Kent County loves its critters and just proved it again with the opening of the Animal Care Shelter for Kent County on Worton Rd.

After five years of planning, fund-raising, and construction, the $6+ million shelter is a state-of-the-art facility designed to care for lost and surrendered animals until they are reclaimed or find a forever home.

Executive Director Richard Keaveney says that promoting the health and safety of the animals are their primary goals, and to that end have constructed spacious cat and dog galleries, unique adoption rooms for cats with access to outside areas on warm days, and outdoor play areas for dogs who are walked by staff and volunteers four times and day.

To maintain an optimum health environment, a controlled air system is in place to block any cross-contamination. This safety feature, along with separate areas for sick animals and a special medical room eventually for minor surgeries, dentistry, and neutering, are central to the health care of any animal at the facility.

A food prep kitchen to accommodate special diets and meds and an industrial laundry room help staff and volunteers work at an organized and comfortable pace. A separate break room is available for everyone during the day.

Additionally, Animal Control now maintains an office at the new shelter to bridge the lost and stray animals to the facility and on their way to healthier lives and forever homes.

And yes, there’s even a special “barn” for feral cats where they will learn to socialize and be introduced to the adoption galleries.

An official ribbon cutting will open the new facility to the community in May. The Spy will keep you posted.

Here, Executive Director Richard Keaveney walks the Spy through this extraordinary addition to Kent County.

This video is approximately 14 minutes in length. For more about the Animal Care Shelter for Kent County, please go here or call 410-778-3648.

Two artists, two states, one canvas, and one acclaimed painting. You might have recently seen a write-up on their collaboration in the Spy. It was an idea neither artist expected would happen.

Jill Basham from Trappe and Southern California’s Kim VanDerHoek met at an Easton Plein Air event almost a decade ago. Each admired the other’s work—both the similarities (including their preference for aerial views of landscapes) and differences. VanDerHoek is more of a textural artist, referring to her style as ‘loud.’  On the other hand, Basham prefers capturing the softer, subtler moments. Couldn’t the meshing of the two types, they wondered, create an interesting outcome?

The decision to design one painting came about as their challenge and an opportunity for growth. “It meant,” said VanDerHoek, “not silencing or obliterating the other person’s voice stylistically. It’s easy to let your ego take over, but that’s where the mutual respect and admiration of one another’s work is so important.”

As was reported, the painting, started by Basham using a photo of D. C. as reference, was then sent to VanDerHoek, who added her artistic talents. Having agreed not to share progress, the nearly completed painting was returned to Basham for a final edit. “When I opened the box, it literally took my breath away,” she said. That moment is captured in a video.  The 24”x36” painting is now on display and available for sale at Trippe Gallery in Easton.

As exciting as this collaboration was, VanDerHoek and Basham are now back to creating their own paintings. They each admit that the partnership was well worth the effort and allowed them to reflect on their careers and how this experience has changed them.

For VanDerHoek, thoughts about becoming an artist started when she was a child and was reinforced in high school. In college, she majored in fine arts, worked as a graphic designer, then took time off after her son was born. It was then that she discovered Plein air. “It was something I could do and not worry about him getting into my supplies,” she said. “It didn’t take very long for me to realize that that was the career path I’d always wanted to take.”

Contrast that to Basham’s path, one that she considers a ‘late start.’ “I was a social worker and then a transportation planner for a while. It was not something I cared much about, so instead, I stayed home and raised four kids. When my youngest was in third or fourth grade, I signed up for a drawing class at the Academy Art Museum and then went on to take classes in painting. That’s when I got that ‘aha’ moment and knew this was exactly what I wanted to do. It still gives me goosebumps.”

Despite their focus on painting, both Basham and VanDerHoek learned they had different ways of starting a project. For VanDerHoek, it’s a matter of finding or inventing something with a strong design that will keep the viewer engaged. She prefers to paint on wood panels and uses different tools such as squeegees, brushes, and a palette knife to add layers of paint that will give her both the soft, quieter passages and the bold textural areas. “Unlike Jill,” she said, “I work on one painting at a time. I wish I could work on more, but I have to finish one before starting another, or it loses momentum, and I’ll never return to it.”

To Basham, her ability to work on several paintings is something she feels is ‘undisciplined.’  “I have 20 paintings going on at once,” she said. “I really don’t have a process for a beginning. Sometimes I’ll use a photo reference, or I’ll just start with a design and look for the abstract strength of that design. I might turn the canvas and see what I see. And then start creating a memory of a landscape that comes to mind.”

Although they may not always agree on how to start a painting, they are more aligned in knowing when to stop. “I’ll add five details and take a step back,” said VanDerHoek. “If the painting isn’t any better, then it’s time to stop. I’m just adding unnecessary detail.” 

Basham said to her it’s all about time. “I need to sit with it and let it breathe. We, artists, tend to want to keep on painting, but that will just end up potentially distracting or detracting from the overall quality of the work.”

Both artists welcome any additional collaboration knowing it will depend on the commitments each has made to their respective careers. For now, Basham’s thoughts are on teaching workshops at the Academy Art Museum while supplying galleries with her work.

VanDerHoek admits to life getting in the way at the moment, consuming her better intentions to spend more time painting. She knows it’s all temporary, though. “This is, after all, still a job. You must still show up and create work. You still have deadlines.” Deadlines which include shows and art festival events.

Like all Plein air artists, they are preparing for the season. “I love painting at our Plein air. It’s something I always look forward to. It will even be more special in 2024, which will be their 20th anniversary.”W

VanDerHoek is particularly looking forward to coming back to Easton. “Easton has done a huge amount for me as an artist. Besides friendships with other artists like Jill, it has helped me advance my painting style and fostered a love of the area, the landscape, and the supportive art community. That’s been significant and impactful for me.”

Jill Basham: https://www.jillbasham.com
Kim VanDerHoek: https://kimvanderhoek.com
The Trippe Gallery, https://www.thetrippegallery.com

 

While the new Talbot County Public Schools superintendent Dr. Sharon Pepukayi is indeed home-grown, with a long family history based in Bellevue, including her parents ownership of Bellevue Seafood, years spent as a counselor Camp Pecometh in Centreville, and a very proud graduate of St. Michaels High School, she does start her new career at TCPS with a learning curve challenge. For her entire professional life, including her recent twelve years with Middletown, Delaware public schools, she has never worked within the Maryland public school system before taking her new job.

In “normal times,” this gap of experience is relatively easy to overcome, but with the rollout of Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, the state’s massive multi-billion dollar public education reform act, as well as surveying the full impact of COVID on her students, Dr. Pepukayi is the first to admit that she’s been on a rapid orientation since she was appointed last summer.

Nonetheless, Pepukayi is well aware that her school district will be not only entering a new era, but it may also be it’s most transformational. With the support and funding of the Blueprint plan, the superintendent sees a remarkable opportunity for both students and teachers to fulfill the County’s consistent desire to provide the best possible education for its young people.

And while the Blueprint offers some remarkable hope, it doesn’t stop the complexities and current challenges of her 4,524-student school system. That includes, but is not limited to, getting students caught up after losing almost two years to COVID, very poor test scores, school safety, and such things as dress codes and the use of cell phones.

Dr. Pepukayi touches on these complex issues in her first interview with the Spy. She also talks about her professional journey, her love of her native Talbot County, and her devotion to public education.

This video is approximately eight minutes in length. To support the work of the Talbot County Public Schools please go here.

 

 

 

For Brittany and Frank Hynson, going to work daily means descending 125 steps down the face of a cliff to the shantytown of Las Gradas, Costa Rica to begin their day attending to the needs of children and families in the community.

Inaccessible by car, Las Gradas is the poorest section of the La Carpio slums in San Jose, Costa Rica. Surrounded by a garbage dump and alongside a polluted river, the 155-acre area is home to 155,000 inhabitants with children at risk for sexual abuse, drug and alcohol abuse, hang activity and prostitution.

Frank, nephew of Kent County’s beloved Rev. Vincent Hynson, and Brittany met at Hope Fellowship in Chestertown and recognized in each other the determination and commitment needed for missionary work in some of the most economically challenged areas in the world.

This shared calling brought the two together as missionaries and eventually as husband and wife, and now two young children, as they help meet the needs of an impoverished community lacking the basics, from clean water to reading skills an learning to survive in a dangerous environment.

Both had previous experience as missionaries with CoLaborers International in Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Zambia, and Costa Rica. That experience proved invaluable as they worked to create a non-profit branch of the organization in Las Gradas.

CoLaborers International is an organization that works alongside established efforts to “provide services to the women and children including basic education, emotional intelligence/ mental wellness groups, counseling services, food, hygiene, arts and crafts activities, and vocational training to the parents founded by Marielos, a costa Rican therapist.”

The additional challenge of an influx of 300,000 Nicaraguan refugees fleeing the violence and repression of the Ortega government has made the Hynson’s job even more taxing. While they are often faced with the language barriers of indigenous populations, they continue to gain the trust of the battered and ever-changing Las Gradas community.

The key element to that growing trust is their long-term commitment to the community and goal to raise their own family there as they work with staff members who experienced childhoods in the same slums.

The Spy recently held a Zoom meeting with Brittany and Frank to learn more about their missionary work with CoLaborers International.

This video is approximately nine minutes in length. To find out more about CoLaborers International, go here. For more about the Hynsons work in Costa Rica, go here.

 

What better place to study 19th-century English Romantic literature than to immerse oneself for a few summer weeks in England’s northwest Lake District, wake to a damp shawl of mist over glacial ribbon lakes and hike the rugged mountains while discussing Wordsworth and Coleridge?

Each summer for twenty years, Washington College Professor Emeritus Dr. Richard Gillin, his wife Barbara, and a dozen students from Washington College did just that as part of the Kiplin Hall program they co-founded and chaired.

The learning project’s mission was to connect “literature and landscape” using the our-hundred-year-old ancestral estate of Lord Calvert, whose son Cecil Calvert founded one of Maryland’s first settlements in the 1600s as a haven for persecuted Catholics. 

Each day, the Gillins and students explored the surrounding countryside of North Yorkshire and West Cork, Ireland, an experience he would later describe in his book A Guide to Hiking the Liberal Arts as “an explanation of what the liberal arts are and how learning history, art, philosophy, literature are so important It’s not a matter of collecting numbers or gathering simple facts. It demands experience, time, and contemplation.

Princeton Review selected A Guide to Hiking the Liberal Arts as one of its 2020 Best 300 books. Publisher Robert Frank wrote that the book is a tribute to the extraordinary dedication of America’s best undergraduate college professors “and the vitally important role they play in our culture, and our democracy.

The Spy chatted with Dr. Gillin to talk about how the Kiplin Hall project came about and his reflections on why experiences like the summer learning tours are fundamental to a liberal arts education. 

This video is approximately six minutes in length. The Bookplate bookstore’s ongoing Authors & Oysters series will feature Dr. Gillin at 6 pm. Wednesday, January 8 at the Retriever Bar at 337 ½ High Street. The event is free and open to the public.

 

 

 

The old joke about consultants is that they ask for a client’s watch to tell them what time it is. This attempt at humor does accurately describing the reality that many answers companies seek are actually in plain view. But what it fails to note is that many of those clients simply don’t have the expertise or staff to notice them in the first place.

Historically, these clients have been corporations and other large institutions, but increasingly small towns are turning to outside advisors to help them manage such challenges are tourism, economic development, affordable housing and the like. Lacking the internal resources to identify unique opportunities, as well as funding sources to pay for those initiatives, these tiny municipalities are increasingly breaking from their “do-it-yourself” problem-solving approach and are bringing in real pros to analyse those issues and develop thoughtful action plans to address them.

In the case of Mid-Shore towns, it would be hard to find more capable or well-known outsiders than Ross Benincasa & Sam Shoge, the partners of the newly-formed Roads and Rivers Consulting firm based in Easton.

Active Talbot County residents will immediately recognize both men. Before starting on his own, Ross had been the highly-regarded executive director of Discover Easton at a time when Sam was serving as the economic development coordinator for the County. Benincasa led the effort of Talbot County’s first Arts & Entertainment District during his tenure and has remained an active board member of Chesapeake Music and Talbot Interfaith Shelter. The Elizabethtown College graduate also serves as an advisor at the innovative SVN Miller Commercial Real Estate firm, focusing on infill development projects.

And Kent County citizens have known Sam since he grew up in Chestertown and later when he was a member of Washington College’s admissions office just after graduating from Elon College and more recently as the former director of the Kent County Chamber of Commerce and member of the Chestertown Town Council.

The Spy asked Ross and Sam to stop by the Spy studio earlier this month to talk about this new partnership and why small towns and organizations benefit from having a new set of eyes look at their structural challenges.

This video is approximately eight minutes in length. For more information on River and Roads Consulting please go here.

Executive Director of RiverArts wasn’t on Chris Sade’s bingo card for mid-2022, but lucky for the Chestertown community, here we are.

Sade and his wife Marianne discovered Chestertown in 2015 during a visit to explore a job opportunity for Marianne at Washington College Library. Months later, accepting the job, the couple made the leap of faith and moved to town.

Fast forward to July 2002 and RiverArts’s search for a new executive director to steer one of the community’s paramount arts organizations into 2023 and beyond. Enter Chris Sade.

Chris brings 35 years of experience in the art world as the founder of a national transportation company in Washington DC that would cater to museums and organizations throughout the country.

“In 1996 we sold it to a firm it was based in DC and from there I ended up working with them for nearly 20 years helping them expand their business and provide services to museums such as packing, storage, transportation, and a conservation lab to help with inventories,” Sade says.

Sade says his role was to find new work for the company and tapped into the many connections he’d made over the years.

“I’ve been to about every major museum in the United States and some others around the world so I got to know people and they got to know me because trust is a large issue and allowing somebody to walk in and take care and custody of their valuable work.”

Connecting is the key, Sade says, and he hopes to expand his network of friends in Kent County to promote RiverArts mission to support artists, offer programming, arts and crafts shows, and arts education to the community.

Sade’s first project will redesign RiverArts’s floorspace by moving the gift area into a newly enhanced adjacent gallery space rather than combining it with the main gallery. Identifying the space as a standalone gift shop will help with retail sales, the foundational revenue that supports the organization. A grand opening for the gift shop will be in February.

The Clay Studio and Arts Education Center will hold a Grand-Re-Opening January 6 at 204 High St. (First Friday) from 5-7 pm, Clay Studio posting may now be found on RiverArts Facebook page, here.

The Spy sat down with Chris Sade last week to discuss his vision for 2023.

This video is approximately seven minutes in length. To join RiverArts or volunteer, see their website here.

The last time the Spy interviewed Wendy Palmer was documenting the bittersweet moment when she and her partner, Gretchen Gordon, stepped down as the owners of the very popular Oxford restaurant Latitude 38 in May of this year. 

What we didn’t realize at the time was how far back Wendy’s relationship goes with the Easton Family YMCA. It turns out it went back decades, but in the last five years, as both director of operations and promoted to associate director of the two-campus Y program in Easton. And that relationship changed once again when it was announced in October that she would be the new executive director of one of the YMCA of the Chesapeake’s flagship programs. 

In her first interview with the Spy in her new position, she documents how well the Easton programs have come back from the challenging days of COVID, the major expansion to accommodate the growing popularity of Pickleball, the YMCA’s highly successful fitness programs for those suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, and a renovated wellness center at the Peachblossom campus. 

This video is approximately minutes in length. For more information about the Easton Family YMCA please go here.

For Waterfowl Festival president Ken Miller and his colleagues on its board of directors, their mission is simple; help celebrate the unique culture of the Chesapeake and raise money to protect it.

While it is true that the majority of the Board’s work is focused on the smooth operation of a three-day festival now in its 51st year, Waterfowl’s real business is to work with local conservation organizations, artists, artisans, hunters, and watermen to help educate the public on how rare and exceptional life is for those fortunate to live on the Eastern Shore.

Much of this effort has historically gone into land protection. Close to $6 million has been raised and donated to the cause of land protection on the Shore. And more recently, it has started a scholarship fund for young people eager to become leaders in the conservation movement.

But the real challenge for the organization happens every year in the streets and buildings of downtown Easton. Part of the labor is finding sponsorships and attracting the best waterfowl artists and artisans, but more importantly, to continue to creatively engage the thousands of families who attend with programming for all ages.

In Ken’s case, a boyhood in rural New Jersey was where his conservation passion began. Growing up in a small town in the farm country of that state, Ken started hunting as a kid, primarily ducks and muskrats, which led him to a love for duck carving during his teens. And from then on, Miller has always found a way to be part of the culture.

While his real job in life has been a succession of leading insurance companies, followed by a successful role as an entrepreneur in private equity finance, Ken Miller remained a lifelong hunter but has also engaged in land use and conservation. From chairing Morristown’s Open Space Committee to installing living shorelines at his family’s now permanent home on Broad Creek in Talbot County, Ken and his wife, Julia, have been active participants in ecological preservation.

The most recent example has been Ken’s work with the Waterfowl Festival. A Board member for years, he recently agreed to serve as president for a one-year term. The Spy sat down with him last week to talk about the Festival (which starts this weekend), the organization’s mission, and some of the challenges Waterfowl Festival faces as it enters its sixth decade.

This video is approximately three minutes in length. For information and advance tickets please go here.