I met David Pace in 2014 when I was observing a portfolio review at Fotofest Houston. Sometimes I just know immediately that I want to invite someone to the Cassilhaus residency and I asked him that same day. Fourteen months later he was on our doorstep. I liked David and the work he was doing in Burkina Faso so much. He was showing me the Karaba brick quarry and Friday Night Dance work that day.
He showed our community much more of that work during his standing room only artist's talk.
We had our usual lively crowd who got to tour the Private Portals exhibition (post coming soon!) that was up during David's stay with us.
Ron and Iris
George and Lisa
Marge and Holly
Rachel
Anne, Gesche, and David
We make a point of trying to connect our visiting artist with scholars and resources to help with the projects they want to work on while in residence. I have to confess I thought I had met my match at the prospect of finding someone in our area working on Francophone West African contemporary photography. Thanks to the amazing Naomi Nelson at the Rubenstein Special Collections Library at Duke, we were able to connect David with not one but three scholars at Duke and UNC with overlapping research interests. The icing on the cake was finding a graduate student from Burkina Faso that was able to meet David and come to his talk. Apparently there is a very small cadre of US scholars working in Burkina and David tapped into an amazing network here. Who knew? Naomi apparently!