Hello everyone! My social media ‘handle’ is ‘Creative Instigator, Radical Optimist, and Pal of the Arts’. Over the span of a long career as an artist, curator, and administrator, I have had the honor and privilege of working with literally thousands of artists/creatives on hundreds of projects, many of those were large scale and complex. A good example would be the Barnstormers, a 26-member troupe from the US and Japan, headed by the artist David Ellis (originally from here in NC then NYC). He decided to revisit the small town in Eastern NC where he grew up, bringing along a few artist friends. While there, they started producing huge murals on the sides of old tobacco barns; the structures being the weathered monuments to a once vital industry in the area. It was the locals that gave them the name the Barnstormers, brought them food, and put them up while these artists were painting in the middle of the humid North Carolina Summer. I found out about them and invited them to move an entire tobacco barn to the gigantic galleries at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, when I was the Chief Curator there. They jumped at the opportunity, not just moving the barn that acted as a canvas for their in-the-gallery-2-month painting episodes, but also creating an amazing time lapse film of the process, from dismantling the entire barn plank by plank, its rebuilding in the space; all the painting that took place on one of the 18 ft tall gable sides during the run of the show, and finally capturing its rebuild, back on the original site from where it came. Rightfully so, the film is called 360 Degrees and you can find it on Vimeo. They also produced the Hive Mind Sound System that I referred to as a ‘hillbilly wall of sound’, comprised of 150 old TVs, car tires, washing machines, tables, and other cast-offs, stacked high on three hand-built large wooden wagons (think full size wagon train), all the objects were retrofitted with large speakers, and wired for sound that wafted through the galleries. There was much more to this project but I’m running out of space. That project is emblematic of one of my working methods: find something REALLY interesting and initiate a conversation that may lead to creations not yet made or conceived. It’s a back and forth, dance kind of thing. I’ve tackled subjects such as terrorism 10 years before 911 (Beyond Glory: Re-Presenting Terrorism); a global response to creative affordable housing (the HOME House Project: the future of affordable housing that involved more than 440 individuals and teams from the US and sixteen countries); and even a pinewood derby exhibition and race contest that pitted 150 hand built ‘art’ cars from all over the South, against 200 vehicles from New York (Eat My Dust!)

So where did it all come from and how did I get there? My training years ago was a combination of two types of universities: the book-oriented scholastic and the direct hands-on, nut and bolts, roll up the shirt sleeves doing it. The latter started off by volunteering whenever I had the opportunity, to help other artists on their projects. At one point, I took the time to create a plan for myself, and the first question I pondered was: what have you done? I realized I had more than ten years’ experience working with other artists on their projects and decided to use that as foundational approach to expanding a career in the field. Not long afterwards, a job was posted in the Washington Post for one day (how fortuitous!) and I soon was hired as the Director of Exhibitions at the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore, overseeing five galleries in three separate buildings. During the seven years there, we produced close to 90 shows a year!