Slowly, and needless to say, very carefully, the Avalon Foundation is back in action. To the delight of devoted music fans on the Mid-Shore, the beloved venue for music has scheduled a full calendar of bands and performers to take the stage of the Stolt Outdoor Pavillion this April in yet another sign that a post-COVID world might be just around the corner.

The Spy spoke with Al Bond, Avalon’s CEO, yesterday to talk about these recent developments and the equally good news that the Foundation has entered into a partnership with the Monty Alexander Jazz Festival to host the popular early fall event.

Al also speaks of how the Avalon Foundation has completed its volunteer role in helping run the COVID-19 hotline and his conviction that the Mid-Shore will be returning to its indoor performance stages on Dover Street sooner than people think.

This video is approximately three minutes in length. For more information about the Avalon Foundation please go here.

Like almost everything else the Academy Art Museum has been planning since the COVID pandemic hit, they have had to pivot and find new ways to carry on their mission while also keeping traditions alive.

One of those challenges recently was what to do about its annual student art exhibition, which fills the museum galleries with works from kindergarten age to the most sophisticated senior high school artists from the Mid-Shore. How could the AAM and regional schools move forward without the customary art on walls approach that had served so well in the past?

For Constance Del Nero, the Academy’s director of children’s education, and Mehves Lelic, its curator, it was a matter of looking at what other art museums were doing that gave them the inspiration for a unique model where high school students curated their own exhibition online using the museum’s permanent collection as inspiration for their art work, which would also be electronically displayed. Students came up with a theme, wrote their own wall text and artist statements and then created artworks of their own that meshed with their theme.

The result is “Twisted: The Peculiar Portrayal of People.” With the help of Andrea Schulte, art teacher at Kent Island High School, and AAM curatorial assistant Conner Dorbin, this exceptional pairing is now is display on the AAM website for all to see and enjoy.

The Spy spent some time with Constance, Andrea, and Conner to get a better sense of how this special project came together.

This video is approximately three minutes in length. To view the exhibition on line, please go here.

Before Liza Ledford came back to the Eastern Shore to start a family, the current director of the Oxford Community Center could only have been considered a “player” in Hollywood in the 1990s.

With senior role positions with such prominent production companies as Amblin, Universal, and Sony, Liza was intimately involved in productions led by the likes of Steven Spielberg, and Kathleen Kennedy, on “Good Will Hunting,” “Jurassic Park” and “The Bridges of Madison County,” as part of her resume. And it certainly didn’t hurt to have brother, Chris Moore, be one of tinsel town’s top producers with credits like Academy Award winner “Manchester by the Sea.”

And through the magic of Zoom, Ledford is reconnecting with that Hollywood past in a remarkable special event designed to inform and motivate aspiring screenwriters living in Chestertown, Easton, or Cambridge on what it takes to go from an idea to streaming on Netflix. Entitled “The Journey of a Hollywood Idea,” this joint project of the Oxford Community Center and the Chesapeake Film Festival will bring into a Zoom chat her brother Chris and four other Hollywood executives about the unique path that these creative projects.

The Spy caught up with Liza recently to talk about this novel way of bringing some of the best in the movie biz to the Eastern Shore.

To purchase tickets to participate in The Journey of a Hollywood Idea please go here.

 

With the help of a new federal grant, The Mainstay will be doubling its seating capacity with two hundred new seats this summer. While it should be noted that those new seats will be outside, the $100,000 project will be a welcomed addition as this beloved music venue comes back from the dark days of COVID.

The Spy wanted to learn more about this and asked John Thomas, the Mainstay’s music director, to give us a short overview on how this new performance space will dramatically open new opportunities for the Rock Hall’s renowned cultural center.

This video is approximately two minutes in length. For more information about The Mainstay please go here.

“When some people walk through an art gallery, they look at each image maybe four or five seconds,” says Petra Bernstein. Bernstein, a German-born, Eastern Shore-based artist whose solo show at the Dorchester Arts Center in Cambridge just opened about a year late–a delay driven by a pandemic you may have heard about. “My goal is to get people to look closer to the art image–to engage their eyes and their attention a bit longer,” she says, “to get them asking, ‘What am I seeing?’ “

If you linger only a few seconds over her overlaid artworks or her more straightforward paintings, you may dismiss them as pretty pictures of a hibiscus or an iris in glorious bloom. But look closer. On many of her paintings, and especially her archival photo-enhanced images, you’ll notice that flowers don’t bloom in such a way in nature unless they’re altered—genetically or in Bernstein’s art, by digital means. 

Nature and Beyond is the aptly named solo exhibition now open at the handsomely refurbished downtown Cambridge arts center. The show reflects the radiant yet subtle beauty inspired by shimmering floral petals and glistening water flows Bernstein observes outside her Wicomico riverfront home in Salisbury and at other Eastern Shore vistas.

Her flower compositions are easier to identify, even the nocturnally suggestive photo-enhanced painting in the storefront window of what was once Nathan’s on High Street in Cambridge. Bernstein labels it Dancing in the Dark after the 1980s Bruce Springsteen hit that was playing when she was finally satisfied by the image that emerged. “You could never get that effect from direct observation,” she says, pointing to a leaf in the lower-left corner of her floral-dominated canvas. It could be a stellar constellation or the ghost of a fallen leaf of the marshmallow-white hibiscus. Water beads, which she spritzed for visual effect, cluster on each petal.

Bernstein describes her current approach to art as an “evolution.” She didn’t always paint this way nor shoot photographs as she does now. Bernstein, whose first degree was in elementary education, says she was always inspired by the verdant valleys and snow-white peaks of her native Bavaria. But she didn’t take up painting until moving to flat-landscape Salisbury with her husband 26 years ago and earning a second bachelor’s degree at Salisbury University in fine art painting. One of her early group-show entries won a people’s choice award in a 2008 national competition invitational. It was a finely crafted portrait of her first muse, Petra and Kevin Bernstein’s daughter, Sarah.

That Petra Bernstein wound up in Salisbury is a result of a chance transatlantic romance that developed when her husband-to-be was dispatched to Bavaria representing K&L Microwave, which has nothing to do with the ubiquitous ovens perched between cabinets framing stovetops in kitchens virtually everywhere today. K&L Microwave, based in Salisbury, specializes in filtering out random audio signals that interfere with what the client wants to hear. There are myriad commercial as well as military applications for such technology.

There was little technology involved in Petra Bernstein’s early figurative artwork. She moved on to representational environmental paintings–scenic land- and seascapes and flora studies often painted from photographs. Now she manipulates painting and photography to filter in or out random visual signals to coax the viewer to interpret something uniquely her own. 

Only in recent years, Bernstein says, has she gone full time as a professional artist. “I paint every day,” she says, “though not all day every day.” In that time, her work has evolved into abstracts. Still, her floral compositions, whether with or without photographic overlays, are easily recognizable, even if it’s not what you would see if the image was taken directly from what was before the artist’s eyes. Cinderella, for instance, is rendered as if it were the namesake’s pink hibiscus gown as she was about to try it on for the royal ball. 

More abstract are the water images, such as Odysea, suggesting wormlike squiggles that may be glimpsed in current- or wind-blown water surfaces by way of semi-hallucinatory slants of sun- or moonlight. Other Bernstein abstracts involve pastel and earth-tone stacks, some resembling multi-layered cakes, others perhaps a pile of poolside towels. Bernstein smiled at my observations as if to say without saying so out loud, “Whatever you think.”

That’s her point–to engage your eye and your mind.

To encourage such engagement, there’s an observer-participation aspect to her show. The Dorchester Garden Club has created plant-sculpture re-creations of several paintings in the exhibit. Take a sheet in the lobby and try to match the garden club entries with the painter/photographer’s artworks.

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and critic now living in Easton.

 

NATURE & BEYOND

Paintings/photographs by Petra Bernstein through March 27, Dorchester Center for the Arts, 321 High St., Cambridge. Hours: noon-6 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays. Virtual reception, 6 p.m. March 13, via Facebook: live comments from the artist and a virtual tour of her show. Free admission to the show and virtual reception.

410-228-7782, dorchesterarts.org

 

Poet and playwright Robert Earl Price says he was disheartened to learn that few people in Chestertown knew about the man for whom their elementary school was dedicated: Henry Highland Garnet.

Six years ago, Price and Leslie Prince Raimond conceived of the idea of creating a video tribute of Highland’s life and how he participated on the world stage as a staunch promotor of self-emancipation by encouraging a slave rebellion against plantation owners of the South.

The small-budget video includes a dozen or more vignettes of Kent County residents, Black and white, relating highlights of Garnet’s life. The production was funded by the Kent County Arts Council and Sumner Hall and has recently resurfaced from Kent Cultural Alliance archives. 

Born a slave in 1815 in Chesterville, Kent County—just west of Millington— Garnet’s life story was often eclipsed by Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman and their famous escapes from Eastern Shore’s slave owners and subsequent ascension as pioneers of the struggle for emancipation. 

Garnet made his own escape to New York City with family members in 1825 an went on the become one of the most outspoken abolitionists of his time.

As a Presbyterian minister, Garnet gave one of his fiercest objections to slavery at the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, New York in 1843:

“It is in your power so to torment the God-cursed slaveholders that they will be glad to let you go free. If the scale was turned, and black men were the masters and white men the slaves, every destructive agent and element would be employed to lay the oppressor low. Danger and death would hang over their heads day and night. Yes, the tyrants would meet with plagues more terrible than those of Pharaoh.”

In 1865, Garnet became the first black person to deliver a sermon in the House of Representatives.

Here, Robert Earl Price talks about the video project and how Garnet’s life and impassioned beliefs stirred the nation as it approached the brink of the Civil War.

The video may be found here. Books by George Shivers about Henry Highland Garnet are available through the Charles Sumner Hall website here, and at the Bookplate bookstore.

This video is approximately six minutes in length.

In the performance and art exhibition world, the marking of success can sometimes be measured by how much afterglow is felt by the audience long after leaving the venue. And afterglow here meaning that some walk away from viewing art, watching a movie, or hearing a concert with an indelible sensation of impact well after closing time.

Days, sometimes even weeks later, the consumer of art can still experience a glow after seeing Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, or hearing Beethoven’s 9th in live performance. But how about when that sensation can last years?

This might be the case with many who attended the Ruth Starr Rose exhibition in Easton five years ago. And one of those who still feels that afterglow is Unionville native Jeffrey Moaney.

Now a design executive working in Baltimore, Jeffrey is part of the Moaney clan, many of whom were subjects of Rose’s work, so there is naturally an understandable bias at play. Still, as he told the Spy when we met a few weeks ago at the new Water’s Edge Museum, where the artist’s work will be permanently on display, it represented to him sometime far more significant than a family album.

We sat down with Jeffrey in front of a full wall of ancestor portraits to share his lasting impressions of the Mid-Shore exhibition, which Dr. Barbara Paca curated and was sponsored by Eddie and Sylvia Brown and the Dock Street Foundation, who funded the tour in Easton.

This video is approximately four minutes in length. For more information about the Water’s Edge Museum please go here. 

 

While the old adage is “that those who can’t, teach,” nothing could be further from the truth with the Academy Art Museum’s remarkable instructors. While they might be extremely talented with their teaching abilities, their art is perhaps the best indicator of that unique skill.

And, to the delight of the Mid-Shore, the Academy demonstrates their gratitude, and those of their students, by highlighting this talent with an exhibition that brings their work to the forefront.

The Spy sat down with AAM curator Mehves Lelic last week to talk about this unique assembly of artists and their work as the Museum’s second floor displays some of this extraordinary talent.

This video is approximately two minutes in length. Cover art, “Bridge Collapse” is by Sheryl Southwick. For more information about the Academy Art Museum, please go here.