”

By 6 in the evening, many of the day’s paintings had been mounted near the waterfront for show and sale under a tent surrounded by cocktail tables and sofa lawn furniture arranged in quadrants, most with umbrellas. By 7, gray-white stripes of evening clouds partially obscured the sun before it set—no thunderstorms in sight. Several paintings were already marked SOLD, even as they went up under the tent. It’s not unusual for Meet the Artist’s paintings to attract a buyer even before it’s finished and framed.

Griffin, the artist who moved to Easton after his first Plein Air, put his “Sheep at the Barn” up for a modest $900, while California painter VanDerHoek sought $6,300 for her “Upward and Onward.”

The festival continues with painting demonstrations through the week at PAE headquarters in the Waterfowl Building at Harrison and South streets and in Tilghman on Monday, July 17, and an Easton “paint-in” on Tuesday. Tickets to the Collector’s Preview Party on Friday, July 21, give a head start on the show-and-sale opening to the public. The preview ticket price can be applied to your art purchase. The smell of fresh oil paint permeates this event as signs warn you of “Wet Paint” on many works.

A July 22 kids competition concludes the next day with an exhibit, sale, and prizes. Awards in various categories of the professional competition, juried by painter Jove Wang, go up for show and sale at the Academy Art Museum on the final day, Sunday, July 23.

Across the street at Christ Church, “Local Color,” a show and sale outside the PAE festival, is open July 20-23. 

***

Plein Air Easton festivities began indoors with Friday afternoon-into-evening receptions at three downtown art galleries. 

Troika Gallery opened its fourth annual “Fabulous Forgeries” exhibit featuring artists it represents who have copied some of the Great Masters’ greatest hits on canvas. In addition, works by Sara Linda Poly, the 2016 Plein Air grand prize winner, and classically based paintings by Matt Zoll are on show and sale through Aug. 31.

Further down Harrison Street, Trippe Gallery premiered its “Women in Plein Air” exhibit of works by seven artists among 20 past and/or current PAE painters, including Jill Basham of Trappe, who has appeared in every Plein Air Easton festival since 2012.

Turning the corner onto Goldsborough, Studio B hosted a reception for its “Masterstrokes: Visions of Jove Wang” show running through July 24. Jove is a juror for this year’s Plein Air Easton.

As the gallery receptions drew to a close, an audience estimated at 200 was assembling in lawn chairs arrayed on Harrison in front of the Tidewater Inn for Perfect Storm Productions’ presentation of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” on a stage adorned with plastic flowers and blinking-light garlands bathed in clamshell footlights. 

The tale of mismatched lovers, confused by magic and mischief, was performed by a large and nimble cast and crew that dodged raindrops as thunder dispersed some of the crowd near the show’s end.

A video intro to “Pyramus and Thisbe,” the tragedy within the comedy, drew robust applause for Wall, erected by the couple’s fathers to keep the lovers apart. A final resolution of love lost, found, and reassembled is portrayed in immersive style as a cast of fairies, a jester in donkey ears, and a vagabond troupe of players mingle with the audience as a royal wedding becomes one for four couples whose love survives the harrowing “dream.” 

Rain all but curtailed the “Nocturne Paint-Out” scheduled to follow the play, though a few artists with easels painted scenes from the “Midsummer’s Night” show. (The final performance is at 7 p.m. Sunday at Oxford Community Center.) 

More festival highlights include the Collector’s Preview Party on July 21, The Plein Air Quick Draw Competition on Saturday from 10am to 2pm which is open to anyone and will see thousands of collectors and over 200 artists painting in a two block area of downtown Easton.  The Next Generation Painting Competition, for painters 18 and under runs on Saturday as well from 10am to 3pm.  The festival concludes this Sunday, July 22,  at Small Painting Sunday from 10am to 3pm with complimentary Bloody Marys and Mimosas and at 2pm The Judges Talk where Plein Air Easton Judge, Master Jove Wang will reveal why he chose each of the winning paintings.  Plein Air Easton Headquarters is open with hundreds of freshly painted Eastern Shore scenes daily except for Thursday.  More details at pleinaireaston.com.

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.

PLEIN AIR EASTON
Through July 23 in Easton and various Talbot County locations. pleinaireaston.com

 

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Filed Under: Arts Portal Lead, Spy Highlights

Good News: Baltimore Symphony’s Return Homecoming to the Shore

July 4, 2023 by Steve Parks

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, as part of its Music for Maryland summer touring season, returns to Chesapeake College’s Todd Performing Arts Center for the first time since 2016.

The Music for Maryland series opens July 8 with a concert at Harford Community College’s APG Federal Credit Union Arena, then makes its first Eastern Shore appearance at Elkton High School auditorium on July 21 with a program leading off with Mozart’s “Magic Flute” Overture.

The Chesapeake College concert, the first since Marin Alsop, now the BSO music director emeritus, conducted the orchestra in its 100th anniversary season with a program of the classic of classics, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (“Eroica”), and the Oboe Concerto by Christopher Rouse, then still a living composer. (He died in 2019.)

For nearly two decades to that time, the BSO had played at Chesapeake College every year until interrupted by scheduling cutbacks, in part due to lengthy contract negotiations with its musicians, the emergence of the Delmarva’s own Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra, and later by COVID restrictions.

This makes the July 29th Wye Mills 29 concert an on-the-road return homecoming for the BSO. Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser conducts a repertoire beginning with Dvorak’s Slavonic Dance, Op. 72, No. 7 in C major, followed by the third movement of belatedly celebrated African-American composer Florence Price’s Symphony No. 1, followed by Tchaikovsky’s Waltz from “Eugene Onegin,” Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances, Piazzolla’s “Summer” from “Four Seasons in Buenos Aires” and capped by the rousing fourth movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. 

The Music for Maryland BSO tour covers nine of the state’s 23 counties representing every geographic region from the Shore to St. Mary’s in southern Maryland on Aug. 5, with the finale in mountainous Garrett County on Aug. 6.

By the way, tickets are a Pay-What-You-Wish bargain or a suggested $10 donation. The concert starts at 730 PM.

bsomusic.org/events

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Filed Under: Arts Lead, Arts Portal Lead, Centreville Best

Spy Arts Diary: Avalon Paintings & Pictures, 4th Fireworks, and Much More

June 25, 2023 by Steve Parks

Not to be confused with the Avalon Theatre in Chevy Chase, straddling northwest Washington, D.C. near the line into Montgomery County, the Avalon Theater in Easton celebrated its centennial in 2022, while Chevy Chase’s Avalon is observing its 100th anniversary by screening great films from each decade of its existence. If you’re curious, the next movie – to be determined (no, not its actual title) – is from the 1970s and will be screened on July 16. 

Jill Basham’s “Time Travel Wye House,” Plein Air Easton Festival, 2022

Meanwhile, the Avalon in Easton one-ups its junior namesake by moving through its 101st anniversary with one of the most successful programs of its storied history. The Avalon Foundation’s 19th annual Plein Air Festival, regarded as the most prestigious and arguably largest such juried competition in the United States, opens July 14 with a kick-off party stroll-through downtown art galleries and other smart shops that dish out raffle tickets commensurate with your retail purchases while you enjoy pop-up street concerts. Following the raffle drawing and prizes – you must stick around to win – a live, interactive street performance of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” breaks out in front of the Tidewater Inn just as dark settles in and the “Nocturne Paint Out” commences with amateurs invited to set up easels next to festival competition artists as, together, they paint the town.

But that’s just the start. July 15 is your opportunity to see paintings evolve as you watch at the “Meet the Artists Party,” where most, if not all, of the artists in competition gather at this year’s historic venue situated at the confluence of the Gross and Lloyd creeks and the Wye River. Gross Coate Farm and its namesake Georgian plantation mansion were patented to William Gross in 1658 and became the ancestral home of the Tilghman family for 250 years. Unobstructed waterfront views in three directions stretch out to Wye Island straight ahead and Bennett’s Point in the distance, challenging talented artists to match its beauty. Guests can wander this magnificent estate and watch as painters create their interpretation of the vantage points they’ve selected. Admission is by charitable-giving membership in Friends of Plein Air Easton. Most people are there to buy, so don’t wait until the oil or watercolor dries. If it looks promising to your eye, make an offer before the painting is done, or you may lose it to a rival Plein Air friend. 

Competition, not so much among the artists as the buyers, also applies to the Collectors’ Preview Party on July 21, during which your admission ticket allows you two hours or less to buy a potential masterpiece before everyone else is admitted free. (The cost of your ticket can be applied to your purchase.) Recent preview parties resulted in an average painting sold every 45 seconds. Even after the preview ends, the fresh smell of oil and other painterly applications lure art lovers for hours as signs warn them not to touch lest they smear the artist’s imagery.

While artists come from all over the U.S. and beyond to compete and sell their paintings at Plein Air Easton, Jill Basham of Trappe has been a fixture in the festival, appearing every year since 2012, winning a third-place ribbon. Basham also won the Best Painting by a Maryland Artist prize in 2015 and Best in Show in the limited 2020 pandemic edition.

Avalon Foundation’s Plein Air Easton is a one-of-kind-festival where you can experience art as a live performance event in town and all around Talbot County.

But if it’s a classic film centennial you’re looking for, Avalon in D.C. has just the ticket. Full disclosure, I only discovered this by googling Avalon centennial and coming up with that other one. Personally, I’m sticking to Easton’s Avalon’s centennial plus 1. 

Avalon Plein Air Easton & Avalon Centennial Chevy Chase
pleinaireaston.com; theavalon.org/programs/centennial-program                                                                                               

Mark Nelson’s “Bison Pause” at Dorchester Center for the Arts

                                                                       ***
July is summertime anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere, and sometimes you need relief from the heat. Besides its air-conditioned galleries, Dorchester Center for the Arts in downtown Cambridge offers a visual escape to another of the four seasons with its photography exhibit “Yellowstone in Winter,” July 1-29. In February 2022, six skilled amateur photographers – three Ph.D. nutritionists, a human services administrator, a financial planner, and a bagpiper – embarked on a 10-day project to share their digital views of Yellowstone National Park, hoping to capture its natural wonder and majesty.

The photographers in the show are native New Yorker Janet Kerr, a retired researcher at the National Institute of Health; Bill McDonnell, who won several photo competitions in Fairfax County, Virginia, and more recently as a member of the Dorchester arts center; Mark Nelson, who took up photography in sixth grade after winning a camera as a prize for selling magazine subscriptions; Joe Soares, a retired University of Maryland, College Park, professor, who says climate change has driven him to “use photography to document the delicate nature of our woods and wetlands”; Randy Welch, who as a young commercial fisherman in Alaska, photographed wildlife ranging from humpback whales to wolves and eagles, and Wayne Zussman, who says he believes “a photograph should always tell a story.”

A Saturday, July 8 reception with the artists starts at 5 p.m.

dorchesterarts.org

                                                                      ***
You can enjoy Independence Day fireworks all over Delmarva, but for a truly Capital Fourth, think about traveling to the Nation’s Capital. However, if you’re sticking closer to home, fireworks get an early weekend start over St. Michaels Harbor on Saturday, July 1, at dusk. Go to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum campus for unparalleled viewing. (Admission to CBMM is free after 5 p.m. that day.) Celebratory bombs burst over Chestertown on Tuesday, July 4, along either the Kent or Queen Anne’s county sides of the Chester River. The best viewing is aboard the River Packet that sails out about 7:30 p.m. or at Town Dock at the foot of High Street. In Cambridge, fireworks shoot into the dark skies over the Choptank River on the Fourth, with the best views at Great Marsh and Long Wharf parks on the Dorchester side. But you can also take in the show on the Talbot side of the Choptank.

For a D.C. Fourth, consider staying overnight Monday through Wednesday morning. The celebration starts early with the Independence Day Parade along Constitution Avenue between 7th and 17th streets. A fife and drum corps leads the way for military servicemen and women, keeping step to marching bands ahead of colorful patriotic floats, all starting at 11:45 a.m.  

From there, it’s an easy walk to the National Archives, where you can see the original Declaration of Independence and other historic artifacts. On the Mall nearby, take in any free Smithsonian Museums sites, the National Gallery of Art, or the memorials and monuments – from Lincoln to Washington to World War II. But, be warned, it’s a longer walk than it looks to the Capitol. After squeezing in a late lunch/early dinner break, you may still have energy for the spectacular fireworks show over the Mall starting at around 9 p.m. While free tickets for the concert beforehand on the West Lawn of the Capitol aren’t easy to come by, try asking your congressional representative. The best bet may be to record it back home and take in the mix of Americana genres, classical music, and patriotic salutes upon your return. 

If you’re staying an extra day, complete your three-day Fourth holiday with a half-hour drive to Mount Vernon to see how George, the Founding Father himself, lived back in the day of the nation’s birth as you listen to Revolutionary War-era music. Having seen the river view from his home, I’m sure that Washington–said never to have lied (I don’t believe that either) –once threw a silver dollar across the mile-wide Potomac. Not even a Cy Young arm is that mighty.

nps.gov/subjects/nationalmall4th/things-to-do.htm

                                                     ***
While baseball may not seem a subject for an arts column, it certainly qualifies as Americana. There’s a fashion aspect to this mention of the Baltimore Orioles, now the toast of the town. Make a fashion statement by attending the Friday, June 30, game against the Minnesota Twins while fitting yourself with the Orioles Floppy Hat giveaway. (Gametime 7:05 at Camden Yards.) Or take in two games and further accessorize with a Birdland Hawaiian Shirt at the 4:05 game with the Twins on July 1. There are no free threads for Sunday’s contest, but the 12:05 start allows kids or grandkids to run the major league bases after the O’s have defeated the Twins. 

For a literary link to hometown baseball, Oriole Park is not far from the Edgar Allan Poe House & Museum, where on the first Saturday of the month – in this case, July 1 – you can book a bus for a guided exploration of circumstances surrounding Poe’s life and death in Baltimore. The 90-minute macabre tour includes a visit to BOTH of his graves – was he buried twice?! – each one close to where he was found and later passed away. Of sport-worthy note, Poe’s connection to Baltimore inspired the former Cleveland Browns football franchise, which relocated to Charm City in 1996, to be renamed the Ravens. And may it remain so, quoth the Raven, evermore.

BTW: The O’s challenge the Yankees in the Bronx over July 4 weekend.

orioles.com; poeinbaltimore.org

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.

 

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Filed Under: Spy Highlights

Showing Pride on the Delmarva

June 17, 2023 by Steve Parks

The second annual Delmarva Pride Festival opened Friday night at Easton’s Avalon Theater with a drag show featuring six queens strutting their sequined stuff on the Art Deco stage before mingling with a cafe-style audience who stuffed their hands and décolletage costumes with dollar bills. Even in high-rise heels, most also went upstairs to the boisterous fans seated in the balcony. 

Miss Pride of Salisbury Tania Lashay at the Delmarva Pride Drag Show

Queen of queens Miranda Bryant played host for a 2 1/2-hour pageant that also showcased Vicky Fischer, Kedra Lattimore, Kandi Pop, Brie Daniels, and Tania Lashay, the 2022 Miss Pride of Salisbury – all performing to recorded dance music. 

Bryant, a drag veteran who admitted to a half-century plus one in age, lip-synced to a superstar of her mother’s generation, Dolly Parton while stripping to his bustier as dollars rained down from above and hand-to-hand from patrons at the 22 cafe tables below.

Kandi Pop, presumably a stage name, was introduced by Bryant as bisexual and transgender-in-progress – “I’m so confused,” he added jokingly. “Pop” was the first to run up the stairs to wow the balcony crowd. Everyone else followed Kandi’s example, even if by slow-moving elevator. 

A statuesque Lashay took the drag soundtrack to hip-hop attention with a Beyonce number athletically delivered with a crowd-pleasing backflip, then closed her third round in the drag sequence with a hoot-inducing twerk.  

Kandi Pop with Pride Drag Show host Miranda Bryant

Of Brie Daniels – we learned in the final number as he revealed himself as decidedly male Brian – host Bryant said, “We went through puberty together.” Brie’s skimpy outfit brought on a veritable torrent of dollar bills streaming down from one corner of the balcony.

If any drag-show virgin in the audience doubted that the singing was lip-synced, Kedra Lattimore, in her pastel gown, complete with wedding-style train, proved it was all recorded. No one on earth can sing like Whitney Houston, tragically not even Whitney anymore. Vicky Fischer picked up the rest of “I Will Always Love You” before segueing into a hot dance number to match his vibrantly curly red wig.

Delmarva Pride chair Kyle O’Donnell had advised attendees to “bring your dollar bills” – which they did in spades – some while re-upping at the cash bar. As for ticket sales, O’Donnell said that “100 percent goes to support the work of Delmarva Pride Center,” which includes monthly socials “to encourage people to come out and feel a sense of belonging and community in public.” Coming up in July is a pool party, bowling in August, and a nature hike in September. More importantly, money raised in this and other fund-raisers will go toward a brick-and-mortar Delmarva Pride Center – a true home base.

The Pride Festival continues Saturday with a Harrison Street fair from 11 a.m.-4 p.m., including main-stage entertainment hosted by MC Ryan featuring headliner Danah Denice along with The Sagacious Traveler, Madisun Bailey, Cameron Mae & Danny Alvarez, plus drag show reprises from the night before as well as new acts. And there’s an art show as well.

More than 100 vendors have signed up to sell their wares and wearables, along with food trucks and beverage stands, and, of course, people from Delmarva Pride to tell you everything you need to know about their work and what they’re abou

“We offer the Mid-Shore, Upper Shore LGBTQ community a safe space to be themselves,” says Tina Jones, a Wittman native and secretary/treasurer of Delmarva Pride.

“It goes back to visibility,” says Concetta Gibson, co-chair of Delmarva Pride. “Our center, what we do, makes it easier for us to find each other.”

“It’s about freedom to be yourself and having support to help keep your head up,” Ivan Colon says, adding that being a gay Latino can “reduce your earning power.”

Citing “intersectionality” – having more than one or two strikes against you in the eyes of those who hate people who are not like them  – Jones, a white trans woman, says, “A black, trans woman is 14 times more likely to commit suicide.” Besides discrimination and violence against them, the trans community and others in the LGBTQ alphabet face legislative attacks, too. “More than 500 laws have been introduced in this country to make it more difficult for them to live their lives. Some of these laws mean that they can even take your kids away from you.”

Still, Jones feels lucky, she says, because “I came out later in life.” Now 56, Jones had a successful career that gave her the strength to keep her head up in the face of people who think that her transition is – somehow – any of their business.

But when she did come out, Jones says, “I ripped the doors off the closet.”

The Pride Festival winds up on Sunday morning, 10 a.m.-noon, with a Pride Brunch at ArtBar 2.0 in downtown Cambridge.

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton. 

DELMARVA PRIDE FESTIVAL

Friday, June 16-Sunday, June 18, in Easton and Cambridge, delmarvapridecenter.com

 

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Filed Under: Spy Highlights

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