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April 11, 2021

The Talbot Spy

The nonprofit e-newspaper for the Talbot County Community

Spy Chats Spy Top Story

At the Academy: Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann’s Waterfall

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The way Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann tells it, while she has had a passion for art since childhood, both in this country and in Asia, it was only after she was well out of college that she found her direction with her work. With the help of a mentor at Maryland Institute College of Art, she came to realize that working as a graphic designer had hindered her approach to her visual art. Her use of long straight lines and compacted components, her teacher told her, was far too confining to be seen as serious abstract art.

Mann agreed, however painful it might have been hearing that critique, and from that point on, she decided to recreate the work more openly and explosively.

The first step for her was to begin each painting with a “pour,” an arbitrary application of color and form that opened her increasingly larger canvases to far more freedom and flow that now has become the signature style of the D.C.-based artist.

Those were the essential ingredients for her installation of “Waterfall,” which stands in cube form in the front of the Academy Art Museum for the next year. With the use of unique blue and green colors, Mann pays homage to stained glass that creates new impressions as day turns into night and from the outside to the inside of the cube.

Katherine talked to the Spy by Zoom last week about “Waterfall” and her desire for the museum’s visitors to make reservations to experience the work from within the cube at different times during the day.

This video is approximately three minutes in length. For more information about Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann’s work, please go here. For information about the Academy Art Museum, please go here.

The Fight for Racial Justice on the Shore: Pastor Cesar Gonzalez

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One only needs to look at Chestertown or Talbot County these days to see a whole new generation of young leaders as the Black Lives Matter movement and the Talbot Boys monument controversy have emerged on the Eastern Shore. After decades when the elders of these communities struggled mightily on their own to fight for racial justice without the help of millennials and generation X, many of whom having had to leave the region for school or jobs, the Delmarva has seen the dramatic rise of men and women in their thirties and forties taking up the cause of anti-racism from Kent County to Dorchester.

One of those new bright lights is pastor Cesar Gonzalez in Cambridge. Born in Panama and raised in Miami, Cesar initially took a traditional route with his career in the first ten years and after college with a successful career in publishing and journalism. It was only after he and his wife moved to Washington, D.C. that he began to question his priorities, which eventually led his family to Dorchester County and his desire to return to his spiritual roots with The Seventh-day Adventist Church. He now serves as pastor of the Cambridge Church.

Since his arrival, Cesar has not only reinvigorated his church and its mission he also emerged as a community leader in helping bridge a lingering divide in a city still healing from its history of racial strife. in working with whcp community radio, he has sponsored “the conversation” program with ministers of all political persuasions talking about race and justice, he wrote and directed a documentary called “You Don’t Know Nothin’ about Groove City,” and recently covered the repainting of the vandalized Black Lives Mural and public apology of the young man responsible to the attack. 

The Spy caught up with Cesar at WHCP’s studio on Race Street a few weeks ago to talk about his own journey and that of his new commonunty of Cambridge as continues to fight for racial justice in the 21st Century.

This video is approximately ten minutes in length. For more information about the Cambridge Church go here and for WHCP please go here.

Bill Peak Spends Some Time with Author Alice McDermott

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Bill Peak, the Mid-Shore’s “library guy,” has just completed an interview for the Spy with Alice McDermott, who has been called “the Virginia Woolf of American letters.”  Peak’s interview was performed as part of a partnership between the Talbot County Free Library and The Spy to introduce area readers to the poets and writers behind some of our country’s best literature.  

Alice McDermott’s eighth and most recent novel, The Ninth Hour, made it to the Best Books of 2017 lists of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Time Magazine, among others.  Her seventh novel, Someone, was long-listed for the National Book Award.  Three of her previous novels, After This, At Weddings and Wakes, and That Night were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.  Charming Billy won the National Book Award.  That Night was also a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award.  

McDermott’s stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harpers, Commonweal, and elsewhere.  She has received the Whiting Writers Award, the Corrington Award for Literary Excellence, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for American Literature.  In 2013, she was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.  McDermott retired last year from Johns Hopkins, where, for the past 23 years, she served as the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities.

This video is approximately sixty minutes in length. You can also listen to this as a podcast at the following:

 

For more information about

 

The Future of Waterfowl with Director Margaret Enloe

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In a few weeks, one of the most successful public events in Maryland was scheduled to take place in Easton, and it was going to be a particularly important one. On November 13, the Waterfowl Festival had plans to not only once again be the host for thousands of visitors from all parts of the United States but would have celebrated its 50th year in honoring some of the best traditions of life on the Eastern Shore.

Over those fifty years, Waterfowl has not only become the iconic event that celebrates the arrival of Fall but a great economic development engine that last year piped in over $2.7 million into the local economy with all profits designed to support local conservation efforts.

But like every other small and major special event in America, the 2020 Waterfowl Weekend was canceled in June as a direct result of the coronavirus pandemic. As Margaret Enloe, director of Waterfowl Chesapeake, notes in her interview with the Spy, it was the hardest decision her board has ever had to make and left attendees and volunteers alike gutted by the disappearance of this beloved celebration.

Faced with the reality of their primary annual event being canceled, Waterfowl Chesapeake’s leaders found themselves in uncharted waters with what to to do during this gap year. But in no time at all, they quickly rebounded with new ideas that would keep the spirit of Waterfowl alive.

The first was to finally put into place a long-delayed plan to host many of the festival’s most popular artists on a new website. And the other new development was partnering with local businesses and arts organizations to start a new tradition called CommUNITY Days, which will take place on the same weekend as the original Waterfowl, but with strict safety measures where families can still enjoy Easton and all it has to offer.

The pandemic’s possible silver lining for Waterfowl is that it has given Margaret and the organization to start thinking out of the box for what the annual event will look like in the future. She discusses this transition in our interview that took place a few days ago at the Spy studio.

This video is approximately five minutes in length. For more information about Waterfowl Chesapeake and CommUNITY Days please go here.

The Spirituals Initiative with Kentavius Jones

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When people on the Mid-Shore think of Kentavius Jones, the image of the former lacrosse star at Washington College turned professional musician is presumably the one that comes to mind. For more than twenty years, Kentavius has not only archived regional prominence with his live performances at almost every venue on the Eastern Shore, he’s been a passionate local advocate for art and music, including his support of the integration of the two forms as a trustee of the Academy Art Museum and countless other coalitions in the region.

But when the Spy heard that the singer-composer’s newest project was the celebration of historic spirituals music on the Eastern Shore, it was a delightful shock.

Noting with humor that classic spirituals can be found in his DNA, impacting both directly and indirectly his own music, Kentavius joined friends La Fleur Paysour, Richard Potter, John Wesley Wright, James Redman, and Barbara Paca in forming the Maryland Spirituals Initiative to celebrate this unique legacy and perform that music in some of the Shore’s most historic places and buildings in African-American history.

The Spy talked to Kentavius Jones at the Spy studio last week to learn more.

This video is approximately five minutes in length. For more information about the Maryland Spirituals Initiative please go here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Election 2020: The Spy Bay Ecosystem Forum with Rob Etgen, Alan Girard, Isabel Hardesty and Tom Horton

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While COVID-19 continues to dominate the news cycle and the public’s attention, there remains a number of other important issues that should be considered as voters go to the polls on November 3.  And nothing can be more important to those living in the Chesapeake Bay region than its ecosystem health.

That is why the Spy pulled together some outstanding conservation leaders who work on the Chesapeake Ecosystem to talk candidly about what is a stake for the next four years. Our all star panel includes Rob Etgen, president of the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, Alan Girard, the Eastern Shore Director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Isabel Hardesty, deputy  director of  ShoreRivers, and award-winning environmental journalist Tom Horton.

This video is approximately thirty-five minutes in length. For more information about Eastern Shore Land Conservancy please go here, for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation go here, for ShoreRivers go here and Tom Horton’s Bay Journal Films go here.

 

A Chat with YMCA’s Robbie Gill on Chestertown, Y Expansion and the Slow Return to Normal

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There was a big celebration in Chestertown over the weekend. After years of wishful thinking and some very hard work, a groundbreaking event for a new YMCA for Kent County took place on Saturday. Not only was it a joyful occasion for the community but yet another indication that, despite the devastating impact of a global pandemic, life does indeed continue, and in this case, signals a robust future for children, families, and senior citizens for the area.

Robbie Gill, who leads the YMCA of the Chesapeake, gives credit to Dixon Valve and in particular, its CEO, Dick Goodall, for making this dream a reality. But the addition of the new Chestertown facility is also part of a remarkable expansion plan that Gill and the Y’s board leaders have been working on for over two decades. Within the last few years, the YMCA has not only added Chestertown, but just completed a branch in St. Michaels, and is on track to break ground in Queen Anne’s County next year.

The Spy sat down with Robbie yesterday to talk about the new Chestertown campus, an update of the new facility planned for Queen Anne’s, as well Caroline, Dorchester and Talbot County programs as the YMCA starts to return slowly from the coronavirus criis.

This video is approximately five minutes in length. For more information about the YMCA of the Chesapeake please go here.

The Life of a Cube: The Art of Scott Cohen

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The original concept of Easton-based artist Scott Cohen’s Life Cube project was actually a simple one. Write down a goal and execute on that vision. In Scott’s case, it was the creation of a temporary art installation made specifically for the famed Burning Man self-expression event in Northern Nevada in 2011.

That original Life Cube, which became a portal of others wishing to share their person goals, was an instant hit. Artists contributed their work, while attendees saw the cube as a spiritual center for life itself, with couples becoming engaged and seeking to be married at the site. All of which ended in a climatic torching of those aspirations and goals as a way to send those out to the larger universe.

But the life of Cohen’s cube didn’t end there. Since that early version, the Life Cube project has been replicated over a dozen times, not only at Burning Man, but also with museums, schools, and even downtown Las Vegas. To date, over 100,000 have engaged with Life Cube in its various locations, and now Scott is moving the project to the web where its his dream to make it the largest interactive art project in history. Given his track record, it’s a reasonable bet that he will accomplish that goal.

The Spy sat down with Scott via Zoom a few weeks ago to understand the Life Cube Project and its future.

At the Academy: Andy Warhol’s Accidental Icons with Mehves Lelic

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Long before iPhone and “point and shoot” cameras, artist Andy Warhol was one of the very few who recognized the power of using Polaroid cameras in informal settings to capture American celebrity and culture images from the 1960s until his death in 1987.

Taking along a Polaroid “Big Shot” model which weighed over two pounds, with a lens that extended almost nine inches, Warhol recorded the full range of New York City life. From portraits of Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Jane Fonda, the hip nightlife of the Big Apple, or surreal still lifes of Perdue chicken, the artist built a visual diary of a particular time in America.

Now with some of the best examples of Warhol’s work brought together by the Academy Art Museum in Easton from the permanent collection of Salisbury University Art Galleries, AAM’s curator Mehves Lelic talks to the Spy earlier this week about Warhol’s technique and lasting contribution to American photography in preparation of the exhibition, “Andy Warhol’s Accidental Icons,” which opens in late October this year.

This video is approximately three. minutes in length. For more information about Accidental Icons: Warhol’s Photography please go here.

Andy Warhol’s Accidental Icons
Academy Art Museum
October 23, 2020 – January 17, 2021

The Library Guy: Celeste-Marie Bernier on Frederick Douglass’s Family

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In honor of Frederick Douglass Day, Bill Peak’s guest today is Professor Celeste-Marie Bernier, Professor of United States and Atlantic Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and a world-renowned Frederick Douglass scholar. Bill speaks with her about her latest book, If I Survive, and the remarkable Walter O. Evans archive of Frederick Douglass Family correspondence and art it chronicles, including letters home from Lewis Henry Douglass, who fought with the illustrious 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner.

This video is approximately thirty-four minutes in length. Photo credits; National Park Service, Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, Washington D.C.  For more information about the Talbot County Free Library please go here.