Slowly but surely, pedestrians and drivers in Talbot County are taking note of large signs and banners with the simple word of “Hopeful” displayed in color. That is the only message they receive as they walk or drive by. The term has no exclamation point or question mark, no website to check out, nor any other instructions. It is up to the observer to make of it as they will.

That, of course, was the intention of Maine artist Charlie Hewitt. Commissioned as a public art project of the Dock Street Foundation, his four large sign marques, and some thirty banners, are now scattered from the Oxford Ferry to the Farmers’ Market in Easton with that simple message.

Talbot County now has joined a dozen other communities where signs of Hopeful are now on display. Starting with Portland, Maine, and continuing with a New York City installation in a few weeks, this public art project has an extraordinary impact on its citizens, particularly during these dark days of COVID-19.

But as Charlie noted in our Spy interview with him from last weekend, there is more there than meets the eye. While being “hopeful” as a human condition is positively encouraged, it also means taking responsibility.

In the case of Talbot County, that means expressing that sense of hope by donating to Mid-Shore Community Foundation’s Emergency COVID-19 fund that supports local nonprofits operating in the realm of hunger, homelessness, and healthcare.

This video is approximately three minutes in length. To make donation to the Hopeful project please go here.

 

Although attending live concerts by the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra is still months away due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a small chamber ensemble of orchestra musicians will be performing outdoors in the gardens of London Town on the South River over Labot Day weekend. No public tickets are available, however, as the audience is limited to 39 subscribers chosen by lottery.

This follows the cancellation of a dozen concerts at the end of last season and over the summer.

While there are no immediate plans for audiences to attend indoor concerts for the new season beginning Sept 26, you can subscribe to live streams of each performance at the Strathmore Music Center in North Bethesda, where the Annapolis orchestra will be playing most of its in 2020-21 season. Two 2021 concerts are from Maryland Hall in Annapolis. For $99, you can enjoy five performances in the Masterworks Series, plus Holiday Classics in December, from the comfort of the best seat in front of your widest-screen home TV.

The theme for the Masterworks Series is “Harmony in Nature.” Annapolis Symphony maestro Jose-Luis Novo says he “invites you to embrace and relive the transformational relationship of nature to humankind. We will discover breathtaking landscapes, idyllic corners, ominous storms, seasonal beauty, all through the incomparable world of highly evocative sounds as we showcase not only our exceptional orchestra but also a stellar line up of guest artists.”

These soloists include violinist Leticia Moreno, clarinetist Robert DiLutis, soprano Janice Chandler-Eteme, pianist Olga Kern and pipa player Wu Man.

The series begins with concerts anchored by Piazolla’s “The Four Seasons,” Sept. 26, followed by Brahms’ “Serenade” Oct. 24. After the Dec. 18 holiday concert, the masterworks resume in February with Copland’s “Billy the Kid,” Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto in March, concluding with Debussy’s “Le Mer” May 1.

The Spy talked to Symphony executive director Edgar Herrera from Mexico City about these changes for the Fall and his optimism that the Spring will bring live concerts back to the Chesapeake region soon.

This video is approximately five minutes in length. For more information about You can subscribe to the streaming series here .

When the world shuttered businesses and lives in March, it also hit the arts and entertainment world equally. Movie production halted, Broadway went dark, galleries closed their doors, live music venues went silent. Across the board, artists plunged into the riptide of the unemployed.

But creatives, by their very nature, are hard to keep down, and some have found ways to move forward by using online strategies. It may bring in a fraction of their pre-pandemic income, but it’s something that keeps the arts lifeline open to the community when sorely needed.

The Mainstay in Rock Hall is an excellent example of sustainability during hard times. Since 1997 when Charlie Byrd christened the venue with his jazz, The Mainstay has become a Maryland hub for international country and jazz artists. It is a significant economic and cultural engine for the Kent County area.

The pandemic hit just as they were planning the 25th Anniversary. The Board quickly organized to set up online presentations, and you will notice on their website and Facebook page that they offer a host of ongoing ticketed events. Also note that artists include online tip-jars to help underwrite their their shows.

Bets Durham, President of the Mainstay Board talked with Spy about what the Mainstay is up to online now and the future. Along with their music showcases, many of the streaming activities have included educational episodes to convey the rich history of music.

“Our streaming activities have also included educational episodes with Board Member Dave Robinson on Louis Armstrong and another on Traditional Jazz Styles. We will continue to offer afternoon educational sessions via our Facebook page as we head toward the end of the year,” Durham says.

Coming up: streamed live from The Mainstay Stage, on Friday 9/11 7PM will be Jeff Antoniuk and Helluvaband Band; Jeff will be joined by Max Murray on Bass, Frank Russo on drums, two of The Mainstay’s favorite artists, and John Lee on guitar. They will play from their new album, FLOW, and many of the jazz standards from their repertoire.

Also, during this time of BLM, John Thomas our Program Manager has been showcasing African-American artists in our streaming line-up, per the organization’s Statement on Racial Equity, as posted below.

This video is approximately seven minutes long. For more information about The Mainstay  please go here.

The Mainstay’s statement on racial equity:

As an organization dedicated to presenting the diverse music of our culture, we must take a moment at this time to acknowledge the contributions of African Americans to the cultural fabric of America. There is little music in the public eye that is not uniquely shaped by African American artists and their experiences.

Blues, which is at the root of all American music, is a direct product of the black experience in America.
Jazz, built upon the foundation of the blues was elevated by men such as Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis.

Folk and country music owe more than a little to the influence of artists like Leadbelly and Robert Johnson.

The attributed originator of bluegrass music, Bill Monroe claimed a black man, Arnold Shultz as his primary influence.

Anyone in the world today working as a professional jazz/pop/folk musician owes a debt to the work of Louis Armstrong.

These great Americans contributed immeasurable treasures to American culture, yet endured lifelong violence and indignities at the hands of law enforcement and other authority figures.

Many of us have lived in comfort believing that those experiences are of a bygone era in our country, but current events reinforce that this is reality today. As an organization that supports arts, artists and all humans, we repudiate this violence toward our fellow citizens. In whatever way that we are able, we intend to speak out to support our fellow Americans who have had, and continue to have, their rights trampled upon.

Racial diversity is embedded in our musical past, including a rich history right here in Kent County. We pledge to honor this heritage by acting to engage our entire community with performances by and for all people. During the coming months we will strengthen our programming by adding classes illuminating the rich contributions of African American artists who have shaped the music we all love and we are seeking to join with others in celebrating diversity in all our programming.

The Mainstay welcomes ideas and comments from the community on how to better advance our actions for diversity in programming. The Mainstay Board of Directors.

One of Easton’s most popular live concert events of the year, the Monty Alexander Jazz Festival, won’t be happening this Labor Day weekend, as it has for the last decade. Instead, Coronavirus 19 has forced it to go virtual. The only good news is you can see these past concerts right now through the Chesapeake Music website and YouTube.

The gregarious festival namesake opens his video presentation with regrets that he can’t be here in person to perform his 11th annual set of concerts, opening his remarks with a brief ditty he called his “Easton Regretful Blues.” He went on to introduce his 2014 Live at Baloise Session in Switzerland, a 59-minute concert featuring a mini-festival of jazz standards and Alexander originals with a Caribbean flair.

Alexander opens, as is his custom, with himself on piano, riffing improvisationally on his “Hurricane come and gone,” sitting back occasionally to allow for sax and drum solos by members of his big band, Wayne Escoffery and Karl Wright, respectively. It’s followed by a raucous “King Tubby Meets the Rockers Uptown,” segueing into the Duke Ellington classic “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing” with Alexander picking the pace, first on melodica and then back to piano. The mood turns Delta bluesy with Vincent Ford’s “No Woman No Cry” as the title phrase is sung mournfully by Leon Duncan while strumming on electric bass.

Next Alexander welcomes his wife, vocalist Caterina Zapponi, to the stage for a pair of Italian standards that he accompanies softly on piano with Gerald Cannon on acoustic bass. The interlude is received politely by the Baloise audience, apparently more jazzed up for the band’s rowdier calypso and reggae-influenced selections. They get their wish with the finale, Alexander’s own high-energy “Regulator,” featuring solos by Escoffery and Wright, preceded by the Ahmad Jamal’s classic “Night mist blues.”

Alexander and his band rarely get into a rut in concert, moving all over the jazz repertoire in just under an hour. We’ll miss them this Labor Day. So enjoy them virtually.

You can make a full concert evening of it by opening with a shorter set by trumpeter and vocalist Bria Skonberg. She, too, expressed her regrets in introducing selections from sets at two Manhattan jazz clubs plus a torch-song video she released. In her remarks she said she’ll especially miss the crab cakes in Easton, “the best I’ve ever had in my life.”

Skongberg and her band play a few numbers at the Jazz Standard in New York and Dizzy’s Jazz at Lincoln Center nightclub. Most showed off her trumpet chops, playing songs associated with her hero Louis Armstrong. She often switches to vocals in mid-song and, of course, sings nothing like the late Louis. She saves her best vocal performance of this presentation for a soulful video directed by Jennifer LeBeau, “So Is the Day That I Write This Song,” making the most of her movie-stars look with a pouty delivery of a soulful love ballad.

Steve Parks is a retired New York journalist now living in Easton.

 

MONTY ALEXANDER AND HIS BIG BAND AT BALOISE SESSION

“My Roots to Jazz” recorded in 2014 in Switzerland

BRIA SKONBERG AND HER BAND

Recorded at Jazz Standard and Dizzy’s Coca-Cola nightclubs in New York City plus a recent studio video

Streaming free online at chesapeakemusic.org in lieu of the Monty Alexander Jazz Festival canceled due to COVID-19

A previous article in the SPY on Faith Ringgold highlighted her art in support of civil rights and women’s rights issues that she continues to explore today.  This article for Chestertown’s Legacy Day celebrates the contributions of three African American legends:  Faith Ringgold, artist and writer; Sonny Rollins, jazz musician; and Josephine Baker, dancer and singer.   

Ringgold received her Masters of Art degree from The City College of New York in 1959:  “I got a fabulous education in art—wonderful teachers who taught me everything, except anything about African art or African American art, but I traveled and took care of that part myself.”  Visiting Europe in the 1970’s, she was inspired by African masks and Tibetan Buddhist thangkas (large cloth banners hanging from dowel rods). She embraced the idea of framing her painted canvases with cloth and hanging them from rods. This approach allowed her to introduce traditional cloth patchwork quilting she learned from her mother.  Cloth is much lighter than framed canvas under glass, can be rolled and shipped at less cost, and is easier to handle and hang. She acknowledges this approach has allowed her to exhibit in more galleries, because they were willing to accept work that was less expensive to ship and easier to display.  These “story quilts” were a distinct departure from the traditional woks on canvas, produced by white male artists. 

Walter Theodore Rollins (b.1930) and Faith Ringgold were the same age, and grew up together in Harlem’s Sugar Hill district.  She tells the story that when they were 12 or 13 they kissed in a game of Post Office.  Sonny came by with his saxophone and played, and “once or twice” she sang while he played.  “Sonny’s Quilt “(1986) (91”x72”), is one of several in Ringgold’s “Bridge Series.” From 1959 to 1961, Rollins was on a self imposed break: “I was getting very famous at the time and I felt I needed to brush up on various aspects of my craft.  I felt I was getting too much, too soon, so I said, wait a minute, I’m going to do it my way. I wasn’t going to let people push me out there, so I could fall down.  I wanted to get myself together, on my own.  I used to practice on the Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge because I was living on the Lower East Side at the time.”   Rollins went each night to the Williamsburg Bridge to practice the saxophone in order not to disturb his Grand Street neighbors. He would practice for 15 to 16 hours a day, no matter the season.  

Rollins’s nightly practice inspired “Sonny’s Quilt.”  On the quilt Rollins is high in the sky on the bridge and blowing tenor saxophone.  The girders and spans of the bridge direct our eyes up to him.  Ringgold has painted the sky and water a bright blue.  The Manhattan skyline is gray and the bridge spans are painted white, but glued on to these flat colors are brightly colored cloth patchwork pieces.  The frame is made entirely of cloth patches highlighting the colors in the quilt, especially the red.  We hear the notes and feel his passion as these color patches create a jazz rhythm.  In November 1961 he said, “I could have probably spent the rest of my life just going up on the bridge. I realized, no, I have to get back into the real world.”  Rollins’s comeback album in 1962 was titled “The Bridge”, and in 2015 the recording was introduced into the Grammy Hall of Fame, one of the many honors he received.  

Sonny Rollins was mentored by Thelonious Monk and befriended by Miles Davis when they hung out together in Harlem.  Davis wrote, “People loved Sonny Rollins up in Harlem and everywhere else.  He was a legend almost a god to a lot of the younger musicians.  He was an aggressive, innovative player who always had fresh musical ideas.  I loved him back then as a player and he could also write his ass off…” During his career Rollins made over 60 albums, one of which was titled “Global Warming” (1997). He played Carnegie Hall (1957), won two Grammy Awards (2000, 2004), and received the Grammy Life Time Achievement Award (2004), among others.  In early 20ll, President Obama presented him with the Medal of Art “on behalf of the gods of music,” and in 2015, he received the Jazz Foundation of America’s lifetime achievement award.  On receiving the Kennedy Center Honors award in 2011, he said, “I am deeply appreciative of this great honor.  In honoring me, the Kennedy Center honors jazz, America’s classical music.  For that, I am very grateful.”

Freda Josephine McDonald (b.1906 St. Louis, Missouri – d. 1975 France), grew up poor with only her mother looking after her.  At the age of eight, she was in domestic service, and by age thirteen she was a waitress, living on the street, and dancing on street corners for money. Her first marriage at age thirteen ended within a year and in 1921 she married Willie Baker.  The marriage ended in 1925, but her career had gotten started, and she decided to keep the Baker name for the rest of her career.  That same year she was in a dance troop going to Paris.  One year later, in 1926, she was “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw” remarked Ernest Hemingway.  Ringgold’s quilt “Jo Baker’s Bananas “(1997) (80.5’’x76’’), illustrates her almost instant rise to fame.  In 1927, dancing at the Folies Bergere in Un Vent de Follie, wearing nothing more than a skirt made of 16 plastic bananas and a necklace of beads, she was a living icon.  

In the quilt, Ringgold repeats Baker’s figure five times as she shimmies and shakes across the quilt.  The original background for her performance was a tropical setting of greenery with yellow and orange flowers that Ringgold duplicates with the painted patchwork background.  Paris had fallen in love with American Jazz, African art and Jo Baker.  Two African American jazz musicians and a multiracial audience drinking complete the story.  The cloth patchwork frame complements the yellow bananas and the orange and greens of the background.  The quilt is full of movement and almost dizzying energy.  “Jo Baker’s Bananas” is on display at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and it is one of twelve in the series “The French Collection”, inspired by a recent visit to France.  Other titles in the series include “Dancing at the Louvre” (1991), and “Jo Baker’s Birthday” (1993).

The quilt is as vibrant and exciting as was Baker.  She was loved in Europe, but not in America.  Jo Baker and her bananas became an iconic image and a symbol for the Jazz Age.  In 1934 she took voice lessons and stared in the opera La Creole by Jacques Offenbach.  Shirley Bassey remarked, “I swear in all my life I have never seen, and probably never shall see again, such a spectacular singer and performer.” Baker came to American on tour in 1936, and she refused to perform for segregated audiences.  Most performances went well, but Americans were cruel to her.  She returned heartbroken to Paris in1937, and became a Naturalized French citizen.  “I have two loves, my country and Paris.” 

When WWII broke out in 1940, she joined the French Resistance.  Her star quality allowed her to attend parties and receptions for officials from many countries, and she was so charming they talked to her and told her things.  She could travel anywhere in Europe,  and she passed information written with invisible ink on the backs of her sheet music or pinned inside her underwear, betting no one would strip search her.  They never did.  In 1941 she traveled to the French Colonies in North Africa for her health. When she recovered, she organized and paid for an entertainment troop for the American, British and French troops stationed there.  After WWII she was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French Military and named a Chevalier in the French Legion d’honneur by Charles de Gaulle.  She was the only American woman to receive full French military honors at her funeral.

She never stopped loving America, and she donated to the Civil Rights Movement.  She stood with Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, and she made a short speech while wearing her Free French uniform and the Medal of the Legion d’honneur.  “I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents, and much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, ’cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world.”  After Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, Coretta Scott King offered Baker an unofficial leadership position in the movement.  She thought it over carefully be declined, saying her children were “too young to lose their mother.”  She had one daughter and adopted 11 orphans whom she called “The Rainbow Tribe.”  Subsequent visits to America to play at Carnegie Hall and elsewhere were successful.  She received numerous awards from Paris and several American cities, streets were named after her, and she was honored by the NAACP and other African-American organizations. 

Faith Ringgold is widely known for her art, but she also is a well known writer. In an interview in 1999, she stated that the story quilts grew from the many rejections by publishers who refused her autobiography: “I figured, I can’t get anything published, so I might as well write my story with my art.”  Many of the story quilts were painted with acrylic on canvas and included text, often telling a story from her life or one she made up.  Not all of the story quilts include written text as can be noted from the three pictured in this article, however, each still tells a story without words.  “Tar Beach” (1988) (74.5’’x68.5’’), is setting is on a tarpaper roof top of an apartment in Harlem.  Laundry is drying on a line, a few potted plants are scattered about, and a nearby table contains food, including a watermelon and wine.  Two families are playing cards and two children are stretched out on a quilt and looking up at the stars.  In the background is the lighted Manhattan skyline, and above it is a large lighted span of a bridge.  At the very top is a girl in a white dress flying with the stars in the sky.  As the title indicates, they are pretending they are at the beach.          

Tar Beach is the title of one of Ringgold’s best known books, and the series of bridge quilts and the book were both inspired by “Sonny’s Quilt.”  “I will always remember when the stars fell down around me and lifted me above the George Washington Bridge.” Tar Beach tells the story of Cassie Lightfoot an eight year old girl who lived in an apartment in Harlem in 1939 during the depression.  Cassie has the ability to fly and has big dreams.  When she and her brother Be Be, are flying one night they meet Harriet Tubman and find out about slavery and Aunt Harriet’s underground railway.  Still  in publication, Tar Beach remains a resource for teachers and guides for teaching it are on-line today. The book received the Caldecott Medal (1992), the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustrators (1992), the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award, a New York Times Best Illustrated Book, and winner of the Parent’s Choice Award among others. In all Ringgold has authored and illustrated 17 children’s books.  In 1995 her autobiography We Flew Over the Bridge was published.  She is the recipient of over 75 awards and 23 honorary doctoral degrees.   

Beverly Hall Smith was a professor of art history for 40 years.  Since retiring with her husband Kurt to Chestertown six years ago, she has taught art history classes at WC-ALL and Chesapeake College’s Institute for Adult Learning.  She is also an artist whose work is sometimes in exhibitions at Chestertown RiverArts and she paints sets for the Garfield Center for the Arts.

The last time the Spy spoke with Liza Ledford, the executive director of the Oxford Community Center, was only a few weeks after Governor Hogan issued his “stay-at-home” order to curb the spread of COVID-19. And like all arts administrators, Liza and her board faced the daunting task of keeping the OCC alive and well when no one was allowed inside their building and with dozens of spring programs having to be canceled.

The very good news is that the Oxford Community Center made it through that problematic four-month period, and learned a few lessons along the way. Beyond the creative use of their website, which they used to have a remarkably successful Virtual Fine Arts program, the OCC started experimenting with outdoor programming for concerts and other fun events that received a warm welcome for its patrons.
.
Now with the Fall season just around the corner, those improvisational skills are still in play as the region remains vigilant against the coronavirus. Nonetheless, in her most recent chat with the Spy, Liza highlights a full and robust schedule of safe events that will take the OCC to December.

This video is approximately five minutes in length. For more information about the Oxford Community Center please go here.

Lin comes from a cultured Chinese family.  Her father emigrated from China in 1948; he was a ceramicist and became Dean of Fine Arts at Ohio State University. Her mother emigrated in 1949; she was a poet and Professor of Literature at Ohio State.  Lin grew up among the members of the university and had access to the schools many cultural and artistic offerings. “I was always making art and my parents encouraged us to follow our passions. Hence, my brother is a language poet and I am still making things”.  Her parents brought Maya and her brother up to assimilate:  “Typical with immigrant families, they didn’t talk about what they left behind. We were brought up without either parent teaching or wanting to teach us Chinese. It was a conscious decision on their part.”  Lin’s mother’s advice was “to do what was challenging and what you were passionate about.”  For Maya Lin that was art and architecture.

Maya Lin was one of nine artists invited to participate in the inaugural exhibition (2015), for the re-opening of the restored Renwick Gallery in Washington D.C.  The overall title and concept for the exhibition was “Wonder.”  Lin chose to do an installation about the Chesapeake Bay.  She often incorporates water into her work. “The Chesapeake is one of my favorite waterways, partly because people outside of the area aren’t as familiar with it. But if you know the area and know how significantly it’s changed ecologically speaking since we settled the area, it’s huge. It’s an incredibly beautiful form.”  “Folding the Chesapeake” (2015) (318’’x391’’x273”), is composed of 54,000 clear marbles that she glued to the walls, floors, over a fire place, and onto the ceiling, to form and fold the shape of the Chesapeake Bay.  Her intent was to make the viewer aware of the ecology of the bay as an extensive waterway.  Those who live on some part of the Chesapeake rarely envision it as a whole. Lin does extensive research for all of her projects, and gained significant knowledge concerning the Bay and the 2,700 species of plants and animals which are supported by its ecosystem.  “This piece allows me to give people an idea of the totality. You see it as a single organism, as a living system.”  

Lin’s choice of subject and material for this work had several influences.  When she was eight years old, Lin remembers that her father brought home a box of artisanal clear marbles, the type glass blowers employ.  “It was like opening a box of water. They capture light in a way I had never seen.”  She also was inspired by the Renwick.  “The Renwick Gallery is probably one of the more historic buildings that I’ve ever installed in and so taking something and being able to, in a way, transform a room without necessarily becoming physically overbearing or overly large was very important.”  Perhaps most significant, is Maya Lin’s continuous interest in saving the environment.  From her childhood she recalls Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring from1962, the passing of the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and the Clean Water Act of 1972. “I’m very much a product of the growing awareness about ecology and the environmental movement. I am very drawn to landscape, and my work is about finding a balance in the landscape, respecting nature not trying to dominate it.” 

Water has played a significant part in Maya Lin’s work.  Her Civil Rights Memorial (1989), in Montgomery, Alabama, commissioned by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is a large fountain in the shape of an asymmetrical upside down cone.  Water flows over the top of the cone.  The cone is inscribed with 41 names of martyrs who were killed from 1954 to 1968.  In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled segregation of schools was unlawful and in 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated.   Lin chose a water memorial after researching the history of racial segregation, and read King’s speech “I Have a Dream” in which he said “…we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” The water flows in a gentle but solid stream across the top, and visitors are encouraged to touch the water and the names of the dead, which momentarily interrupts the flow of water, but it returns quickly to a steady and calm stream.

During her career, Lin has maintained a balance between earthworks that create wave patterns with grass and hills, memorials, architecture, and museum pieces.  Lin is prolific in all of these areas.  Some further examples of her works relating to water are “Bodies of Water” (2006), a series of sculpted birch plywood bases, shaped to scale, of the Caspian Sea (19”x58.5”x33”), the Black Sea, and the Red Sea.  Lin states these bodies of water are “unseen ecosystems that we pollute” and are “endangered bodies of water.”  “Disappearing Bodies of Water “(2013), are marble sculptures carved to scale, that illustrate the loss of water due to overuse in Lake Chad and the Aral Sea.  “Pin River Yangtze (2015), located in the lobby of the U.S. Embassy compound in Beijing, is composed or 30,000 steel pins tightly grouped and tacked into a backing.  “Pin River- Hudson Watershed” (2018), is one of twelve works in the Hudson River Museum. It is a time line of the Hudson River from the past to the present, with art and text that illustrate the changes in population and species over time. Lin does extensive research into each of her projects using available twenty-first century technology.  These include micro and macro views of the earth, solar resonance scans, and aerial and satellite mapping systems.

Since 2014, Maya Lin is creating a series of works called “What is Missing?”  She refers these as her last memorial.  “In all my memorials, time has been a huge driving, underlying structure. For Missing, there is the past — what we have lost, but more importantly, pointing out things you don’t even realize are missing like the sounds of songbirds, the scale of species, the abundance of species.  In fact, in the 1890’s the Atlantic Cod fish was as large as man and New York coast oysters were 12” in diameter.  Lin has set up her own not-for-profit organization and plans to contribute to it for the rest of her life.  There are 40 conservations groups working with her to look at what has been lost and what can be done to correct the situation.  The group is also thinking about how conservation and climate concerns can generate both jobs and climate change.

From the beginning Maya Lin’s has been involved in politics.  Her choice, by a blind jury, to create the Viet Nam War Memorial (1981), raised many alarms.  She was too young and therefore inexperienced, she was a woman, and she was not American but an alien, an Asian, despite that fact that she was born in America.  Today it is thought by most to be a singular monument and a moving testament to the soldiers lost in the war.   In 2003, she was asked to serve on the jury for the World Trade Center Memorial.  In 2016, President Obama awarded her the Presidents Medal of Freedom.  

Most of her work has been involved with the environment and climate change.  “What is Missing?” is dedicated to continuing the efforts to save the planet from disaster. “It is a very dark moment in history. Sixty-nine percent of Americans agree that climate is changing. The good news is that cities, states, and countries are moving, they have been moving, and will continue to move towards a sustainable future. I think nature is resilient – if we protect it – and with my background I wanted to lend a voice to the incredible threat we are under from climate change and species and habitat loss.”  

Beverly Hall Smith was a professor of art history for 40 years.  Since retiring with her husband Kurt to Chestertown six years ago, she has taught art history classes at WC-ALL and Chesapeake College’s Institute for Adult Learning.  She is also an artist whose work is sometimes in exhibitions at Chestertown RiverArts and she paints sets for the Garfield Center for the Arts.