Cassilhaus

Hannah Frieser and Charles Guice

I went to FotoFest in 2014.  It is much more of a photographers' show than a collectors' show but it is a wonderful place to see great new work and meet lots of folks in the photo community.  They have, I think, one of the largest, if not the largest portfolio review programs in the world over three weeks every other March and it is an incredible opportunity for photographers at all career stages to be in front of the top leaders in the photo world.  I am uncomfortable doing reviews myself but I love to sit in on them. When I was there, my friend Del Zogg took me under his wing and let me sit in on his reviews. While I was on the review floor I looked around to see if there was anybody else I knew so I could keep doing it the next day and I spotted my friend Charles Guice who I had gotten to know as a gallerist. I spent a fascinating day with Charles and he asked if I wanted to sit in with the women reviewing next to him, Hannah Frieser, the next day. I didn't know Hannah but I was having the time of my life and I had already met an artist i wanted to invite to the residency (David Pace) and decided to purchase work from another artist (Cheryle St. Onge) so I agreed. Hannah's memory freaked me out. Some of the photographers she was reviewing she had previously reviewed at venues around the world and some as long as a decade prior. She not only remember bodies of work from these photographers but specific images and was able to plot the arc of their work over their careers.  I was struggling to remember the name of the artist who had just left the table! All of the reviews I sat through were thoughtful and helpful but I had never experienced anyone like Hannah.  I decided to invite her to our residency.  In addition to 9 years directing Light Work in Syracuse,NY she was an independent curator of international photography exhibitions and had written extensively in the field and I thought she would bring a lot to Cassilhaus. We arranged for her to come 17 months later in the fall of 2015.  A few months before she came she asked if she could bring Charles Guice along.  I was confused.  I didn't know they were a couple-romantically and professionally- and that they were collaborating on a new photo web project called Converging Perspectives. We'd had two collaborating couples before and they were very successful and I adored Charles so I was totally on board.  That is until a certain Norwich Terrier named Wellington entered the picture.

We came to learn that Charles and "Wellie" were inseparable and had traveled together including internationally for 15 years and that Charles wouldn't come to the residency without him. We have a strict no pets policy at Cassilhaus because of our resident felines Jaco and Joni and although Wellie was cat friendly, our two were definitely NOT dog friendly. I tried to find alternate lodging for them in the area so they could still do the residency but nothing was working and Hannah started talking about coming solo. I did one last Hail Mary by sending out a request on my neighborhood listserv to see if anyone was willing to take in two unknown artists and their dog for a month and to my complete shock one of our neighbors, Mike and Diane Doub, who I DIDN"T EVEN KNOW, said they would love to host them.  It was incredible enough that anyone would be so open to taking in total strangers and their dog but even more amazing that they were within walking distance of our house!  The 5 of them bonded like family and Diane basically adopted Wellie.  They are fast friends now.  Although Hannah and Charles became our first non-resident resident artists, I was thrilled to spread our net and share the joy of living with artists with one of our neighbors.

Because I had connected with these guys doing portfolio reviews, I thought it might be interesting for Hannah and Charles to do reviews with photographers in our community rather than the traditional artist talk that many of our residents do.  They graciously agreed to do a whole day of reviews and i gave them a list of artists I thought would benefit from the process and let them select who filled the 8 slots. I asked if our interns could sit in on all of the sessions and get a review themselves and they also agreed to this.

Lisa McCarty showed her new Transcendental Concord Series

Dan Gottlieb showed his new handheld long exposure images.

Rachel Boillot participated via Skype from Tennessee and talked about her new book.

Jim Lee showed some of his amazing and inventive new still life work.

Lori Vrba showed both 2 and 3D work.

Also reviewed were Aaron Canipe, Eric Pickersgill, and David Simonton, as well as our interns Michaela O'Brien and Alyssa Miserendino

 

Charles and Hannah also visited old friends Trevor Schoonmaker and Teka Selman who gave them a private sneak preview of Trevor's new exhibition Reality of My Surroundings at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

Since leaving us Hannah has shared the exciting news that she has taken over as the Executive Director of the Center for Photography at Woodstock and she and Charles have moved to the tiny village of Woodstock, NY. We expect to see exciting new things happening as she leads the organization toward their 40th anniversary in 2017.

 

 

 

The Do Good Fund at Cassilhaus

David Simonton was the first to tip me off to this amazing thing called the Do Good Fund some time in 2013. This Southern photography initiative was started by an attorney in Columbus, GA named Alan Rothschild. Alan is on the board of a private foundation and one of the innovative ideas the founder of the foundation implemented was to allow each board member to individually support small or start up charitable initiatives outside of the foundation's traditional giving pattern. Alan's idea was to bring contemporary photography of and about the South to non-traditional audiences in often non-traditional venues. His dream was to bring this vital work to school gymnasiums, community colleges, and regional museums and encourage community based programming around the exhibitions for people who don't frequent major museums. I checked out the work they had collected in a very short period of time and was mightily impressed-I wanted to have the NC debut exhibition at Cassilhaus. 

I think Alan was a bit skeptical the first time I contacted him (crazy guy in NC who has a gallery in his house) and he was also overwhelmed with getting his program off the ground-he is a one man Do Good show and has a full time unrelated law practice.  I gently persisted and in March of 2015 Alan agreed to the exhibition.  I was thrilled.  I immediately enlisted the aid of former Cassilhaus intern Rachel Boillot and Duke MFA|EDA director Tom Rankin to serve as curators for the exhibition and despite their incredibly busy schedules they agreed to the job. I was shooting to have the exhibition up for the Click! Triangle Photography Festival in October 2015. Through much of the late spring and summer Rachel and Tom poured over the collection and made the difficult choices to get a collection of almost 150 pieces down to about 45 that we could fit into the show. There was a good bit of overlap between the artists in our collection and those of the Do Good Fund and we had talked initially about combining work from both collections to make up the exhibition but in the end we decided to keep the Do Good work intact in the upstairs gallery and complementary work by the same artists from the Cassilhaus Collection downstairs in the entry gallery and I think it was a great solution. They developed a beautiful exhibition that they dubbed Tracing the American South: Photographs from the Do Good Fund. Our intern at the time Eric Pickersgill agreed to drive to Columbus in a rental van to pick up all of the work. (Click on images to enlarge)

Alan had found these groovy custom bubble wrap gallery bags that he had made to fit each of the individual pieces so packing was a breeze.  It was super heavy duty plastic and the bubbles don't pop.  I was in serious art envelope envy!!  Working with our current interns Alyssa Miserendino and Michaela O'Brien we got the work spread throughout the gallery so Tom and Rachel could come and lay out the show.

After some significant curatorial deliberation we hung the show. The final checklist is here.

I can't remember a time when we hung a show at the house that I didn't know 90% of the images and 3/4s of the artists. It was disorienting at first and then sort of exhilarating.  Each day I was making new discoveries and falling in love with images. That's what it is supposed to be about right? This is an iPhone panorama of the installation in progress.

Below is one of my favorite pairings in the show. On opposite sides of the gold colored wall, Jerry Siegel's 2007 image Shooter of a young African American women in a Selma Alabama arcade shooting bottles with a rifle and a confederate flag in the background juxtaposed with Charles Moore's 1963 image of young African American civil rights protesters being pummeled by spray from a fire hose in Birmingham Alabama.  The rifle and the fire hose seemed to be trained on each other in this amazingly charged duo.

I fell in love with Susan Worsham's Young Boy Cleaning Church, VA 2011 and had to purchase a print for our collection. One of the many side benefits of doing these exhibitions is meeting and befriending artists included in the show.  I got to know Eliot Dudik, Rylan Steele, and Susan Worsham through this show and also learned of the work of many more photographers previously unknown to me.

The opening was lots of fun as ususal.

Alan Rothschild (far left) came up from Columbus for the opening and made some remarks about the collection. It is inspiring what he is doing for the photography community.

Later in the run of the show we asked the two curators Tom Rankin and Rachel Boillot and two of the represented artists Susan Worsham and Aaron Canipe to do a panel discussion and it was a very lively one.

Tom and Rachel really wanted to do a publication for the exhibition with an interview with Alan and that is not something we have done before for our shows as we have no funding source for them.  One of our wonderful Cassilhaus supporters, Mary Jane Rivers, stepped up and made a generous donation to make the publication possible and artist Aaron Canipe designed it. Thank you Mary Jane for this beautiful document of the exhibition!

The Do Good Fund is getting more and more ambitious with their programming and acquisitions and we were thrilled to be able to showcase the work in North Carolina.  Stay tuned to their website for upcoming exhibitions. Alan signs off all of his emails with

 

Be Good | Do Good

 

 

2nd Annual Cassilhaus Contemporary Curator Camp

Curators don't get many opportunities to compare notes and help each other with exhibitions.  In 2014 our visiting artist Mark Sloan spearheaded the first Cassilhaus Contemporary Curator Camp. We had so much fun and it was so successful I convinced Mark to do it again and we have launched an annual tradition.

16 curators from 4 states in the Southeast convened for the day.  Ellen and I both joined in as junior curators in training and learned a ton.  During the day art loans were brokered, collaborations were explored, and sneak previews of shows that are coming to life now were shared by all. We made some great new friends.

Lisa McCarty's Developer Drawings exhibition was up at Cassilhaus during the conference.  She wears both artist and curator hats and gave us all a tour of the work.

It was a beautiful day and we shared lunch on the porch.

 

In the years that I worked in museums, first as a summer student and eventually as a curator, one of the primary lessons I learned was this:  History is shaped by the people who seek to preserve it. We, of the present, decide what to keep, what to put on display, what to put into storage, and what to discard.

 

--Susanna Kearsley

BELEZA

In 2013 I was invited by Ann Ehringhaus, one of our previous Cassilhaus AIRs, to be on the photo crew for the annual Ocrafolk Festival on Ocracoke Island, NC.  I was to photograph the bands on the various stages throughout the island and it was my first time at the festival.  It was love at first chord.  I got some great photos and made some great new friends.  I also discovered Beleza-a Brazilian/American duo playing samba, funk, soul, blues, bossa, jazz and Spanish flamenco. Beleza is Madeline and Humberto "Berto" Sales.  Ellen and I looked at each other and said "ya know we haven't had a musical artist yet.." It took a while to make the stars align but Beleza joined us in July and August of 2015.

 

It was their first residency and they didn't quite know what to expect.  The project they wanted to work on was a new youth oriented record. They had lots of creative space here and it was an incredible joy for us to hear live music coming down the hall every day.  They were very focused but always left time for fun and sharing.  We had a GREAT time with them. 

They jumped in to help me make sticky buns one evening.

Dinner out with amazing artist Damian Stamer.

 

Summer fun in Ellen's ELF.

We are incredibly excited that "Just for Fun" was born here and was just released.  Take a listen and pick up a copy. In a former lifetime I used to run a recording studio and it was pretty hilarious to see Berto do with an iPad what used to take me a room full of equipment to do.  They were working on demos for the tunes they ultimately recorded in the studio in Charlottesville.

 

They couldn't resist doing a little gardening while they were here and left us some beautiful additions to the garden!

Most of our visiting artists give an artist talk.  Beleza gave a PERFORMANCE. We can seat about 50 at our events and almost all of our programs eventually "sell" out.  I wasn't prepared, however, for getting 120 RSVPs in 48 hours after sending the invitation-particularly from a duo almost completely unknown in the Triangle. My theory is that many folks are intimidated to come to an artist talk because they think they need some kind of specialized knowledge to appreciate the talk but everyone feels like they can appreciate new music.  After a momentary panic about pissing a bunch of people off or organizing another venue, Madeline and Berto graciously agreed to do a second show and we had two standing room sets. I was swept off my feet-pure magic.  Their chemistry was so electric and intimate I was almost a little uncomfortable to be so close to it. Click on these stills and videos to make them full screen.

 

 

Berto had this cool foot pedal activated looping device he affectionately calls Loopita and Madeline does live vocal looping on this song.

It's pretty quiet down the hall now.  Madeline and Berto thanks for filling our lives and home with music, at least for a little while and until you return.

 

 E aí, beleza?

Hey, what‘s up?

Beleza, which literally means beauty, nowadays has a much wider meaning. Saying beleza means things are going fine.

The expression is mostly used by young people and is very informal. It also has shorter versions like: Beleza? or even Belê?

Here are some ways to reply

1. Beleza 2. Tudo bem 3. Mais ou menos 4. Tranquilo

 

 from gringoes.com