12 Mart 2013 Salı

Arts and Culture in North Carolina

Arts and Culture in North Carolina

A rich legacy of handicraft, folk art, down home music, and diverse influences makes North Carolina a fascinating blend of traditions. African-American and Cherokee cultures inform aspects of the state's creative landscape, from historic sites to prominent art collections, jam sessions to outdoor festivals. Additionally, the region known as the "triangle," the trio of research universities of Duke University, North Carolina State University, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has given the state a legacy of fine art.
In 1964, North Carolina's then-governor, Terry Sanford, established the North Carolina Arts Council, the first local arts council in the United States. Since then, state government agencies have supported many state arts organizations and artists, ensuring artistic traditions and innovations continue to thrive throughout North Carolina.
HIGH ARTS 
While traditional roots music reigns in North Carolina (see Music section below), classical music organizations have also experienced success. The state's best-known symphony, founded in 1932, is theNorth Carolina Symphony. The ensemble presents 175 concerts per year in small community parks and major concert halls, but its main performance venue is Raleigh's Meymandi Concert Hall.
Based in Greensboro, the Bel Canto Company tours the region with programs of choral work.
Some classical organizations operate during the summer season, often hosting concerts in spectacular outdoor settings. The Brevard Music Center, situated in western North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains, presents 90 opera, chamber concert, and orchestra performances between June and August. In Charlotte, the Symphony Park is the site of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra Summer Pops series.
Opera plays a minor role in North Carolina's art scene. One of the oldest companies, the Asheville Lyric Opera, performs classics such as Carmen and The Marriage of Figaro in a downtown theater. Chapel Hill's Long Leaf Opera encourages collaborations between artists and produces fully staged English-language productions. The newest member of the state's modest opera scene is North Carolina Opera. The company begins operating in summer 2010 and will perform at Raleigh's Progress Energy Center for the Performing Arts.
Founded in 1970, Charlotte's North Carolina Dance Theatre is the state's oldest professional ballet company. Two former dancers from the New York City Ballet serve as artistic directors of the troupe, which has a repertoire of full-length classical, modern, and contemporary pieces. Its offshoot company,North Carolina Dance Theatre 2, fosters careers of apprentice dancers.
Using dance as a tool to enlighten audiences and promote social change, the Chuck Davis African-American Dance Ensemble calls Durham home. Energetic, boundary-blurring performances combine dance with ritual, audience participation, African culture, and chanting. Durham also hosts the annualAmerican Dance Festival, an event that began in Bennington, Vermont, under Martha Graham. The summer series of dance performances, events, and classes aims to preserve American dance heritage and promote new choreographers.
Western North Carolina's first modern dance company, the Asheville Contemporary Dance Theatre, presents modern masterworks as well as experimental pieces at the intimate BeBe Theater.
The annual North Carolina Dance Festival tours several locales, typically hitting Raleigh, Greensboro, Wilmington, and Charlotte. Its humble beginnings consist of a 1991 weekend dance performance in Greensboro; it now encompasses eight different companies performing alongside local dancers in the tour's host communities.
MUSEUMS
In 1947, North Carolina's governor set aside $1 million for public art collections in Raleigh's North Carolina Museum of Art. Since then, North Carolina's history of funding public art has resulted in an impressive number of museums. Renovations completed in 2010 expanded Raleigh's North Carolina Museum of Art to include a new 127,000-square-foot building showcasing the permanent holdings. The original museum building now hosts temporary exhibits, while gardens and outdoor galleries hold site-specific environmental art pieces.
In Charlotte, North Carolina's oldest museum, the Mint Museum, began as a branch of the United States Mint, issuing gold from 1836 until the beginning of the Civil War. The Federal-style building houses collections of ancient American Art, American and European ceramics, American decorative art, historic costume, African Art, Asian Art, historic maps, contemporary art, and photography. The museum has a second building, the Mint Museum of Craft + Design, which opens in a new uptown building in autumn 2010.
Another popular Charlotte attraction is the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, specializing in European and American art from the mid-20th century. Although small, the museum features many little-seen works that previously formed the private collection of the Swiss-American Bechtler family.

Additional cultural attractions include the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts & Culture, which hosts dance, music, theater, visual art, and literary events, and Chapel Hill's Ackland Art Museum, which boasts 15,000 works spanning ancient eras through the 21st century. Over a dozen thematic exhibits annually cover contemporary photography to paintings by European masters, pop art to video installations. In Wilmington, the Louise Wells Cameron Art Museum stands amid the nine acres of woodlands that make up Pyramid Park. The permanent collection represents North Carolina practitioners of fine art and craft traditions, as well as artists from the United States and beyond.
At Durham's Duke University, the Nasher Museum of Art features the Brummer Collection of medieval and Renaissance art as well as the George Harley Memorial Collection of African Art, holdings of Greek and Roman antiquities, and over 3,000 examples of ancient American art. Curators have set their sights on expanding the contemporary art collection. Duke University also holds the Bryan Center, a complex that includes Louise Jones Brown Gallery (international artists), the Perk Gallery (Duke student artwork), and the Duke Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Life (work exploring themes of sexuality, race, religion, and spirituality).
Two cultural institutions in Asheville reflect North Carolina's diverse art traditions. Asheville Art Museum centers on 20th- and 21st-century American artists but also dedicates space to western North Carolina's cultural heritage of Cherokee art, Black Mountain College experimental and interdisciplinary art, and studio craft. In 1892, George Vanderbilt commissioned hundreds of African-American craftspeople to build the YMI Cultural Center. The center's gallery presents shows focusing on black experiences and regional traditions.
The city of Greensboro, home of a University of North Carolina campus, has notable cultural attractions. The campus' Weatherspoon Art Museum showcases modern and contemporary work by Southeastern artists; works include sculpture by Alison Saar, photography by Gregory Crewdson, and paintings by Dona Nelson. The Civil Rights Center & Museum pays tribute to significant moments in the civil rights movement with exhibits such as a Hall of Heroes, a remembrance wall dedicated to those who died fighting for equal rights, and a Hall of Shame chronicling the horrors of Jim Crow era North Carolina.
MUSIC
North Carolina has earned notoriety for its thriving scene of traditional music, covering genres such as fiddle tunes, bluegrass, ballads, blues, swing, gospel, and folk. Raleigh is home to PineCone, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving folk performing arts with five concert series and monthly bluegrass, shape-note, and Irish folk music jam sessions.
Countless musical innovators have counted North Carolina as their birthplace or home. Doc Watsonwon seven Grammy awards for his signature flat-picking work in bluegrass, country, blues, gospel, and folk music styles. Thelonious Monk brought revolutionary improvisational playing to bebop, which many credit him with founding. Saxophonist John Coltrane developed the bebop sound into hard bop and then explored the world of free jazz. Percussionist and composer Max Roach also worked in bebop and jazz, creating compositions that often addressed issues pertaining to African Americans and the civil rights movement. Pianist and singer Nina Simone defied strict categorization, but earned the nickname "The High Priestess of Soul."
Other famous names associated with North Carolina music include Etta Baker, a Piedmont blues guitarist and banjo player; Earl Eugene Scruggs, famed for his three-finger picking style on the banjo; old-time banjo musician Charlie Pool; and R&B songstress Roberta Flack, whose most famous hit was "Killing Me Softly."
North Carolina native George Clinton made inroads in funk with his band Parliament and Funkadelic as well as his solo work. Randy Travis performs American country music and has had 16 singles hit number one on the country charts. Guitarist, fiddler, and singer Charlie Daniels plays southern rock, and soul artist Ben E. King earned fame for his hit "Stand By Me." Other North Carolina music notables include Clay Aiken, who wowed audiences with his pop ballads on American Idol and  has since released several albums; and pianist and singer Tori Amos, who was born in Newton, and has charted several alternative rock hits.
THEATER AND PERFORMING ARTS
Raleigh has a few thriving theater companies, among them Burning Coal (specializes in overlooked classics and groundbreaking dramas), North Carolina Theatre (hosts musicals and touring versions of Broadway shows), Raleigh Little Theatre (a community theater), and Raleigh Ensemble Players(alternative theater and dramas).
The North Carolina Stage Company presents innovative theater in its downtown Asheville space. In addition to the Mainstage Season, the company hosts the Catalyst Series to nurture emerging local theater companies.
On Greensboro's Triad Stage, the company presents bold productions that inspired the New York Drama League to name it one of America's best regional theaters. Established dramas constitute the main stage season, while the UpStage venue hosts edgy, cabaret-style shows.
In 1989 Larry Leon Hamlin founded the National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem. Poet and memoirist Maya Angelou served as the first chairperson of the festival's board, which oversees a roster of multiple performances presented by America's top professional black theater companies.
FILM
Numerous famous films feature North Carolina as a setting, even if they were not wholly filmed in North Carolina. David Lynch's darkly surreal Blue Velvet (1986) used the small town America look of Wilmington as an ironic backdrop for his film noir–style events and characters.
Other films shot or set in North Carolina include Cape Fear, first made in 1962 but remade to great acclaim by Martin Scorsese in 1991, the Peter Sellers-starring comedy-drama Being There (1979), the baseball-themed romantic comedy Bull Durham (1988), slasher film I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), thriller Kiss the Girls (1997), and war drama Cold Mountain (2003). In the Amy Adams vehicle Junebug (2005), a Chicago art dealer travels to rural North Carolina to convince an "outsider" artist to sell his paintings.
North Carolina's most notable figures involved in film include actor and director Cecil B. DeMille, actor and singer Andy Griffith, and actress Ava Gardner, famous for her work in Show Boat and The Sun Also Rises.
North Carolina hosts several film festivals, such as the Charlotte Film Festival, Kings Mountain's Real to Reel Film Festival, Greensboro's Carolina Film & Video Festival, Winston-Salem's RiverRun International Film Festival, Wilmington's Cape Fear Independent Film Festival, and, also in Wilmington, the Cucalorus Independent Film Festival. The city of Durham alone offers several, among them, the North Carolina Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, the That's Not Mine! Film Festival, and the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. In Asheville, people can attend theAsheville Film Festival or the Asheville Rejects Film Festival.
LITERARY ARTS
Over his 22-year tenure in the town of Flat Rock, writer, lecturer, and folklorist Carl Sandburg created one third of his oeuvre that reflected on the eternal questions, "Who am I, where am I going, and where have I been?" Award-winning poet and autobiographer Maya Angelou taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. Her first memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, chronicled the first 17 years of her life in poignant detail, earning her critical accolades.
Other notable writers associated with North Carolina include Thomas F. Dixon (author of The Clansman, which inspired the controversial silent film The Birth of a Nation), poetic novelist Thomas Clayton Wolfe, short story master O. Henry, historical novelist Charles Frazier, novelist Kaye Gibbons (best known for Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman), playwright Paul Eliot Green, children's book author Betsy Cromer Byars, mystery novelist Margaret Maron, and historical writer Timothy B. Tyson.
The surreal, humorous novels of Tom Robbins, who was born in the town of Blowing Rock, have earned him wide acclaim. In 1993, Gus Van Sant directed the film version of Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, a fictional exploration of hippie counterculture.
VISUAL ARTS
One of North Carolina's most famous visual artists is Maud Gatewood (1934–2004), who painted everything from jagged landscapes to portraits of television evangelists. African-American artists such as painter and sculptor John Biggers, sculptor Selma Burke, surreal folk artist Minnie Evans, soulful portraitist Beverly McIver, modern muralist Charles Alston, and figurative painter J. Eugene Grigsby have also earned notoriety.
Charlotte-born Romare Bearden (1911–1988) created autobiographical oil paintings, collages, and cartoons. Although he left North Carolina at an early age, he continued to incorporate imagery of African-American life in the American South into his artwork, and also drew inspiration from Mexican muralists such as Jose Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera.
Asheville's Kenneth Clifton Noland (1924–2010) attended North Carolina's famed Black Mountain College, where he explored the schools of Neo-Plasticism and Bauhaus, as well as artwork by Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee.
ARCHITECTURE
North Carolina's largely rural background has resulted in only a few grandly designed public buildings. In Raleigh, the North Carolina State Capitol, which builders completed in 1840, features Greek Revival architecture. Historic Edenton, the site of North Carolina's first colonial capitol, contains examples of classic architecture styles spanning 250 years.
Asheville is home to the former home of George Vanderbilt. Using family money from steamboats and railroads, he oversaw construction of the vast estate, which he christened Biltmore. Trails circumvent the 8,000-acre backyard. Bennehan House, in Durham, forms the heart of Historic Stagville. The surrounding area features four rare slave houses, a timber frame barn, the pre-Revolutionary War farmer's home, and a cemetery.
New Bern's Tryon Palace was originally built in the mid-1700s, serving as the home for the royal governor. Its Georgian architecture emulates design fashionable in London at the time. The grounds contain post-Revolutionary and early 19th-century homes, including the neoclassical George W. Dixon House, the Georgian John Wright Stanly House, the more humble Robert Hay House, the New Bern Academy Museum, and, opening in July 2010, the North Carolina History Education Center
HANDICRAFT AND FOLK ART
Traditional crafts and folk art constitute a $538 million annual industry in North Carolina. Thousands of artisans work in glass, metal, fiber, wood, clay, and other media. The Blue Ridge Mountains are home to the dynamic Penland School of Crafts. Lucy Morgan founded the school in 1925, which now hosts classes, workshops, events, and exhibitions. In the western mountain locale of Brasstown, the John C. Campbell Folk School offers weekend and weeklong workshops in handicrafts, music, dance, gardening, cooking, nature studies, photography, and writing in a noncompetitive environment.
North Carolina's Cherokee heritage thrives, particularly in the towns of Murphy, Franklin, Cherokee, and Robbinsville. Itineraries known as Cherokee Heritage Trails provide tours to places demonstrating the intersections of contemporary Cherokee life with traditional customs such as basket weaving and storytelling.
On the Qualla Boundary, the Museum of the Cherokee Indian illuminates the life, contributions, and history of the Cherokee people. The Qualla Arts and Crafts Co-op, one of the country's most successful Native American craft cooperatives, sells handmade Cherokee baskets, woodcarving, pottery, beadwork, dolls, and jewelry. The Oconaluftee Indian Village and Living History Museumreenacts 18th-century Cherokee village life, with Cherokee people demonstrating craft making.
HISTORIC ART MOVEMENTS
The groundbreaking word of artists and academics at Asheville's Black Mountain College, formed in 1933, resulted in a legacy of experimental and visionary projects. Merce Cunningham formed his dance company at the university and musician John Cage staged his first happening there.
North Carolina, along with many other Southern states, has produced many practitioners of outsider artvisionary art, and self-taught art. These artists work in diverse media but share the experience of working outside of the commercial and academic art worlds. In Rocky Mount, the Wesleyan College campus holds the Lynch Collection of Outsider Art, featuring a Vollis Simpson whirligig, Leroy Person's wood furniture assemblage, and folk carvings by Gary Gurganus.

-World Trade Press

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