George introduces Doc Watson at Eno River in 1978. Ralph Rinzler is in the background.

It was a heavy blow to receive the first e-mail from my old friend David Holt, informing me that Doc Watson had been hospitalized after falling at home. I’m well aware that at age 89, a bad fall can be catastrophic. I first saw Doc perform on the National Mall in Washington at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival; I hope it’s not too trite to say the experience changed my life.

Who knows how many guitar players Doc inspired? While I played a little, I knew I could never achieve anything close to his level of skill. Doc was as much a virtuoso as any great musician you can name. All I wanted to do from that point onward was to create similar opportunities for people to discover such amazing artists who seemed so utterly modest and matter-of-fact about their genius.

I had the fortune to come back to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 1973 as a paid summer intern after my junior year at Duke University. So enthralled was I that I took a leave of absence from school to work for the festival through the fall. The following year, the university gave me funding to organize the first North Carolina Folklife Festival on the Duke campus. I wasn’t able to present Doc then, but we featured a number of his talented relatives from Deep Gap.

In 1976 I was invited to direct the festival on a grander scale at Durham’s West Point on the Eno Park as part of the bicentennial celebration. Afterward the Department of Cultural Resources hired me (with help from NCMA Director Larry Wheeler, who was deputy secretary of DCR at the time) to document and promote North Carolina’s folk arts and culture full time. It was a dream come true, but I didn’t feel I’d fully succeeded until I finally had the chance to present the great Doc Watson at the second North Carolina Folklife Festival in 1978. It was especially meaningful to me that my mentor Ralph Rinzler, the director of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the man who brought Doc into the wider world, came down from Washington to introduce him.

Since then I’ve had the honor of presenting Doc in various festival and concert settings, and he appeared at the NCMA three or four times. He was 87 on his last visit, but you wouldn’t have known it. He was strong in voice and playing as impressively as ever. But after that the years began to exact their toll, and the man I thought to be possibly immortal grew frail. We were set to present what we knew (though we couldn’t say it) would be Doc’s public finale on June 30.

The event was never meant to be just another Doc Watson concert, but rather a Doc Watson celebration, a chance for all of us to express our appreciation for the wonderful music and example he provided over five decades. We planned to surround Doc with his closest friends and picking partners and take a day to reflect on his remarkable life and career and contribution to our national culture.

When I spoke with David Holt within a few hours of Doc’s passing we knew we needed to carry on with our plans, now more than ever. We hope you will join us Saturday for this day of stories and song and celebration of a North Carolina treasure.

—George Holt is the NCMA’s director of performing arts and film programs.

Last fall UNC grad Carolyn Janssen created three billboards featuring digitally manipulated worlds filled with marauding Amazons, in environments that were both strange and appealing. This spring we’ve opted to do something entirely new: we invited college students to submit images and ideas for billboards. And what a response we received! After sorting through all the entries, we chose three artists: Sydney Cobb (Alamance Community College), Isaiah Johnson (St. Augustine’s College), and Cindy Kohnen (Meredith College).

Cobb’s billboard, Fireflies, refers to a favorite Southern pastime. “This piece portrays a childhood memory of catching mystical fireflies in one of my grandma’s mason jars,” Cobb says. “I always loved opening the jar and watching them fly away.” Cobb notes that our current exhibition, El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa, provided inspiration. “My piece is a free-flowing and natural piece, much like his artwork.”

Johnson’s winning entry, One Brick, One Seed, is a photographic manifesto about the linked urban and natural landscapes. “I didn’t want to be literal with nature and all the beautiful aspects of it, but to show the evolution of today’s world through one brick and one seed,” Johnson says. “This piece was inspired by the beginning of life itself, the buildings we live in, and the hands that built them. From that first hammer or screw, their constructions offer limitless inspiration. The components of this piece are the forest and the cityscape. The trees were placed above the buildings to highlight the line between two different worlds that are also closely related.”

Kohnen’s Cycles presents, in her words, “the different stages of life after death.” Kohnen explains, “I chose the white and pink petals to show the beauty in life but paired these elements with dirt to convey the sense of a fallen petal to the ground. As spring turns to fall, leaves also observe the remaining life in nature’s dying elements. The third [segment] shows the reincarnation of the dead petals and leaves through the image of live mushrooms and their roots. The repetition of the circular formation created with grass embraces earth’s life cycle. I used color throughout this series to depict and stages of human life, starting with birth, softness, and purity, and ending with wisdom, age, and decomposition.”

Congratulations to our three winners, and thanks to all our participants! Be sure to explore our Museum Park to view these billboards, and come back in the fall to experience a new round of Park Pictures.

This work, made possible by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, is part of an ongoing series of outdoor art projects, Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the NCMA to encourage visitors to actively explore the Museum Park.

Images and captions:

Top: Sydney Cobb, Fireflies, 2011, digital print on vinyl, © 2011 Sydney Cobb

Cindy Kohnen, Cycles, 2011, digital print on vinyl, © 2011 Cindy Kohnen

Isaiah Johnson, One Brick, One Seed, 2011, digital print on vinyl, © 2011 Isaiah Johnson

It’s that time of year again, dear readers! With the change of the seasons comes a new edition of our billboards project, Park Pictures. We’ve been promoting Park Pictures here on Untitled for more than two years now, and we’re still going strong! As you may recall, our Pictures are three “billboards” installed along the paved walking trails, commissioned by the Museum to encourage visitors to explore the art available in the Museum Park. These billboards change regularly to feature new works by different artists, both from North Carolina and elsewhere.

Last spring Anthony Goicolea created three billboards in conjunction with his solo exhibition Alter Ego: A Decade of Work by Anthony Goicolea. This time around we’ve commissioned three works by California-based artist Carolyn Janssen, who completed her master of fine arts degree at UNC–Chapel Hill in spring 2011. Janssen’s works are digitally crafted worlds created by the expert superposition of images from Janssen’s own daily environment, including multiple representations of herself. This consistent layering allows the artist an element of control as she focuses on the process itself. “I used individual objects in the same way I would use a single brushstroke,” Janssen notes, “building each scene mark by mark.” Janssen’s knowledge of art shines through in her works, which are reminiscent of traditional landscape painting as well as the complex scenes of Bosch and Breughel. The images also refer to video game worlds and science fiction tableaux, which keep Janssen’s works rooted in pop culture.

The subject matter of Janssen’s billboards pertains to an imaginary dystopic society populated solely by Amazon-esque women who, the artist notes, “question and commandeer the landscape, engaging in narratives and mini-dramas, in which they build, fight, kill, and rest. At times calm, at times acting in apprehension to a present or past disaster, the figures reflect on a landscape broken, uncertain, and strange.”

This work, made possible by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, is part of an ongoing series of outdoor art projects, Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the NCMA to encourage visitors to actively explore the Museum Park.

Teenagers tend to see the world a little differently—but that’s not a bad thing! A distinct point of view can be an asset to a photographer. The Museum’s recent Digital Photography Workshop encouraged high schoolers to express their creativity in a variety of media.

The workshop combined a photo shoot in the Museum Park with computer manipulation and hands-on art projects. First the teens took a look at our current photography exhibition, Landscape Sublime, and saw how North Carolina artist John Menapace transformed ordinary daily spaces into extraordinary arrangements of light and form. They took their cameras into the Park to capture worm’s-eye views of oaks covered with kudzu and the geometric angles of the amphitheater stage.

Back inside, they got their hands on computer software to manipulate photographs, distorting and enhancing their own photos for a dramatic and sometimes humorous effect. The students experimented with printing on unusual surfaces and combining photos of themselves with works of art for mixed-media projects.

They drew inspiration from Anthony Goicolea’s Sea Wall, a sculptural installation of photos, glass bottles, and glass blocks, to print photographs of each other on acetate for a group installation, which they then photographed. They looked at vanitas paintings in the Dutch collection—still lifes that symbolize the emptiness and transience of earthly things—and then created another three-dimensional installation using still-life objects. Their work graced the Blue Ridge patio for just a short time, but the images live on in students’ photographs.

We invite you to peer behind the lens for a new perspective of the Museum.

One sculpture in the Park that has always inspired my contemplation is Steven Siegel’s To see Jennie smile. This 24-foot-tall sculpture incorporated over 20,000 pounds of News & Observer newspapers. Siegel and a team of 50 volunteers spent two weeks installing the work in 2006. Community involvement is an important aspect of the artist’s work. as reflected by the title of the piece. In an interview with the artist, Siegel tells his story of a volunteer inspiring his naming of the work.
Download audio file (siegel.mp3)
Using specific materials to emphasize the ephemeral nature of our landscapes, Siegel always inspires discussion about environment and art. Visitors have often asked whether the newspapers are detrimental to the environment, as they are expected to decompose in the landscape during the piece’s lifetime. (The answer is no: the newspaper uses vegetable-based inks, and the glossy inserts were removed before installation.) I have found myself staring at the top of the sculpture among the trees and wondering if the local birds have taken part in the work as they construct their nests.

In June 2009, a conversation began among staff members regarding To see Jennie smile. We began to notice the sculpture leaning slightly to the right. Staff members of the Planning and Design, Conservation, and Curatorial departments decided to monitor the changes in the sculpture over the next six months. We photographed Jennie at various stages of deterioration and finally made the decision to remove the piece. On May 20 the NCMA staff said our goodbyes to a work of art that has delighted us, and the public. for four years.

The deinstallation took just a couple of hours and was pretty painless. After wrapping the entire piece in black landscaping fabric, the crew was able to pull the sculpture to the ground with a backhoe. The discarded newspapers and wood infrastructure were hauled off in a large truck. The staff, visitors, and the inhabitants of the Park will surely miss Jennie—especially the 3-foot-long black snake that had taken up residence inside it.

I revisited the sculpture’s footprint last week in search of remnants of the past. I performed my own little archaeological dig at the base of a tree and found small bits of Jennie. The ongoing presence of the work in the landscape—even after deinstallation—actually made me smile!

These remnants called to mind a quote in an interview with Siegel in Sculpture magazine:

“I believe that we are the landscape, not only by our physical presence, but also by the messes we leave and the way we reconfigure all of the material around us—from the roadway to the recycling of cans to nuclear waste. Our presence is there in every molecule.” Excerpt from an interview with the artist and John K. Grande, a contributing editor for Sculpture, and curator of earth art at Canada’s Royal Botanical Gardens.