WALTER Magazine - May 2024

The Art & Soul of Raleigh

MAY 2024

The Art & Soul of Raleigh

MAY 2024

The Art & Soul of Raleigh

MAY 2024

The TheArt Art& &Soul Soulof of Raleigh Raleigh

NATIVE ROOTS NATIVE The Inter-Tribal NATIVE NATIVE ROOTS Pow Wow at Dorothea Dix Park The Inter-Tribal ROOTS ROOTS Pow Wow at NATIVE The TheInter-Tribal Inter-Tribal Dorothea Dix Park Pow PowWow Wowat at ROOTS

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MAY MAY2024 2024

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Dorothea Dorothea Dix DixPark Park The Inter-Tribal

Pow Wow at Dorothea Dix Park

INSIDE THE DINO LAB ARTIST KRISTEN SOLECKI BOUTIQUE PLANT SALE INSIDE THEBAAAAACK! DINO LAB THEY’RE ARTIST KRISTEN SOLECKI A CICADA INVASION BOUTIQUE PLANT SALE THEY’RE BAAAAACK! A CICADA INVASION

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INSIDE THEARTIST DINO LAB ARTIST KRISTEN KRISTENSOLECKI SOLECKI ARTIST KRISTEN SOLECKI BOUTIQUE BOUTIQUE PLANT PLANTSALE SALE BOUTIQUE PLANT SALE THEY’RE THEY’REBAAAAACK! BAAAAACK! THEY’RE BAAAAACK! A CICADA INVASION AACICADA CICADAINVASION INVASION

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CONTENTS

MAY 2024

25 72 OUR TOWN 25 SHOP: A Growing Passion 27 GARDEN: Here Comes the Sun 28 NATURE: They’re Baaaaack!

30 MUSIC: Negative Space 33 SPORTS: The Long Run 37 DRINK: Natural Fit 40 BOOK: Sweet Memories 43 MAKERS: Painting With Purpose 46 NOTED: Moonbeam 48 SIMPLE LIFE: The Poor Man’s Guide to Domestic Bliss

FEATURES 53 After the trout lilies

by Richard Krawiec illustration by Gary Palmer

54 Native Roots

The Dix Park Inter-Tribal Pow Wow

by Lori D. R. Wiggins photography by Alexandra Williams

64 Blooms & Bees

Roger Montague’s garden

by Helen Yoest photography by Liz Condo

IN EVERY ISSUE 10 EDITOR’S LETTER 14 CONTRIBUTORS 15 YOUR FEEDBACK 17 OUR TOWN 19 DATEBOOK 87 THE WHIRL 96 END NOTE: Free Moms

72 Good Bones

Tour the new DinoLab!

by Hampton Williams Hofer photography by Joshua Steadman

80 Sketching Stories

Artist Kristen Solecki

by Colony Little photography by Joshua Steadman

48

On the cover: The Dix Park Inter-Tribal Pow Wow. Photograph by Alexandra Williams.

8 | WALTER

Joshua Steadman (LINDSAY ZANNO); Terrence Jones (GEORGIA TARDY); Liz Condo (URBAN POTHOS); Gerry O’Neill (DUKE’S AND TOMATO)

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We had a very science-y month! Addie and I got to take in the eclipse outside the office. Then her daughters were our models at the new SECU DinoLab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

D

o you have to be born in North Carolina to be a North Carolinian, or can you convert?

Recently, I made a trip up to New York City, where I lived for 13 years. When I left Raleigh, it was about 75 degrees and sunny — landing up north, it was 50 and rainy. As I got settled in my tiny hotel room, the first thing I did was yank open the curtains to get some natural light in.

Not that it was much help: my one window looked out into a narrow alleyway shaded by tall buildings.

I hopped in a car to meet a friend at a restaurant. And as I walked in, I had a very North Carolina moment: I ran into someone I knew, my old boss from my very first job in NYC. We chatted for a bit; I learned he had a friend who’d be relocating to Chapel Hill soon, so I sang the praises of my adopted home state.

All weekend, I had these moments where I realized I wasn’t a New Yorker any more — my clothes were a little too bright, I walked a little too slow, I smiled at everyone. (I didn’t run into anyone else.) I appreciated being able to ride the subway and find a coffee shop around every corner, but I missed home.

When I landed back in Raleigh, it was full, glorious spring — flowers in bloom,

leaves a brilliant green, sun warm in our clear-blue skies. I breathed a sigh of relief.

I wrote this month’s editor’s letter as I walked home from work. (If you see a blonde lady typing intensely into her phone between downtown and Oakwood around 5 p.m., that’s probably me.) As I waited to cross one intersection, I heard a car honk — a friend driving by offered a wave. A few blocks later, I heard a bike ding and got a “Hello, darlin’!” from another friend. One couple of neighbors were in the front yard gardening while their kids played. Another neighbor was on the front porch, ready to fill me in on the latest Costco specials and goings-on at the Alexander YMCA. I’m still stumbling over the names of famous NC basketball players and have to slow down when I find myself talking too fast. But the other day, I noticed that my husband and I had both started pronouncing Dreamville as “Dreamvul” — so I think the conversion is well under way.

Ayn-Monique Klahre Editor

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MAY 2024 EDITORIAL

PUBLISHING

Editor AYN-MONIQUE KLAHRE ayn-monique@waltermagazine.com

Publisher DAVID WORONOFF

Creative Director LAURA PETRIDES WALL laura@waltermagazine.com Associate Editor ADDIE LADNER addie@waltermagazine.com Contributing Writers A.J. Carr, Catherine Currin, Jim Dodson, Mike Dunn, Hampton Williams Hofer, Richard Krawiec, Colony Little, David Menconi, Jim Moriarty, Jessie Rumbley, Rachel Simon, Nelie Tahssili, Lori D. R. Wiggins, Helen Yoest Contributing Poetry Editor Jaki Shelton Green Contributing Copy Editor Finn Cohen Contributing Photographers Alex Boerner, Liz Condo, Jessie Greenberg, Terrence Jones, Juli Leonard, Forrest Mason, Bryan Regan, Joshua Steadman, Alexandra Williams

Advertising Sales Manager JULIE NICKENS julie@waltermagazine.com Senior Account Executive & Operations CRISTINA HURLEY cristina@waltermagazine.com Finance STEVE ANDERSON 910-693-2497 Distribution JAMES KAY Inquiries WALTER OFFICE 984-286-0928 info@waltermagazine.com Address all correspondence to: WALTER magazine, 421 Fayetteville Street, Suite 104 Raleigh, N.C. 27601

Contributing Illustrators Gerry O’Neill, Gary Palmer Intern Elaine McManus WALTER is available by paid subscriptions for $36 a year in the United States, as well as select rack and advertiser locations throughout the Triangle.

Subscribe online at waltermagazine.com/subscribe For customer service inquiries, please email us at customerservice@waltermagazine.com or call 984-286-0928.

WALTER does not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Please contact Ayn-Monique Klahre at ayn-monique@waltermagazine.com for freelance guidelines.

Owners JACK ANDREWS, FRANK DANIELS III, DAVID WORONOFF In memoriam FRANK DANIELS JR. © WALTER magazine. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without the express written consent of the copyright owner. Published 12 times a year by The Pilot LLC.

12 | WALTER

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Jessie Rumbley is a writer, editor and nonprofit leader. The former WALTER staffer lives in Raleigh with her family, including two young daughters. “Sharing part of Louisa’s story is an honor because her life has profoundly changed me. She has the most intrepid spirit! Caring for a medically complex child can be lonely and extraordinarily tough; I hope anyone walking through something similar knows they’re not alone.”

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ALEXANDRA WILLIAMS / P H OTO GR A PH ER Alexandra Williams is a photographer, filmmaker and AURA reader in Raleigh. Her work focuses on empowerment, self love, spirituality and freedom through portraiture. Williams loves to shoot candid and authentic portraits that capture the true essence of her subjects. To her, portrait photography is spiritual and sacred, a safe space to explore and dream of all the different ways to present yourself to the world. “Being able to capture the Dix Pow Wow is an honor and an energy I'll never forget. It’s truly a spiritual experience being in the presence of all the dancers, witnessing them honor their tribes, ancestors and the Creator.”

LORI D. R. WIGGINS / W R I TE R Lori D. R. Wiggins has been a regular contributor to WALTER since 2019. A veteran journalist, Wiggins penned the Midtown Muse community column for The News & Observer for a decade and currently contributes to other publications and literary ventures as a writer, editor and as a communications strategist and content creator. Writing about the Dix Park Pow Wow appealed to Wiggins’ joy of storytelling and reignited a personal quest to learn more about her own Native American ancestry. “My Granddaddy Connie’s mama, my great-grandmother, was a fullblooded Lumbee Indian. My chat with the lead pow wow dancers, newlyweds Stevie and Nakya, both of the Lumbee Tribe, left me even more excited about what I’ll discover about who I am.”

14 | WALTER

JOSHUA STEADMAN / P H OTO GR A PH ER Joshua Steadman grew up absorbing stories told by aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins and, of course, his parents. His father’s Nikkormat and a 28mm lens captured his childhood with great love and attention. “I felt like a little kid getting a sneak peek into the new DinoLab! I’m fairly certain if I’d seen this exhibit as a teenager, I would currently be digging around in some arid country for fossils. Also, it was such a pleasure getting to photograph Dr. Zanno, and to see the other paleontologists on the team at work. The NC Museum of Natural Sciences is just an amazing place!”

courtesy contributors

MAKING RALEIGH SMILE SINCE 1899

FEEDBACK We love to hear from you!

“I am one of your faithful readers that loves the diversity of stories, writers and photographers. My family has been in Raleigh since the 1870s and we love all the new ideas and people that continue to come.”

— Anna Ball Hodge

We make Mother’s Day every day.

Susan Murphy holds the April issue, in which she was profiled.

“Once again, the poem in the March issue struck a personal chord for me! I so enjoy both the poems and Jim Dodson’s thoughtful, entertaining articles.”

— Genie Safriet “The ladies of LIFT (our Tuesday Bible Study Group) at Genesis United Methodist Church in Cary loved ‘Coffee with God.’ We were discussing ways to connect with God during this Lenton season and it really struck a chord. [Jim Dodson] inspired us all to find creative ways to spark connections with each other and God. What a blessing!”

— Becci Monge “‘Coffee with God’ — amazing. It’s so nice hearing someone being so grateful for everything.”

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THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 15

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OUR TOWN

courtesy Live@Lake Raleigh

This month in Raleigh, enjoy an excuse to amp up your biking, take in music of all genres and enjoy good food.

TIME TO TUNE IN Pull out your picnic blankets — it’s outdoor music season! At North Carolina State University’s Centennial Campus, check out LIVE@Lake Raleigh, a laid-back, family-friendly music series. Country fusion group Holler Choir (May 2) and pop group Whoop (May 16) are on the lineup this month (6 p.m.; free; Main Campus Drive; live.arts.ncsu.edu). Head to North Hills for its Midtown Beach Music Series on Thursdays for pop covers, R&B and reggae from lively groups like Blackwater Band (May 2), Band of Oz (May 9) or Spare Change (May 16) (6 - 9 p.m.; $5; 4321 Lassiter at North Hills Avenue; visitnorthhills.com). For its Jazz at the NCMA series, the North Carolina Museum of Art will host Gregory Porter (May 23) and Brian Culbertson (May 30) at its Joseph M. Bryan, Jr., Theater (from $44; 2110 Blue Ridge Road; ncartmuseum.org). And on May 29, the Live After 5! musical block party series kicks off in One City Plaza (5 p.m.; free; Fayetteville Street; downtownraleigh.org). — Addie Ladner

THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 17

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DATEBOOK WALTER’s list of things to see, do and experience this month.

by ADDIE LADNER

LONGLEAF FILM FESTIVAL

courtesy Longleaf Film Festival (FILMS); courtesy Jazz on the Roof (ALLY J)

May 10 - 11 | Various times

Celebrating its 10th year, the Longleaf Film Festival is a beloved event for both aspiring filmmakers and film buffs. Hosted by the North Carolina Museum of History, the festival kicks off on Friday at 5 p.m. with a block of films, followed by a reception and the Movies-NMoonlight outdoor screening on Bicentennial Plaza. On Saturday, the festival offers film screenings, workshops and panels throughout the day and into the evening.

“While the films demonstrate a breadth of diverse creativity, several themes emerged,” says festival director Sally Bloom of this year’s film selections. John Rash and Melanie

JAZZ ON THE ROOF

May 1 & 16 | 7:30 - 9 p.m There’s nothing like smooth tunes to ease into the slower pace of summer. Jazz and funk singer Ally J will kick off the Jazz on the Roof series at The Durham Hotel with her soulful

Dang Ho’s Our Movement Starts Here and Laura Albritton’s Longleaf Forever are centered on our relationship with the natural world. Themes of loss are central to Kiersten Houser’s Voicemail and Sarah Deitrich’s Take Me To The Woods. And Mike O’Connell’s You’ve Got to Start a Thing and Frederick Murphy’s Duality: A Collection of Afro

vocals on May 1. On May 16, twotime Grammy-nominated trumpeter Al Strong will perform, along with a surprise guest. Seating is first-come, first-served — a great excuse to get there early for the bar’s skyline views and craft cocktails before the music starts. Free to listen; 315 E. Chapel Hill Street, Durham; thedurham.com

OPEN GARDEN DAYS

May 3 - 5 & 10 - 12 | 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.

Twenty minutes south of downtown Raleigh is one of the largest and most diverse plant collections in the

Indigenous Perspectives show history and its repercussions. “This year promises to deliver entertainment, insight and connection with about 1,260 minutes of narrative, documentary, music videos and animated movies — all with North Carolina connections,” Bloom says.

Free; 5 E. Edenton Street; longleaffilmfestival.com

country. This month, as it does just a handful of times a year, Juniper Level Botanic Gardens will open its gates to the public so it can see its variety of rare, exotic and native plants. Visitors can also explore the expansive property, which includes gardens of different growing conditions that host an encyclopedic collection of plants.

Horticultural staff will be on-site to assist guests with finding plants and answer gardening questions, and the greenhouses will be open to purchase plants. Free; 9241 Sauls Road; juniperlevelbotanicgarden.org

All information is accurate as of press time, but please check waltermagazine.com and the event websites for the latest updates.

THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 19

NATIONAL BIKE MONTH All month | Various times

Get ready to roll — the City of Raleigh is celebrating National Bike Month! On the evening of May 3, head to Pullen Park for the Bike Bonanza, where you can get a safety check on your gear, grab a free helmet from AAA of the Carolinas or have your bike serviced by Oaks and Spokes. On May 4, meet up with folks from the Raleigh Historic District Commission and Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission at Crank Arm Brewing at 10 a.m. for a 6-mile riding tour of the city’s history. On May 16, Bike to Work Day will bring refreshments and giveaways to more than a dozen pit stops including Red Hat Tower, Raleigh City Farm and NC State.

Throughout the month, look out for cyclinginspired public art projects and additional community events. Free; various locations; raleighnc.gov/bike-month.

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SPRING WORKS

May 4 | 1 & 6 p.m.

Cary Ballet Company will present a performance that combines two great works: George Balanchine’s Who Cares? and Jill Bahr’s Alice in Wonderland. More than 100 dancers will take the stage at Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts for this unique production. Dancers from the youth company will be dainty bumblebees, flowers and butterflies for the whimsical acts of Alice in Wonderland.

courtesy City of Raleigh (BIKE); courtesy Cary Ballet (ALICE IN WONDERLAND)

DATEBOOK

For Who Cares?, professional ballerinas from the company’s affiliate Cary Ballet Conservatory will don costumes handmade by Anina Dancewear in Cary, modeled after the ones designed for Balanchine’s 1970 debut. From $40; 2 E. South Street; caryballetcompany.org

Getty Images (MARGARITA)

RACING FOR THE RESCUES

May 5 | 8 a.m. - 12 p.m.

A run/walk featuring adorable animals, Racing for the Rescues benefits Second Chance Pet Adoptions, Raleigh’s oldest no-kill animal rescue. The event kicks off with a costume parade featuring adoptable dogs, then leads into a 5K for runners, walkers and the dogs that join them. Also enjoy prizes, demonstrations, food trucks and shopping at the pet-centric Vendor Village, where vendors will include Five Freedoms Pet Photography, Unleashed, The Cat and Dog Store, and Care First Animal Hospital. Pet trainers, bakeries and boarding services will also be there. “Our community is in urgent need of help,” says Dave Ballesteros, president of the board of directors for Second Chance Pet Adoptions. “All proceeds go directly toward making a difference in the lives of animals in need.” From $40; 2401 Grigsby Avenue, Holly Springs; secondchancenc.org

It’s the time in your life to have the time of your life.

CINCO DE MAYO PATIO PARTY

May 5 | 5:30 - 8:30 p.m.

Join chef David Mitchell on the spacious patio at Plates Neighborhood Kitchen on Glenwood South for a Mexico-inspired feast. Sip your way through three different house-crafted margaritas while enjoying small plates like mussels in a spicy corn broth with queso fresco and fried halloumi with salsa verde atop a crispy corn tortilla. 301 Glenwood Avenue, Suite 100; plateskitchen.com

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life of the natural world. “We thought this would be an easy, lovely way for local art lovers and our community to see Lynn in his natural element,” says Marcelle Kick, design coordinator at The Umstead. Free; 100 Woodland Pond Drive, Cary; umstead.com

seen not just as a wife and mother, but as a woman with desires, secrets and dreams,” says the director, Susannah Hough. From $25; 3027 Barrow Drive; honestpinttheatre.org

GRAND HORIZONS LYNN BOGGESS AT THE UMSTEAD

May 8 | 1:30 - 3:30 p.m.

The Umstead Hotel & Spa will host landscape artist Lynn Boggess in its galleries this month. To celebrate the artist’s sixth showing at the luxury hotel, the two have teamed up together for a reception and plein-air demonstration that draws inspiration from the hotel’s lush surroundings.

A Virginia native, Boggess is known for his vibrant, textured oil paintings that depict the mysterious and rich

May 17 - June 1 | Various times Independent theater company Honest Pint Theatre Co. will present Grand Horizons at Theatre Raleigh. Set in an independent living center for seniors, the story follows the unraveling of a 50-year marriage that sends shock waves through the community. Written by Bess Wohl, Grand Horizons was nominated for Best Play at the 2020 Tony Awards and is a surprisingly light, heart-warming tale. “The play asks us to consider what happens when you step outside of your role in a family, as our protagonist seeks to be

ARTSPLOSURE

May 18 & 19 | Various times Now in its 45th year, Artsplosure is Raleigh’s longest-running arts and cultural festival, which features art installations, performances, an art market and kids’ crafts. Among the featured performers is Squonk Opera, a Pittsburgh-based group that will

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courtesy The Umstead Hotel & Spa (BOGGESS); courtesy Artsplosure (STREET)

DATEBOOK

bring two of its mesmerizing shows to City Plaza: Brouhaha features the group’s one-of-a-kind “Squonkcordion” (an instrument best described as a conglomeration of giant, accordionpowered tubas), and Hand-to-hand features a pair of house-sized hands that challenge each other through an interactive rock performance.

Artsplosure will also bring back The Song Confessional, a booth in which festival-goers can anonymously share their musings to be turned into a song, and other musical performances including Afrofuturist band Sun Ra Arkestra. Free; downtown Raleigh; artsplosure.org

KRISTEN CHENOWETH

May 18 | 8 p.m.

The North Carolina Symphony will host Tony- and Emmy Award-winning singer and actress Kristen Chenoweth for one night only. With our hometown musicians backing her up, Chenoweth will perform songs from her portfolio of iconic performances, including music from Wicked, Glee and You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

From $90; 2 E. South Street; ncsymphony.org

BULLS VS. REDBIRDS

May 21 - 25 | Various times Take a field trip to Durham for a classic springtime outing: checking out a minor-league baseball game. The week of May 20, the Durham Bulls will play six home games against the Memphis Redbirds. Tuesday is Tacos & Tallboys night, with $2 tacos and discounted beers. Winning Wednesday offers extra chances to win prizes, and Dollar Dog Thursday brings, you guessed it, $1 hot dogs. Friday and Saturday nights, there’ll be fireworks after the game. And at the Sunday game — which starts a little earlier and includes an opportunity for kids to run the bases at the end — Wool E. Bull will be celebrating his birthday, with other mascots in attendance! From $13; 409 Blackwell Street, Durham; milb.com

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THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 23

DATEBOOK

May 5 | 2 p.m.

Hear a storied piano and violin from Naziera Germany brought to life at the North Carolina Museum of Art’s SECU Auditorium for Holocaust Remembrance Day. The instruments, a 1792 Zwerger violin and 1905 Blüthner piano, belonged to Natascha and Grete Wilczynski, Jewish sisters who were promising musicians in Munich in the early 1900s. With the rise of Nazi rule, the sisters — and their instruments — were separated by tragedy. Nearly a century later, Grete’s grandson unearthed his family’s story and reunited the piano and violin. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, the piano and violin will be played together with reverence and pride by Jacqueline Saed Wolborsky, principal violinist at the North Carolina Symphony, and Mimi Solomon, a chamber pianist and UNC Chapel Hill School of Music lecturer. Free; 2110 Blue Ridge Road; ncartmuseum.org

GARDENS ON PARADE

May 31 - June 2 | Various times The Raleigh Garden Club is hosting its first tour in nearly 100 years! Gardens on Parade is a three-day extravaganza with various ways to participate. The two-day Home Garden Tour will showcase eight diverse gardens, each paired with a guest artisan. Among them are a large wooded lot with sculptural art and an imaginative yard with natural play areas. On Friday evening, one of the homes will host Sunset and Moonlight in the Garden, with wine and hors d’oeuvres in a beautiful landscape by Falls Lake. The weekend culminates with a garden party and silent auction at JC Raulston Arboretum, where guests can bid on art while enjoying homemade delicacies and refreshments. Garden-themed attire encouraged! Prices and locations vary per event; raleigh-garden-club.org

Find your trail at

May 30-June 2 All trails lead to Elkin NCTrailDays.com 24 | WALTER

Scan the QR Code to register for hikes

Eamon Queeney

MUSIC OF REMEMBRANCE

SHOP

A Growing Passion

Scenes from Copperline Plant Co., top left, and Urban Pothos, bottom right; plants at Green Rabbit.

clockwise from top left: tk

Three boutique plant stores to add foliage inside your home

by RACHEL SIMON photography by LIZ CONDO

W

hether you have a green thumb or don’t know a fern from a fiddle-leaf, it’s never a bad idea to add some beautiful plants into your home. “Plants elevate your space by adding pops of joy and brightness,” according to Will Lin, who with his wife Julie co-owns Green Rabbit Plants.

The Lins are among a handful of local boutique plant store owners that pride themselves on turning choosing a houseplant into more than just a shopping trip.

“When our customers need help selecting the perfect plant, we ask a lot of questions to ensure that they’re going to bring home something that will thrive,” says Anna Grace FitzGerald, founder and owner of Copperline Plant Co. “Each time someone walks through our door, the hope is not that they buy something, but that they learn something.” To that end, these stores often host classes, encourage guests to linger with a beverage or even invite folks to come by at for fun events like yoga, terrariumbuilding or a plant-centric book club. If you’re in the market for something green inside your home, consider popping into one of these shops.

THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 25

SHOP URBAN POTHOS HOUSEPLANT SHOP 714 W. Peace Street or 1101 E. Whitaker Mill Road Urban Pothos Houseplant Shop opened its doors on W. Peace Street three years ago, and earlier this year, it added a second location in Raleigh Iron Works.

Beneath soaring ceilings, dozens of wooden shelves are chock-full of vibrantly colored plants and accessories.

“The first thing people notice is how much space we have here,” says founder Jose Harvey. He says longtime fans will find the new shop “minimalist” compared to the comfortably crowded Peace Street store, but that he used the same signature yellow furnishings from the first store “to pull in those vibes.”

At Urban Pothos, guests can enjoy unique features like a Soil Bar, in which they can sift through drawers of various potting mixes like perlite, coir and charcoal to create their own combination. Customers can also take advantage of the shop’s repotting service, which gets old plants into new containers, and a DIY terrarium-building experience.

“One of our main goals is to foster community through a shared love of houseplants,” says Harvey.

Harvey’s favorite plant right now: The Monstera Esqueleto, for its wild, lace-like leaves that “remind people of a skeleton, which is where its name comes from; esqueleto means skeleton in Spanish,” he says.

GREEN RABBIT PLANTS 540 St. Albans Drive A recent arrival to the North Hills Innovation District, Green Rabbit is the brainchild of co-owners and founders Will and Julie Lin, who previously worked as strategy and general management consultants. After starting as a pop-up in North Hills, Green Rabbit is now a cozy, inviting shop that specializes in terra cotta planters and unusual cacti. They also provide free and ticketed monthly events and workshops for newbies and experts alike, like plant mounting and even cookie-decorating classes. “Our aim is to make life beau26 | WALTER

tiful through living décor,” says Julie.

Green Rabbit offers free in-store potting services, complete with refreshments.

“When customers check out, they can have a seat at our potting bar where they can sit back, relax and chitchat with us while they have a complimentary drink while we pot their plant for them,” says Will, noting that they’ll have rotating, seasonally curated options ranging from cold brews to bourbons.

Julie’s favorite plant right now: Philodendron Micans “because they’re an easy-to-care-for, low-maintenance plant that gives a moody yet sophisticated touch to any space,” she says. “I love how their velvety leaves trail down beautifully from any bookshelf or mantle.”

Will’s favorite plant right now: Variegated Epipremnum Pinnatum, for the “elevated touch it offers with its fenestrations and white and green marbling.”

COPPERLINE PLANT CO. 23 W. Hargett Street Founded by Anna Grace FitzGerald in the spring of 2021, Copperline Plant Co. has spent the last few years transforming from a tiny pop-up to a major in-person destination. It recently moved into a large, window-filled corner location

that’s filled with indoor plants of all varieties. In addition to selling plants, Copperline offers consultations, classes on subjects like repotting and plant crafting, community plant swaps, and other plant care services. “In 2023 alone, we made over 56 housecalls and in-home consultations, hosted 26 different classes, and helped nearly 2,000 new individuals with their plants in the shop,” says FitzGerald. The store also partners with local businesses to hold plant-adjacent activities like candle-making, macramé hanger tutorials and yoga, and launched a book club in 2022 with picks that loosely revolve around plants.

Despite growing as a business, the company prides itself on its close relationships. “We know our customers by name, we know their dogs by name and we are continually floored by how lucky we are that our shop is so many people’s ‘happy place,’” says FitzGerald.

FitzGerald’s favorite plant right now: Philodendron Brasil, for its “chartreusecolored leaves and vibrant stripes of lime green throughout,” she says. “It’s also a really easy plant to care for and is readily available, so you can enjoy uniquely variegated leaves without breaking the bank.”

GARDEN

HERE COMES THE SUN “Gardening in mid-spring is spectacular because of the beautiful transition,” says local gardening expert Tony Avent. “You have winter plants starting to go dormant and summer plants that are starting to emerge, and the weather is great for getting out there.” Here are three things Avent says to do in your garden this month.

Bridal gown care that goes above and beyond.

Getty Images

MULCH Mulch helps with soil fertility, water retention and weed control. And now, before warm weather grasses emerge, is the time to add it to your beds. “If you can see a weed, it’s too late — that means it’s already germinated, spread and started to take over,” Avent says. “It’s best to mulch while the ground is still bare.”

BRING HOUSEPLANTS OUTSIDE If you brought cold-sensitive porch plants inside for winter, kick off their summer vacation! Avent says that plants like ferns, snake plants, spider plants and fiddle-leaf figs recharge in the natural sunlight, where higher humidity, warmer temperatures and fresh air help with growth and prevent dust and mildew.

START SUMMER VEGETABLES “Now that we’re past frost risk, you can start warm-season vegetables like tomatoes, peppers, basil, squash and eggplant directly in the ground,” says Avent. Find the sunniest spot in your yard, loosen up the soil and fertilize if needed (find manure or compost at your local garden center) before planting your seeds. If you started veggies indoors, now is the time to transplant.

—Addie Ladner

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NATURE

They’re Baaaaack!

A periodical cicada with its adult coloration.

Get ready for an influx of cicadas! Here’s insight into their strange, incredible life cycle. words and photography by MIKE DUNN 28 | WALTER

I

n spring of 2011, I noticed dime-sized holes in the ground one morning when I walked out to my car. Several days later, I started seeing the sheds — cast-off “skins” of creatures that had spent the last 13 years underground — on vertical surfaces like tree trunks, porch posts and even my car tires. The invaders were coming to the surface in droves. The noise was earsplitting, and they dominated the scene for weeks.

These creatures were members of Brood XIX of periodical cicadas. And this year, they’re baaaaack!

Cicadas abound every summer in North Carolina. We have several species of so-called annual cicadas, some of which emerge late in summer after spending only a few years underground.

They are much less abundant, on the large side and green in color.

By contrast, periodical cicadas emerge in spring, and they have black bodies and bright red eyes. Periodical cicadas are best known for being synchronized on either a 17-year or 13-year cycle. There are seven species of periodical cicadas (three with 17-year cycles and four with 13-year cycles) in the genus Magicicada, all of which are only found in the Midwest and Eastern United States. Groups of cicadas that share the same emergence years over a certain geographic area are called broods, and broods can include more than one species.

The special thing about this spring is that there will be a dual emergence of Brood XIX (13-year cicadas) over much of the Southeast and Brood XIII (17-year cicadas) over parts of Illinois. The last time this happened was in 1803, and the next time will be in another 221 years!

Scientists estimate there will be trillions (yes, with a “t”) of periodical cicadas emerging throughout the range of these two broods this April and May. Brood XIX is thought to be the largest brood of 13-year cicadas. They will

emerge this year in scattered locations in North Carolina from Raleigh to Asheville. Each of these cicadas started as a nymph that dropped from a tree and burrowed up to 2 feet into the soil 13 years ago. They started out at about 1/16 of an inch in length and resembled termites or cream-colored ants. But for more than a decade, they have been quietly feeding on the sap from tree roots. They molted several times in their underground chamber, apparently keeping track of time by some as-yet unknown mechanism; researchers believe it may be tied to the seasonal cycles of the trees.

Now, in the spring of their 13th year, these full-grown nymphs will dig a tunnel to the surface, sometimes including a mud turret above ground (especially if the soils are moist) and wait until conditions are just right. Studies show that they emerge from the soil and look for a place to transform when soil temperatures at a depth of several inches reach 65 degrees Fahrenheit. They typically emerge at night.

If they are in your area, you should have several nights to go out and look for the nymphs crawling up vegetation and other vertical surfaces. They soon settle down and start the transformation into an adult. First, their back split opens and a ghost-like, white adult with wrinkled wings pulls out in a slow, arching motion. It then hangs onto its nymphal skin and pumps fluids into its wings, slowly expanding them. Over the next hour, the body darkens from white to black.

Males usually emerge first, and when a sizable number are above ground, they begin singing, which is known as chorusing. Our cicadas have a pulsating song, sounding like the phrase pharaoh, pharaoh, repeated incessantly — or a distant group of alien spacecraft (or maybe I watched too many sci-fi movies as a kid?). Males use specialized drumlike structures on their abdomen, called tymbals, to make their astonishingly loud sounds. As tiny muscles vibrate the tymbals, the buzz can reach over 90 decibels, rivaling the noise made by a lawnmower or motorcycle.

Left: A periodical cicada emerging from its nymphal skin. Right: An adult just after emergence.

Females respond to these choruses. After mating, they use a knife-like egg-laying device, called an ovipositor, to make slits in tree twigs to deposit their eggs. These slits may cause the distal portion of that twig to die (known as flagging). Though it may damage young trees, it is no more than a pruning on mature trees and causes no permanent damage. Eggs begin hatching in about six weeks. The tiny nymphs will drop to the ground, burrow into the soil and start the cycle anew. The singing typically lasts four to six weeks and then the adults begin to die.

The long life cycle of periodical cicadas may have evolved to make it more difficult for potential predators to synchronize with them — these cicadas are, after all, on the menu of almost everything from snakes to birds to bears. With their huge numbers at emergence, some will survive to mate and reproduce. Interestingly, there is a fungus that is synchronized with the emergence. The fungus is in the soil in a resting phase until the cicadas emerge and pick it up on their bodies. Infected adults have a whitish abdomen that eventually breaks open, releasing more spores into the soil for the next generation.

There are several things I hope to witness for the first time in this year’s emergence: finding some adults infected by

that fungus; encountering a rare whiteor blue-eyed adult (a genetic variant); and seeing and photographing the tiny nymphs after they hatch. Perhaps (stress that word perhaps) this year I’ll taste one of these “ground shrimp” as it emerges.

Historical records indicate that many Native American Indian and early European settlers feasted upon the emerging nymphs, and some people still do. I may work up the courage to try them this year, as I’ve heard the taste compared to popcorn, bacon or crab, depending on the cooking method.

If you see them, don’t be afraid; cicadas can’t hurt you. They don’t bite or sting. But I have read that certain power equipment, like chainsaws, may mimic the sounds enough that it can attract a swarm of adults (could be interesting if you’re doing yardwork!). If you have delicate young trees, you may want to protect them with mesh netting.

Otherwise, these cicadas are actually quite beneficial to the environment: The tunnels of the nymphs help aerate the soil; the egg-laying provides natural pruning of tree branches; they are a bountiful food item for a host of natural neighbors; and the decomposing bodies of millions of adults adds essential nutrients back into the soil. I hope you can enjoy this incredible natural event!

THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 29

MUSIC

Crackerfarm

Negative Space

A new album from The Avett Brothers brings it back to its early, stripped-down sound

by DAVID MENCONI

30 | WALTER

I

n the life cycle of most bands, selftitled albums tend to be the first one they release into the world. But if an eponymously titled LP comes later than that, it often represents a transition — a get-back-to-roots move, or a reinvention.

The Avett Brothers (Ramseur/American Recordings), the 11th full-length studio album by Concord’s The Avett Brothers, feels like a little of both. Sonically, it’s a reconnection to Scott and Seth Avett’s early stripped-down days as a trio with bassist Bob Crawford. But aside from the jittery-paced first single “Love of a Girl,” most of its songs move at a slower, more stately tempo. And deciding what to call

the album took almost as much effort as writing its nine songs.

“We had to do some intense mindmapping and contemplating to get to that,” says elder brother Scott Avett.

“We actually had several other titles that

never quite did it. When we’d describe this album to people, a common theme seemed to be ‘less is more.’ And that seemed like the heart of what it was.

That untitled area, negative space. People can do what they want with all of it.”

While the new album is the Avetts’ first since 2019’s Closer Than Together, the past five years have been an eventful stretch. Scott, an acclaimed painter whose artwork adorns most Avett Brothers albums (including this one), picked up solid reviews when his first museum show opened at Raleigh’s North Carolina Museum of Art in the fall of 2019. Scott Avett: INVISIBLE closed in February of 2020, just before the pandemic.

The Avett Brothers battled the shutdown with a series of socially distanced drive-in shows at Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord. The pandemic shutdown also coincided with work on their first theatrical show.

Written by Tony-winning playwright and Avetts fan John Logan, Swept Away is a musical about a shipwrecked crew.

And while the brothers themselves don’t appear in it, their songs give the story shape and character. It opened in Washington, D.C., this past November and picked up the sort of raves that should take it to New York – “Swept Away has proved itself worthy of a Broadway christening,” was The Washington Post’s take.

“The biggest misapprehension that theater people have about the Avetts is they do ‘sort of country music,’” says Logan. “No, they’re an Americana band that does pop, rock, funk, countrywestern, polka and straight-up power ballads. What impresses me about their catalog is the incredible range they have.

So much of their writing is characterbased, and there’s a theatricality about their music. The most important thing for me is I think their music deserves the widest possible audience.”

Being on the cusp of Broadway is a long way from the Avetts’ scruffy origins more than two decades ago. They started out busking all over the state, often from

the back of a pickup truck with a piano, steadily building up a fanbase with a performing style best described as folk music in a key of wild abandonment.

They’ve acquired some fans in high places, among them movie director Judd Apatow, who co-directed the 2017 Avett Brothers documentary May It Last. Another was svengali producer Rick Rubin, who signed the Avetts in time to oversee 2009’s I and Love and You (their first gold record).

Since then, the Avetts have placed three albums in the top 10 of the Billboard 200 while steadily growing into a top-drawing live act playing festival stages from MerleFest to Coachella. The size of their lineup has grown, too, more than doubling to a seven-piece band.

That will actually complicate things a bit when the Avetts get back on the road this year for their most extensive touring since pre-pandemic times. Most of The Avett Brothers is quieter than a large lineup might allow.

“We’ll have the seven-piece show, and it will take our commitment to serve the songs what they need to be,” says Avett.

“We’ll have to make sure not to give in to the temptation of overdoing it, with all of us banging away. That would kill the vibe.”

After an opening vocal prelude, the first words on the album-opening “Never Apart” are younger brother Seth crooning, “Life cannot be written, it only can be lived.” That plays into the overall less-is-more theme, in which vibes and emotions take precedence over words. That’s in marked contrast to the preceding Closer Than Together, a wordy album that even came with a sociopolitical “Mission Statement” on the lyric sheet.

“No mission statement this time,” says Scott. “But there are other things in place, symbolism with drawings that accompany each song. I hope the lyrics will be all the mission statement it needs. We wanted to emphasize the negative space, which is a gift to listeners.

That unfilled space is where everybody gets to make it their own.”

Spring Exhibitions

Lee Hall: Immediate Landscapes Through May 5 Pulp & Bind: Paper & Book in Southern Appalachia Through June 2 The Reading Room: From Seuss to Geisel & Back Again Through June 9

BlowingRockMuseum.org Free Admission · Closed Mondays Top to bottom: Lee Hall, Puglia: Sun Facade I, mixed media on canvas, 50 x 50 in.; Leigh Suggs, Pacing the Races VI, handcut acrylic on Yupo, 40 x 30 in.

THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 31

Look Forward,

Travel Back

to Artistry in Bloom

to Time Well Spent

Experience a city where every moment refreshes your senses. Wander centuries-old cobblestone streets on the hunt for the perfect pint. Immerse yourself in art from American masters to cutting edge vanguards. Or follow your curiosity to an 18th Century living history museum that feels like a bite-size Williamsburg. Why wait? Just grab your friends. Hit the road. And see how far summer in Winston-Salem takes you. Explore hotel packages, itineraries and more at VisitWinstonSalem.com.

to Hands-On History

Drink In Our History We Didn’t Invent Happy Hour

It Jus ttoFeels It Toast YourLike Future

If history has taught us anything it’s that time is precious. Good thing

Winston-Salem under

łhe a ignment. Join us—and spend the day

sampling our epic breweries, distilleries and wine bars. Enjoying international festivals, concerts and theatre. Or savoring a summer meal on a patio so inspiring you’ll forget you’re in the heart of the city. So grab your keys. Reserve

North Carolina

your favorite hotel. And enjoy the magic of time well spent.

CELEBRITY SIGHTINGS

HISTORY COMES ALIVE

COCKTAILS + CULTURE

International Black Theatre Festival

MESDA , SEC CA, Reynolda

Wineries, Vineyards and a Walkable Craft Draft Crawl

and Old Salem Mus eums

SPORTS

The Long Run

Longtime NC State track coach Rollie Geiger reflects on four decades of coaching

by A.J. CARR photography by ALEX BOERNER

R

ollie Geiger might have enjoyed living in balmy Bradenton, Florida, teaching health education and coaching high school track. But when his friend, North Carolina State University track coach Tom Jones, offered him an assistant’s job in 1979, he was soon on the road to Raleigh.

The starting salary was a modest $3,000, income he supplemented by working in the campus mail room. A few

years later, Jones took another job and Geiger was promoted to head coach.

“Tom is the best coach I’ve been around in my life,” says Geiger, who praised his predecessor for leaving the NC State program on a solid foundation. And across more than four decades, he’s elevated the Wolfpack to national prominence.

Growing up in Bedford, Ohio — where Geiger set the 880-yard run record at his high school — and even while on the track team at Kent State University, coaching wasn’t in his dreams. After graduating and moving to Florida, he got a real-estate license, but didn’t pursue that profession.

One day, he discovered a job opening that did pique his interest: teacher and track coach at his local Bayshore High. He applied, was hired and spent several successful years at the school, setting himself up for that call from Jones.

In 42 years as a head coach — sometimes for both men and women — Geiger has been part of 40 Atlantic Coast Conference team titles (32 for cross-country, eight for track & field), 258 individual ACC titles and five national championships. That glossy record, along with election to six Halls of Fame, hasn’t expanded Geiger’s cap size or altered his personality.

“Coaches don’t win championships, players do,” Geiger says, modestly shifting attention to the collection of swift, strong athletes he brought to NC State.

Geiger’s recruiting success could be traced to his days at Kent State. While pursuing a degree, running track and winning “some races,” he also worked as a pots and pans salesman, which required making in-home presentations to prospective buyers. “That’s how I learned to recruit,” says Geiger, who was so successful he got a promotion.

Among the long list of his prized recruits was Betty Springs, a runner whom Geiger coached at Bayshore High, again at State and throughout her professional career with Athletics West. In 1986, Betty and Rollie married. Together they have a THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 33

SPORTS

Left to right: Betty Geiger on the cover of Women’s Track & Field World; Rollie running for Kent State; Rollie’s high school yearbook photo; Rollie today at NC State’s track.

son, Trey, and daughter, Rachel, who are both NC State graduates.

Undefeated in high school, Betty’s college career was even more sensational. She won four national titles (two for cross-country, two for track), earned 10 All-American honors (four for cross-country, six for track) and set NC State records in the 3,000-, 5,000- and 10,000-meter races. In 1983, she posted No. 1 U.S. and No. 3 World cross-country rankings, accomplishments that led to her inductions in the NC State and North Carolina Sports Halls of Fame.

Natural speed, “efficient” running form and grit are characteristics Geiger looks for in prospects — Betty checked all those boxes. “She was very gifted. I may not have coached another runner as mentally tough as she was,” Geiger says.

These days, Betty is happiest in the background, but cheers for the Pack and fervently supports her husband, who is still fueled with competitive spark without a hint of retiring at age 76. “I enjoy it,” says Geiger, who thrives in a power conference that has expanded from eight teams to 15 — and next year to 18.

As a respite from the increasing coaching challenges, he treasures time with 34 | WALTER

Betty and doing the daily workouts that have helped keep him sprinter-fit.

Geiger’s coaching responsibility lightened earlier this year, when former assistant and State All-American Laurie Henes took over the women’s crosscountry team, which has won three straight national championships. “I am very fortunate to have Laurie,” says Geiger, noting that the team’s many specialized assistant coaches are crucial to their success. Geiger continues coaching men’s cross-country and oversees the program as senior associate director of crosscountry and track and field.

While winning has always been a high priority, it’s not all about championships or setting records. There have been some disappointments along the way, but nothing has clouded his purpose for coaching.

“The pressure is to help the athletes be successful,’’ he says. “They have goals. We are here to help them reach them, to lend a hand athletically and academically. The athletes commit to us and we are committed to them.”

Geiger stresses there’s life after track, after college. He encourages the athletes on his watch to go “make a difference in somebody else’s life.”

Geiger has made a difference. “He’s changed a lot of people’s lives over the years — he changed mine,” said Alvis Whitted, a former two-sport Wolfpack athlete. “He believed in me, a little scrawny kid, he took care of me and everybody.” A sprinter on the track team, Whitted helped the Pack win a conference title in 1996. He also played wide receiver on the football team, spent nine years in the NFL and currently coaches wide receivers at the University of Utah.

On the track, Whitted saw Geiger as a “great motivator” who coached and helped each athlete individually, refining a sprinter’s mechanics or a high jumper’s style. “He was a vision of consistency and stability that came from a position of love,” Whitted says.

Whitted wants to have the kind of impact on his own players Geiger had on him, “to help them be better people.”

In an expression of appreciation, Whitted gave Geiger his No. 87 Oakland Raiders football jersey with “Thank you for everything you did for me” written on the back. Other former athletes have expressed a similar gratitude. “That’s what it’s about,” says Geiger, who still keeps Whitted’s jersey in his office.

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DRINK

Natural FIT Lucius Cyrus opens a neighborhood joint in Gateway Plaza

by CATHERINE CURRIN photography by FORREST MASON

F

or almost a decade, Lucius Cyrus worked at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences as an exhibit designer. It just so happened that his friends had a band called Natural Sciences, too. “I always thought that would be a good name for a bar,” Cyrus says.

In January, he made that vision a reality: Cyrus partnered up with the team at Person Street Bar to open his own spot, called (you guessed it!) Natural Science. Tucked in across from Dogwood Country Club in Gateway Plaza in the Woodcrest neighborhood, it’s meant to be a neighborly watering hole — whether or not folks happen to live nearby.

Cyrus, the bar’s managing owner, is not new to the scene.

If you’ve been to Raleigh favorites like Neptunes Parlor and Person Street Bar over the last two decades, you’ve probably seen him behind the bar. “It was a temporary thing at first, and it became something I enjoyed doing. I was relatively successful at it, too,” he says.

When Cyrus was ready to open a space of his own, he saw an opportunity to fill a gap in the development at Gateway Plaza.

“I like the vision of Henry Ward and the team at Loden Properties, and I love the way this part of town has changed and grown,” Cyrus says. Opened in 2019, the development includes tenants like Union Special Bread, coworking space Raleigh

THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 37

DRINK Founded, Fiction Kitchen’s new iteration in Boone, worked on Natural Science’s and the soon-to-open Mala Pata. design. The L-shaped bar is simple and “We became patrons and fans of Lucius functional, offering pockets of seating on and the entire Person Street Bar crew by either side of a copper counter for walk-up virtue of its close proximity to our office,” ordering. The shelves behind the bar arc — LUCIUS CYRUS says Ward, partner at Loden Properinto a wooden portico of sorts, a sculpturties, which is based in Mordecai. “We’re al focal point that makes the large main certain that Natural Science will foster a ‘third-place’ sense of room feel more intimate. Cyrus sourced most of the furniture belonging and contribute to the vibrancy and well-being of the himself, channeling a 1970s office vibe with lots of dark wood neighborhood.” and leather upholstery, plus mismatched side tables and lamps.

The space is tucked away and private — a walk down the “I liked that this furniture could have lived a long life before sidewalk behind Mordecai Beverage Co. — and Cyrus was ending up here,” he says. The walls feature mixed-media pieces intentional about creating cozy nooks inside, too. “There are by local artists Ollie Wagner and Erin Ives. little spaces within this much bigger space allowing for that As for the drinks, Natural Science offers simple takes on classic bar-room experience,” he says. While they aren’t fully enclosed, cocktails, a sophisticated wine program (developed with the help the bar offers alcoves and rooms that offer things you might see of Longleaf Lounge’s manager, Rebekah Hayes), plus a rotating at Person Street or Neptunes, like old video arcade consoles and selection of local beers. “I’m not trying to overwhelm my barbar games. This will also allow the bar to be open while simulta- tenders — it’s not really a cocktail bar. It’s about making friends neously hosting private events. “That way they won’t interrupt over drinks,” he says. “I’m all about developing relationships with day-to-day business,” says Cyrus. “I want guests to walk in and people and making them feel comfortable and welcome.” know what to expect every time.”

Architects from Provision Studio, which recently built out Two of the more private nooks within Natural Science, which offer a pool table and games, plus intimate lounge seating. the new Locals Seafood space and the Rhodes Motor Lodge

“I want guests to walk in and know what to expect every time.”

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INGREDIENTS 2 ounces Beefeater Gin ½ ounce fresh lemon juice ½ ounce rosemary-infused honey syrup DIRECTIONS Combine all ingredients in a shaker with ice. Shake, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a sprig of rosemary.

38 | WALTER

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BOOK

SWEET MEMORIES A year on the journey to adulthood

by JIM MORIARTY

M

y freshman year in college was nothing like the one Stephen E. Smith writes about in his memoir The Year We Danced. And yet it was exactly the same.

For any memoir to rise above the level of that dusty old book sitting on the mantel in your grandchildren’s house, it has to reach a level of universality — no easy feat — and The Year We Danced does it without breaking a sweat. Except on the dance floor, that is. Written with a touch of humor and a bit of heartache by one of North Carolina’s finest poets, Smith’s tale of his freshman year at Elon College in 1965-66 is sweet without being sentimental, poignant without being preachy. With the escalating war in Vietnam a kind of constant buzz in the background, The Year We Danced is nothing less than the launchpad of a life, a survey course in Adult 101 — complete with its own soundtrack. Along the way we’re introduced to an endlessly entertaining cast of characters, drawn by Smith in distinctive, rich detail.

Smith’s father, the boxing coach at the U.S. Naval Academy, had taken control of his son’s college admission process in March and delivered the results in June like an uppercut: “We were devouring Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks and oven-baked frozen French fries smothered in Hunt’s ketchup, our standard Wednesday evening fare, when he stared at me across the dinner table and stated matter-of-factly, ‘You’re going to North Carolina in the fall.’

40 | WALTER

“I froze in mid-bite, a flaky chunk of trans-fat-engrossed fish stick balanced on my fork. ‘I am?’ “‘Yeah, you’re going to Elon College,’ he continued. ‘It’s far enough away that you won’t be running home every fifteen minutes.’”

We are introduced to Grandma Drager, who “never forgave her wayward first husband and never passed up a chance to deliver a sermon on the evils of drink,” who travels 350 miles by bus to hand-deliver to this young man about to venture forth into the world a baffling bit of wisdom in six words, memorable only in their towering insignificance: “Promise me you’ll wear tennis shoes.”

Once at Elon, where Smith’s father delivers both him and the message that he doesn’t expect his son to make it

through the first semester, Stephen meets his roommate Carl, who has arranged his shoes in the closet alphabetically by brand and has a pricey collection of 30 or 40 bottles of men’s cologne in parade formation on top of his dresser. “Unfortunately, Carl was the loquacious sort. He was going to sign up for physics and run for class president in addition to majoring in German. Then he started in on his personal life. I had no choice but to lie there in the dark and listen to him brag about his girlfriend, who was a freshman at a college in Virginia, and how they were going to get married before the year was out, a notion that struck me as utterly demented.”

As it turns out, it becomes clear rather quickly that Carl could have benefited from one, or several, of Grandma Drager’s exhortations on demon rum. “In the time we shared room 218, Carl never once exchanged his sheets for clean ones, and the pile of dirty laundry on his desk had spilled onto the floor beside his bed and included many of the garments he’d so neatly arranged in the closet on the first day of orientation. He’d sold off most of his bottles of cologne for beer money, and, as nearly as I could determine, he’d quit going to class altogether.”

On the plus side, Carl became the subject of an essay written by Smith for the spine-chilling professor of English 111, Tully Reed. Smith picked a subject he knew and wrote the hell out of it. When “The Making of a Derelict” — with copy as clean as anything that ever ran in The

Tim Sayer

New Yorker — gained nothing better than a C- (the highest grade in the class), Smith screwed up the courage to find Tully in his office to ask the fearsome man why. “‘It’s not A or B work,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘not for a college freshman.’ He handed me my essay, took a drag on his Lucky Strike and returned to slinging red ink.”

Smith’s dance partner, and surely one of the first honest loves of his life, is Blondie, an upperclassman who can power drink a PBR and dance until curfew, if not dawn. At their favored club, the Castaways, she takes flight. “As I watched, the simple truth dawned on me: We might be at a club where there was only one acceptable dance step, but if Blondie didn’t want to dance the Shag, she didn’t have to. She was beautiful, unique and she didn’t give a damn about attracting undue attention. She wasn’t there to prove herself to anyone; she was there to have a good time, and she intended to do just that.”

Also unique, and on the other end of the spectrum from the fearsome Tully, was another English professor, Manly Wade Wellman, a prolific author who would eventually call the Sandhills home, just as Smith would and does. “Wellman was barrel-chested and wide-shouldered, his graying hair combed back from his broad forehead. His round, open face was accentuated with heavy eyebrows and a prominent nose below which was cultivated a tweedy, slightly skewed Clark Gable mustache. What was immediately appreciable was the peculiar way in which his eyes reflected light. The very tops of his dark irises flickered, suggesting an inner illumination... If Wellman was insistent, he was also endearing. I was immediately convinced that this guy had a sincere interest in who I was and what I thought. He wanted to know about my latest writing project as if it were of immense concern to the literary community. ‘What are you working on?’ he asked.”

In a few short months, Smith had met

Stephen E. Smith

With the escalating war in Vietnam a kind of constant buzz in the background, The Year We Danced is nothing less than the launchpad of a life, a survey course in Adult 101 — complete with its own soundtrack. both the carrot and the stick.

In the end, Blondie moves on, as all of our Blondies do. Then Smith gets the news that a boyhood friend has been killed in combat. “The spring of ’66 was early in the war, and although the weekly casualties were the highest since our involvement in Vietnam, I doubted anyone at Elon could name a friend who’d died in that distant war. I kept the news to myself.”

But not the sense of helplessness and futility. “I reviewed the times Barrie and I had spent together, my memory sliding from one image to another in no particular sequence — the hours playing hide-and-seek on dusky evenings in the little town of Easton, Maryland, the summer days I visited with him in Salisbury, where we skipped stones from the banks of the Wicomico. But what I

remembered most vividly was a summer afternoon in 1957 — we were both eleven — when Barrie and I were singing our favorite top ten rock ‘n’ roll songs and I mentioned that I was fond of a country song, ‘The Tennessee Waltz.’ ‘I can teach you how to play it on the piano,’ he said, and then he sat down at the family’s upright Baldwin and with uncharacteristic purposefulness showed me how to pick out the melody on the white keys. It was a good moment to hold in memory, affirmative and focused, his casual smile, his fingers walking along the ivories.”

Smith’s memoir, to be released this month by Apprentice House Press, is packed full of good moments. If you know someone who is going to be a college freshman — or if you were ever young once yourself — this trip down memory lane is well worth taking.

THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 41

Small town pride is a big deal here.

Come out and join the party that is Small Town Pride in Chapel Hill and Carrboro. The month-long celebration in June begins with a Proclamation, progresses to the Promenade, and peaks with the Piper. And everyone who celebrates the LGBTQIA+ community is invited to join in the fun.

Check out the list of events, book a getaway, and let pride lead you here.

visitchapelhill.org/ things-to-do/lgbtq-travel

MAKERS

Painting with Purpose

Georgia Tardy creates community through art

by COLONY LITTLE photography by TERRENCE JONES

U

nderneath Georgia Tardy’s practiced hand, figurative portraits of women slowly emerge from curvilinear lines, presenting their metamorphosis as a state of “becoming.” This process of flourishing through change feels familiar to Tardy. “There’s a phase within the cocoon where a caterpillar completely liquefies before becoming a butterfly,” she says. “That speaks to me — there are parts of me that will always remain, but other parts that will completely transform and take a new shape.”

Tardy is known for creating graphic art, paintings and murals in a contemporary Art Nouveau style in her Raleigh studio. Her subjects are often surrounded by colorful waves, sinewy foliage and

fluid swirls. Representations of lotus flowers, koi fish and butterfly wings often pop up, too, layers of symbolism that, for Tardy, are self-referential.

In her hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan, Tardy took delight in drawing her favorite Sunday comic characters — Garfield, Beetle Bailey and Curtis — perfecting their lines and shapes until she could recreate them from memory. Sketching and doodling became an important part of her process. “I grew up with a mother and grandmother who always encouraged my artistic urges and whims,” she says. “I’m very grateful and I don’t take that for granted, because I know so many people whose creativity was discouraged as a child.”

THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 43

MAKERS Community is a cornerstone of Tardy’s artistic career, one that prioritizes a sense of purpose. While studying graphic design at Kendall College of Art and Design in Michigan, she thrived within a diverse circle of fellow artists. After graduating, she started teaching graphic design, working for the West Michigan Center for Arts and Technology, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts and at her alma mater. But teaching often made her feel disconnected from her personal work and from the sense of community she had as a student. She realized that in order to develop her own art practice, she’d need to cultivate a new environment for herself. “I didn’t want to be the only Black artist every time I walked in a room,” she said. “I had to be somewhere that had a rich deposit of Black, minority and female artists to help me stretch and grow.”

That desire inspired a move to Raleigh in 2016, where many of the themes around transformation that she explored in her personal work began to coalesce. Then, a series of family losses, including the passing of her father and her husband’s grandmother, dramatically changed the tenor and scope of her practice. “I had to dig deep to ask myself what I wanted to say and what I wanted my work to represent,” Tardy says.

“And then my work grew because I was forced to grow.”

Tardy began to closely study the symbols she used in her work, becoming more intentional about selecting them not just for their aesthetics, but for their symbolism. The lotus, for example, is a flower that takes root in mud and muck, a plant that can withstand extreme conditions. “At first I thought, this is pretty, but the more I learned about how and where the lotus grows, it blew me away,” she says. “I realized that this imagery could speak to darkness as well as beauty.”

Her work has also grown in scale in recent years. While she lived in Michigan, Tardy assisted established muralists to gain experience, but when she moved to Raleigh she had to start over. “There’s 44 | WALTER

the technical process of how to scale your work, but you also have to know people and they need to know you in order to do that type of work,” she says. “I knew it was going to take time for me to get there.” Tardy regularly attended First Fridays, walking the galleries and studios at Artspace, to meet fellow creatives around town.

During the downtown protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Tardy hit the streets, talking to the artists and business owners who were trying to rebuild.

One of her first murals was a plywood piece she painted for Retro Modern Furnishings at its former location on Dawson Street. The piece featured a series of curved shapes framing a quote by Nina Simone: “An artist’s duty is to reflect the

times.” “Everybody was going through such a hard time,” she says. “Even though I knew it was going to be temporary, I didn’t care.”

Since then, Tardy has created murals for the North Carolina Museum of Art, Whiskey Kitchen and Duke Hospital in Raleigh. Her piece for the hospital, Despite It All, I Will Arise, is painted along a walkway that leads to the Radiology and Oncology Department. It features a trail of swirly black lines that flow into a series of colorfully painted butterflies. They appear to flutter among flowers beneath the rays of a bright yellow sun.

Artsuite’s Marjorie Hodges, an arts advisor to Duke Hospital, recommended Tardy for the project. “Selecting artwork for a hospital setting is very different

from selecting work for a gallery or residence,” Hodges says. “Patients, families and healthcare providers are under constant stress; I was searching for an artist that would transform the entrance to the cancer center with a mural that was meaningful and hopeful. I knew Georgia would create something beautiful in this setting.” While painting the mural, Tardy immediately felt its impact. “Patients, doctors and nurses watched the whole process unfold, and I saw people coming in for treatment on good days and horrible days,” Tardy says. “They all said the same thing: this is so needed.”

Over the month that she worked on the mural, Tardy encountered many of the same patients returning for their appointments. “One gentleman coming for treatment said, this is the highlight of my day, I look forward to coming to see what you’ve done,” Tardy says. “It meant so much to me.”

Through murals, Tardy has expanded

the reach of her art, and as the community slowly emerged from the pandemic, she and her husband Reggie opened up their backyard studio for informal creative gatherings. Coined The Artist’s Lounge, the space officially opened in 2022 to host events. Tardy has also opened up the studio for classes where guests can paint objects such as ceramic flower pots, sneakers and skateboard decks.

“I try to do unique things, things that are going to pull people in while still being able to teach,” says Tardy. “We’re learning about color relationships, composition, how to communicate your story and how to take your idea out of your brain and get it down on paper, but on fun sorts of objects.” She hopes to develop more educational opportunities that target children with limited arts access.

“I’m really geared towards parents who have children that clearly demonstrate some sort of artistic desire, but don’t

know what to do with it,” she says.

For Tardy, cultivating an environment to inspire creativity is just as important as creating space to learn and be transformed by that knowledge. “I want all of my classes to have a purpose. I want to have fun and to give people the opportunity to have that creative moment, but everything for me has to have a purpose,” she says. “You’re leaving with something you didn’t have before.”

This idea of being transformed by an experience is what has guided Tardy in this phase of her artistic practice that harmonizes teaching and personal expression, while stressing the importance that creativity can play in our lives. “I realize that every person or young person that I come in contact with won’t grow up to be a professional artist; we all have our own path,” she says. “I simply want to be a part of changing the narrative of who an artist is and what an artist looks like.”

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THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 45

McKenzie Myers

NOTED

MOONBEAM

by JESSIE RUMBLEY

O

ne year ago, I blearily nursed my baby on Mother’s Day morning.

She had come home about a week prior — six weeks after her due date and 18 long weeks after her birth. For months, I’d dreamed of this moment.

Louisa was born on Christmas Day, despite being due in late March. I was 26 weeks along; she was less than 2 pounds.

The turn of events leading to her arrival were swift, confusing and scary: after a fairly normal first half of pregnancy, 46 | WALTER

things became unpredictably complicated in one whirlwind month.

I never imagined I’d have a premature child. In fact, I didn’t know arrivals that early were possible.

On that Mother’s Day morning one year ago, Louisa fed briefly before losing her stamina. I hooked up her feeding tube and snuggled her while a pump delivered the rest of the milk directly to her stomach.

We paused mid-feed to give her microdoses of medication, part of the dozens

she needed each day. This reality — prescriptions and interventions — was not part of my dream.

Thus began my crash course on living in the blurry gray in-between of having a premature baby. There is no black and white here, no guarantees. Prematurity is complicated, and the “homecoming” is often not the end of the story. Louisa has no lifelong conditions that we know of and is not disabled; it appears that prematurity is her biggest obstacle to overcome.

But it’s a big one.

Since Louisa’s months in the hospital, we have navigated feeding tubes, home oxygen tanks and an ongoing, rigorous medicine schedule. There are so many specialists and therapies and appointments that my 3-year-old now knows which waiting rooms have which toys — these outings are our routine now.

There’s every reason to believe Louisa will outgrow most of her diagnoses and even out between ages 2 and 3; she will almost certainly catch up by kindergarten. So my family — my husband, our older toddler daughter and Louisa — is doing our best to take the long view as we power through daily survival.

We are weary and transformed. But we are also awestruck, doting parents; Louisa is a moonbeam, shining light on a dark and unknown journey.

There is a sense of abundance thanks to perspective, privilege and supportive friends and family.

And yet I can’t help but grapple with a deep frustration at and disappointment in a health-care system that is chaotic to navigate, entrenched in silos and red tape. I have this system to thank for my daughter’s life, yes, but my family has sacrificed so much in the meantime. And we are not alone. During 131 days trekking to and from a NICU, I encountered injustice and inefficiency that still leaves me angry and heartbroken. I witnessed the unimaginable — horrific and miraculous.

Most of all, I encountered an astonishing capacity to love; to endure; to empathize.

I have sat in much bitter and much sweet.

Like many in this medically complex community of parents of premature babies, I now have a solid understanding of pediatric nursing and insurance intricacies; I’m on a first-name basis with

our neighborhood pharmacists; I have five specialists on speed dial; I check MyChart like it’s an email inbox; we get as many boxes from the DME (durable medical equipment) company as we do from Amazon. I am more than a mother — I am also a caregiver, a case manager, a tenacious advocate.

Some months ago, I would have told you I was drowning in all of it. Until one day I realized that Louisa wasn’t. She’s treading water just fine. She’s active and spunky and social, just like every other 1-year-old you know. Her medical needs are exhausting — but she is a delight. My true dispatch from the deep end, here, is that sometimes the light hits the water just right; joy exists in difficult experiences, too. Grace is everywhere, even and perhaps especially in sorrow.

This year on Mother’s Day, we’ll be back at the hospital where Louisa was born.

She’ll be fresh from open-heart surgery, hopefully her last big challenge before we ease into an ever more “normal” existence.

I’ve come to understand, though, that normal is what I make it — at least for now, at least while my two children are young. Perhaps this messy, emotional path is actually the most normal of them all, and I’m both sorry and proud that my daughters have walked along it early.

While I trudge through this profoundly tough season, my girls scamper and giggle onward to the only life they know: one full of curiosity and energy and syringes and books, pushing around the IV pole and the walker toy alike.

Their memories of this time will fade, the feelings baked into who they are, but the details fuzzy. I just hope what they end up remembering is love — fierce, open-hearted love.

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THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 47

SIMPLE LIFE

The Poor Man’s Guide to Domestic Bliss Even unconditional love has its conditions

by JIM DODSON illustration by GERRY O’NEILL

W

ives, does your husband suffer from RRBS, also known as Recurring Refrigerator Blindness Syndrome?

The symptoms are relatively easy to diagnose. Your husband is making himself the first locally grown tomato sandwich of the season and opens the refrigerator in search of Duke’s Mayonnaise. He scans the refrigerator shelves for three full minutes, increasingly agitated as he shifts jars of pickles and containers of mystery meat and cottage cheese hither and yon.

Finally, after shifting the contents of the entire refrigerator around and

48 | WALTER

even checking the vegetable and meat bins for the missing mayonnaise, he straightens up and loudly declares one of two things: “This is ridiculous! I know we have mayonnaise! I saw it in here yesterday!”

Or, alternatively, with a wail of wounded resignation: “Honey, where’s the G#%@* mayonnaise? You said you just bought a brand-new jar this week.

Someone must have taken it!”

Commonly, what happens next is the victim’s wife calmly appears, opens the refrigerator and, within seconds, presents the aggrieved spouse with a fresh new jar of Duke’s. Turns out, the may-

onnaise was partially hidden behind a carton of orange juice last used by said victim, apparently in plain view only to the average female person.

If you live in my house, this happens on an almost daily basis.

Yes, I suffer from Recurring Refrigerator Blindness Syndrome.

But I am not alone.

There are untold millions of us out here who suffer instantaneous blindness whenever we open the refrigerator in search of condiments, cold pizza, leftover mac and cheese or the last piece of chocolate meringue pie.

Moreover, according to the National

Association of Endangered Domestic Tranquility, refrigerator blindness isn’t the only condition that strikes the average married American male, placing undue stress on relations with wives, visiting mothers-in-laws and elderly aunts.

Tranquility experts cite a commonly related condition known as DAS or Dishwasher Avoidance Syndrome that afflicts an estimated 87% of men married an average of 10 years or more.

DAS is defined as a chronic inability to correctly load and unload (much less operate) a German-built dishwasher without proper supervision by someone familiar with the machine’s standard operating procedures, typically a married person of the female persuasion.

Sufferers generally avoid this everyday household task by poorly hand-washing dirty dishes and used glassware whenever the domestic partner is out of the house, not only resulting in suspiciously spotted dishware but unnecessary use of precious water.

A related inability to operate the average washing machine and reach into a clogged garbage disposal have also been documented in some cases.

In addition, studies conducted on the average suburban American male reveal at least two other common stress-inducing habits that take place outside of the home.

The first is LGLP or Lost Grocery List Phenomenon, generally affecting mature to elderly husbands who volunteer to go to the store for their wives with a list of a dozen essential items and return hours later with chips, salsa, three or more frozen pizzas, a six-pack of craft beer, the wrong dishwasher liquid, a set of half-price blinking Christmas lights, four Tahitian patio sconces, a tub of rainbow sherbet, Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s Guide to Home Auto Repair (sixth edition) and only four of the 12 items on the original list, which was somehow lost in transit to the store.

An unsupervised return to the store is sometimes undertaken with a revised

shopping list safety pinned to the sufferer’s sweater.

Finally, there is the all-too-common domestic problem of UHIC, better known as Unfinished Home Improvement Complex, an affliction in which various do-it-yourself home projects have been sitting idle, unfinished or simply forgotten since the first Obama administration. This includes, but is not limited to: half-tiled bathroom walls, toilets that don’t properly flush, mountains of pricey hardwood mulch left in the backyard so long they’re sprouting trees, doors that never quite close, suspicious sounds beneath the house, broken doorbells, half-installed home security systems and driveway sinkholes.

Curiously, in the interest of saving time and money, the typical victim of UHIC routinely stalks the aisles of Lowe’s or Home Depot, dreaming up ambitious new home improvement projects that will make home life easier but don’t stand a chance of ever being completed.

Yes, wives, you know these conditions all too well.

Sadly, there’s no known cure for any of these domestic maladies just yet. But there is hope in the form of a newly created self-help grassroots organization called Building Better Husbands, designed to afford hard-working wives like you the opportunity to network and share creative ideas on how to make their homes happier places and spouses more thoughtful and responsive. Look for chapters forming in your neighborhood soon. BYOB (or two).

A final word to my fellow sufferers.

This Mother’s Day, fellas, let’s give the little lady of the house a break by picking up the slack on normal domestic duties, finishing those pesky home projects, even reading the appliance operating instructions and learning to go to the grocery store only once without a list pinned to your golf shirt.

Meantime, it’s probably best to avoid calling your wife “the little lady.”

Some old habits die hard, I guess.

We like to socialize.

Follow along and don’t miss a thing.

@WalterMagazine waltermagazine.com THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 49

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After the trout lilies

by RICHARD KRAWIEC illustration by GARY PALMER After the trout lilies have finished opening their speckled leaves to unveil yellow-petalled flowers, and the air has turned midday to a stifle, constellations of violets, spring beauties, chickweed and blue eyed grasses sprout along the banks of the sussurating rill, among granite outcroppings which yawn winter into spring.

Small bees flitter, among the flowers, mourning doves coo above the bloodroot umbrellas pushing from the ground, the occasional morel. A constellation of blossoms rises from the fragrant moss, through the new spires of grass, weaves through the low budding branches.

There is no shame in loving the world.

Durham-based Richard Krawiec will be in Paris this fall for book festivals and readings in conjunction with the publication of his fifth novel, Faith in What? (Croire en Quoi?).

He is founder of Jacar Press, a community active literary press. He has won fellowships from the National Education Association and North Carolina Arts Council.

THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 53

54 | WALTER

The Inter-Tribal Pow Wow at Dix Park celebrates American Indian community and culture

NATIVE

ROOTS

by LORI D. R. WIGGINS photography by ALEXANDRA WILLIAMS

THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 55

F

or thousands of years, the land at Dorothea Dix Park was a place where Native Americans gathered with family, shared food and engaged in healing, ceremony, stewardship and justice.

Raleigh is itself on the border of Native American Tuscarora and Siouan territory, and the land at Dorothea Dix Park is recognized by the City of Raleigh as the land of the Coharie, Cherokee, HaliwaSaponi, Lumbee, Meherrin, Occaneechi, Sappony and Waccamaw-Siouan peoples.

But as European settlers moved into this area and took over in the last 500 years, much of this cultural history has been lost. The Dix Park Inter-Tribal Pow Wow is an event to recognize and celebrate this ancestral connection to the land.

In August 2020, Raleigh held its first-ever Native Land Blessing & Acknowledgement Ceremony at Dix Park, formally recognizing Indigenous people as the original guardians of the land, as well as their ongoing connection to those traditional territories. The ceremony was held in partnership with the Triangle Native American Society and the nonprofit Dix Park Conservancy. In November 2021, Dix Park hosted its first Inter-Tribal Pow Wow, a day filled with competition dancing, music, vendors and other activities that showcase the legacy and culture of Indigenous communities who still make North Carolina home today. On May 18, it will host the Pow Wow for the fourth time.

“Demonstrating the vitality and strength of the NC Indigenous culture holds immense significance for us,” says Trey Roberts, the community engagement manager at the Dix Park Conservancy and a member of the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe, commonly from Hollister.

“We celebrate because for a long time it was illegal for us to sing, dance and show our culture. It’s a way to stay connected.”

Helping plan the Pow Wow is Sandon Jacobs, a member of the WaccamawSiouan Tribe and who will act as master of ceremonies this year. “The Pow Wow is important to raise awareness to the fact there are still Native American 56 | WALTER

people here in Raleigh,” Jacobs says. “We walk around invisible, yet in plain sight, because too many don’t recognize the Native culture and the Native history of this state.”

For three decades, Jacobs himself has traveled the country and Canada, visiting Native communities as a pow wow singer and event MC. “We’re here — contemporary Native Americans who work as doctors, CPAs, lawyers, teachers, who still celebrate who we are and keep our traditions like our songs and dances,” he says.

The Dix Park Inter-Tribal Pow Wow will start with the Grand Entry, a procession of dancers that starts from the east to mimic the rising sun. The dancing competition takes place within a central dance circle, a symbol of the cycle of life and its continuing connection to all things. Often moving clockwise around the circle in the direction of the sun, male and female dancers of all ages and from various nations showcase skills with the signature moves of various styles of dance. Witness the slow, bounce-step dipping and swaying of the Women’s Traditional Dance, with dancers in regalia of buckskin, moccasins, medallions, breastplates, bones and beads.

It’s a stark contrast to the Men’s Fancy Dance, an active and athletic style of intricate footwork in rhythm with the beat of the drum, with regalia featuring brilliantly colored feathers.

Many of the dances represent lessons and beliefs of cultural significance, from gratitude to spirits for a bountiful harvest or successful hunt to honoring life transitions. The Jingle Dress Dance, for example, is honored as a gift of healing from the Creator to the Ojibwe Tribe, one of the largest groups of American Indians north of Mexico. The dance

practice has been adopted by other tribes and become a shared tradition that has endured generations. The Jingle dress features several rows of cones made of noise-making material such as bones, deer hooves or repurposed metal. Jingle Dress Dance regalia also can include decorations of ribbon, beadwork, feathers, hair ornaments and moccasins. A handfan is raised during the louder beats of the drum.

The head dancers at this year’s Dix Park Pow Wow are newlyweds Stevie Lowry-Leviner and Nakya Leviner, both members of the Lumbee Tribe. Their engagement happened during the 2022 Lumbee Dance of the Spring Moon Pow Wow at the end of a Smoke Dance, which includes a proposal as part of the dance that Nakya made real.

Both 22 — the children of best friends who were pregnant at the same time — the couple have danced pow wows since they can remember. “I didn’t walk first, I danced first,” Nakya quips. “We look at it as a way of life. As Native people, we walk in two worlds; a world of everyday reality, with every other person in society, but we also have a way of life as Native American people, a traditional life.” They’ve danced all over the country and in Canada, sharing culture and tradition. Nakya has danced in all 50 states.

At Dix, Nakya will dance the Men’s Traditional Dance, a ceremonial dance originated by the Omaha Tribe to describe the story of warriors, making its dancers “the warriors of the pow wow movement.” The dancers wear front and back breechcloths, as well as bustles on their backs to represent the battlefield.

Stevie will dance the Women’s Fancy and Women’s Jingle Dress Dances.

Although she’s danced the Fancy the

“We celebrate because for a long time it was illegal for us to sing, dance and show our culture. It’s a way to stay connected.”

— Trey Roberts

majority of her life, the Jingle feels particularly important now. “I feel most connected to the Women’s Jingle dance because of the meaning behind it: healing,” she says. “I have a sick grandma and I feel like every time I dance Jingle, I’m doing something to help her get better.”

The couple also hold dear essential lessons, from Nakya learning early on to honor the eagle feathers on bustles as he would fallen warriors, to Stevie, whose brother now makes bustles for pow wow wear, learning not to frolic in pow wow regalia. These days, the regalia often includes both original “old-style” and contemporary pow wow fashions, which can include newer materials now available and

old-style choices such as deer toes.

“We hold our outfits to a high standard and we take care of them,” Stevie says. “The regalia is a representation of yourself, just like the dance you dance.”

Roberts and Jacobs hope that visiting the Inter-Tribal Pow Wow will spark guests of all backgrounds to embark on a journey of discovery. “There are resources here to learn so much more about the history of our culture and our tribes,” Jacobs says, pointing to a wealth of information available through organizations such as the Triangle Native American Society, the NC American Indian Heritage Commission and the NC Indian Affairs Commission. “Hopefully, people come away with a curiosity to dig deeper.”

Above: Girls Jingle Dress dancers after their contest song, lining up for judges. Inset: Sandon Jacobs, a member of the WaccamawSiouan Tribe, introducing Joe Liles (left) to offer a prayer to start the event.

THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 57

Clockwise from top: Young women in Jingle Dance dresses. Some of the food vendors.

A girl wearing a shawl to raise awareness for the Missing And Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement to prevent violence against Indigenous women.

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Above: Ed Strickland, a member of the Lumbee Tribe, having fun in the “switch dance” contest, where men and women swap regalia to dance other styles. Below: Men’s Traditional dancers lining up for judges after their song.

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Clockwise from top: All dancers entering the circle for Grand Entry. Hoop dancer Cheyenne Daniel, a member of the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe. Artist Senora Lynch, a member of the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe.

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Sage Dimalanta, a member of the HaliwaSaponi, Lumbee and Cree Tribes, a Fancy Shawl dancer.

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Clockwise from top: Adult men doing all dance styles. Jeweler and artist Antonio Grant of the Eastern Band Cherokee and Diné tribes. Some of the booths at the event. Opposite page: A girl carries her little brother after the tiny tots danced their song.

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Roger Montague cultivated a garden to share the joy of a beekeeper’s journey

by HELEN YOEST photography by JULI LEONARD

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Getty Images (BEE)

o Blooms &Bees

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estled in Cary’s charming Picardy Pointe neighborhood, there stands a Federal Colonialstyle home encircled by exquisitely manicured grounds. The house has been Roger and Pettis Montague’s home for over three decades. It’s also a haven for birds, bees and butterflies.

Roger retired in 2014 from a distinguished 50-year career working with the USDA and Bayer Crop Science — but he didn’t leave his passion for science behind. Instead, he harnessed his expertise, using his free time to delve into the world of bees and blossoms.

“I wanted to honor my father, whom I remember keeping bees 70-plus years ago,” he says. “I also wanted to involve myself in something after retirement that kept my mind active and required physical exercise outdoors.”

Roger studied and researched beekeeping for a year, attending a beekeeping course at the Chatham County Extension Service Center as well as reading innumerable articles and books on the subject. “Successful beekeeping requires continual study. It is a complicated endeavor,” says Roger, who also visited several beekeepers and watched what they were doing. But perhaps most importantly, he found a beekeeping mentor, Craig Dupree of Dupree’s Bees and Woodworking: “I have lunch with him on a regular basis — he’s become a friend as well as a mentor.”

Before Roger installed his first hive, he reached out to neighbors and the neighborhood HOA. Fortunately, “they were very supportive and excited about it,” Roger says.

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Scenes from Roger Montague’s garden.

Here, he tends to his honeybee boxes. Top right: A rare “Ice and Fire” Double Picotee Hellebore has petals edged in color. Middle right: The dark-purple leaves of a “Ruby Falls” Eastern Redbud.

2020 || 00 THe Art &OCTOBER Soul of Raleigh 67

Clockwise from top left: Scenes from the garden; volunteer Dr. Robert Majors.

Clockwise from top left: The “Cajun Fire” Coral Bell has mottled leaves and tiny white blooms later in the spring. A Chinese lantern along the pond’s stackedstone edge. A native bee box for mason and leafcutter bees. A Spiria flower. Montague’s three honeybee boxes.

Honeybees working their comb.

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Roger found kits to make his honeybee boxes through Ozark Cedar Hives in Galena, Missouri. “I wanted the hives to be made from red cedar because it was my father’s favorite tree,” he says. He assembled the bee boxes himself, starting with one hive, and was up to three hives after three years. At one time, Roger managed six hives.

“To successfully keep honeybees, one has to think strategically. It requires continual learning to be good at it, thinking months ahead to make sound tactical decisions,” Roger says. Among them: figuring out how to deal with the Varroa mite, a parasite that feeds on honeybees; deciding when to split a colony in the spring to keep the bees from swarming; and choosing how to feed honeybees during the summer to keep the colony healthy.

“To successfully keep honeybees, one has to think strategically. It requires continual learning to be good at it.”

— Roger Montague In addition to attracting honeybees, Roger has created homes on his property for native bees, which are solitary rather than hive nesters. The native bee boxes resemble small bird houses filled with bamboo tubes and offer nesting sites for species like wild mason and leafcutter bees.

By 2016, Roger had passionately embraced the dual roles of apiarist and pollinator gardener. On just a quarter acre, Roger has cultivated an array of flower species that serve as beacons to pollinators — including blanket flower, milkweed, salvia, spiderwort and even blueberries. Roger’s favorite pollinator plant is the hoary mountain mint. “It’s not a showy plant, but it attracts pollinators beyond belief,” he says. Roger continues to grow his pollinator garden, THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 69

adding more than 300 individual perennials as recently as this spring. Roger advocates for plant diversity, citing the staggering quantity of blooms that bees must visit to produce honey: “For honeybees to make a pound of honey, they have to visit 2,000,000 flowers.” It can take 12 bees their entire lifetime to make just one teaspoon of honey.

With most of his pollinator plants in sunny areas, the property also has walking paths in the shade for cool summer comfort with lush ferns, coral bells, hellebores, hydrangeas and berryproducing native viburnums to feed the birds.

A soothing feature on the property is a pond filled with water lilies and water softly flowing over a stone ledge.

Roger’s son, Preston Montague, a landscape architect and botanical illustrator, serves as Roger’s advisor and collaborator in the pond and the gardens. “I take inspiration from him,” Roger says. The feeling is mutual. “Dad’s garden is an expression of his love for the rhythms of nature and concern for the well-being of even the tiniest of species,” says Preston. “He has slowly expanded the ecosystem service potential of the property, shifting from a conventional suburban landscape to a wilder, habitat-focused garden.”

Ten years into his beekeeping adventure, Roger now mentors new beekeepers and presents educational programs to schools, garden clubs and retirement communities. He also shows off his yard during garden tours (or, as he puts it, to “anyone who wants to listen”). Roger harvests about 75 pounds of honey each year. “I give a lot of the honey away and eat some of it — I do not sell it. Sometimes I take it to presentations and let the organization give it to someone in the audience,” Roger says.

Roger named his bee garden after his two grandchildren, Halle and Emily, who were 6 and 4, respectively, when he started it. “I hope they will grow up with fond memories of beekeeping with their grandfather,” Roger says, “just as I did with my father so long ago.”

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Clockwise from top left: The “May Night” Salvia is a bee magnet. A path into the woodland garden. Bees in their combs. Montague grows a variety of blueberries, include Climax, Premiere and Powder Blue. Sam, the family dog. A plaque certifying Montague’s Pollinator Garden.

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The SECU DinoLab at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences invites visitors to experience paleontology in action

GOOD BONES

by HAMPTON WILLIAMS HOFER

I

photography by JOSHUA STEADMAN

n the southern part of Montana during the Cretaceous period, a tyrannosaur and a Triceratops died in close proximity and were rapidly buried.

Over 67 million years, their bones fossilized in the rocky, unforgiving landscape known as Hell Creek Formation. And then, in 2006, their skeletons were discovered, still encased in the sediment that covered them.

The discovery offered an unprecedented chance to research the intricacies of how these two dinosaurs died, what they looked like and even what they ate for their last meals. Because there are fragments of the tyrannosaur’s teeth embedded in the Triceratops, the two are now known as the Dueling Dinosaurs — but enigma surrounds their life and death. It’s a paleontological discovery worth building a whole lab around, which is what the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences has done.

The new SECU DinoLab, which opened late last month, is a high-tech research lab within the museum that is open to the public. It’s unlike any in the world. “I conceived the Dueling Dinosaurs project to take the public on a live scientific journey, to illuminate how science works, to show who scientists are and what we look like, and to increase trust in the scientific process,” says Dr. Lindsay Zanno, head of paleontology at the NCMNS. “At its core is a mystery, a moment lost to time and one of the most fascinating fossils discovered in North America.”

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PULLING BACK THE CURTAIN

Dr. Lindsay Zanno, head of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. The DinoLab will show real scientists at work studying fossils.

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Typically, such fossils as the tyrannosaur and Triceratops would be excavated and studied behind the scenes in a research lab, with the bones or models reassembled and set up for display. But the Dueling Dinosaurs will be kept embedded in the sandstone in which they were discovered, allowing visitors to witness active research and even ask questions of the paleontologists at work, like Did the tyrannosaur have feathers? Is there evidence of soft tissue, even coloration? Were the two really interacting when they died? One dinosaur had a broken finger and a broken tail — how? “Science has an accessibility problem, and mistrust in science is rising. We have to bring science out of the back corners and basements,” Zanno says.

“We need to throw back the curtain, get in front of the public, and let our community see who we are and what we do.”

Javan Sutton, the museum’s director of exhibits and digital media, helped design the Dueling Dinosaurs exhibit with the goal of fostering imagination. “With a working paleontology lab at the exhibit’s center, visitors will get to take part in the actual science in a way that has never been done 74 | WALTER

before,” he says. The museum worked with HH Architecture, a local firm, on what is the first physical addition to the building in more than a decade. Situated between the globe and The Daily Planet Cafe, the exhibit includes immersive areas before and after the lab, featuring sights, sounds, smells and tactile elements. An assembled and posed skeleton of a Therizinosaurus flashes enormous claws, an interactive computer game encourages visitors to design their own dinosaurs, and dinosaur vocalizations and other cretaceous animal sounds echo. Ambient sounds like thunderstorms represent the mass or flash flooding event that likely buried the Dueling Dinosaurs. Scents mimic what the Cretaceous environment would have smelled like, based on research that reveals wet forested areas with lots of conifers like pine trees. Several touchable dinosaur models and fossils add to the tactile elements. Reinforced flooring now accommodates the 30,000-pound block of sandstone and dinosaur fossils and is designed to hold even more. “The door is open for the future,” Sutton says.

The fossils will be studied using CT scans and imaging to

DINO DETECTIVES The interactive Design Your Own Dinosaur feature allows guests to follow the logic that paleontologists and paleo-artists use to recreate a dinosaur’s appeareance. The Fossil Block Theater, opposite page, shares details about Dueling Dinosaurs and why they’re so important.

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DIGGING IN Opposite page: Dr. Jennifer Anné and Eric Lund remove the matrix surrounding the neck of the tyrannosaur. This page: Zanno points to evidence of skin on the fossil. Below: The SECU DinoLab has a large crane to lift the heaviest fossil (12,000 pounds!) and place it in a custom-built rotating device so it can be turned during preparation.

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“There’s nowhere else you can walk inside a working paleontology lab any day, every day, get up close to fossils and talk to the scientific team.”

— Dr. Lindsay Zanno look inside the blocks of sandstone. The stone contains clues like skin impressions from the Triceratops, as well as octagonshaped formations on the frill around its neck, all providing insight into how the skin looked and felt. “There’s nowhere else you can walk inside a working paleontology lab any day, every day, get up close to fossils and talk to the scientific team,” Zanno says.

Live video feeds and regular research updates will keep the public in the loop as they follow the scientists’ discoveries. Visitors can book free, timed-entry tickets to the exhibit, which is in English and Spanish. With over a million visitors a year, the NCMNS is a popular destination for tourists and field trips alike, often the site of many of North Carolina schoolchildren’s first encounter with real fossils.

For Zanno and her team, it is essential that people can see the relevance and cutting-edge nature of paleontology. “Pale78 | WALTER

ontology is not a science that comes to people’s minds when they think of modern challenges, and that needs to change,” says Zanno, noting that the tyrannosaur and Triceratops at the NCMNS represent some of the last dinosaurs alive before the end-Cretaceous extinction. “The fossil record provides the context we need to understand how life has responded to climate change in the past, for example, and what we can anticipate in our future.”

Sixty-seven million years ago, the barren landscape of Montana was actually as flat and humid as the North Carolina coastal plains. Fitting, then, that the dinosaurs would find their new home here. Opening the DinoLab to visitors benefits both museum-goers and the scientists eager to show their work.

“Discovery is deeply rooted in what it means to be human,” says Zanno. “Our fascination with these incredible animals transcends the boundaries that divide us.”

RESEARCH IN ACTION Here, guests can see what happens once fosssils are removed from the field. Left: Candice “Nikki” Simon repairs broken dinosaur eggs. Right: NC State doctoral candidate William Freimuth polishes a dinosaur leg bone so it can be mounted to a slide and examined under a microscope.

Bottom left: The Nothronychus (meaning “slothful claw”) was a therizinosaur that lived in the Late Cretaceous Period.

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Artist Kristen Solecki creates visual narratives

sketching STORIES

by COLONY LITTLE photography by JOSHUA STEADMAN THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 81

Clockwise from top: Solecki works on her tiny portrait series in her studio in Durham. A gouache painting titled Big Coat. The tools of the trade.

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S

torytelling and art go hand in hand for Durham-based illustrator Kristen Solecki. One of her drawings features a stargazing couple, each holding a concealed ring box behind their back — a hint of anticipation for an extra-special engagement. Another piece, a painted matchbox, depicts the colorful exterior of a brownstone. When you open the matchbox, it reveals what lies behind the building’s walls. Solecki’s drawings create worlds that transport viewers to fond memories of the past as well as parts unknown.

It’s a craft she honed at the University of Arts in Philadelphia, where she studied illustration. “Our focus was on telling stories through your artwork, and I’ve taken that and evolved that into different types of things,” says Solecki.

Since graduating in the late 2000s, she has built a freelance practice creating wall coverings, murals, book covers and merchandise. She also has a fine-arts practice that includes prints, journals, stickers, stationery and greeting cards.

Solecki’s art combines collage, ink and a water-based paint called gouache to create images with a familiar, yet aspirational feel. These mediums speaks to the diversity of inspirations and processes that guide her work. Some of her influence can be traced back to her childhood in Philadelphia. “I lived in a town that was built in the 1700s. It was filled with old Victorian Gothic-style houses, and I grew up around a lot of antiques and old art,” she says, noting that she particularly loved collecting vintage photographs of women. “I liked finding 25-cent photos in thrift stores. I was always interested in these weird little things.”

Solecki hangs onto treasures like these until they find a useful purpose. In 2020, for example, she created a series for a solo show titled Women in Wool at Quirk Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. Using black-and-white photos as a starting point, she created contemporary characters that pulled in details from the original images, like a pair of plaid pants or cat-eye glasses. “The illustrations were based on what the women in these

discarded photographs would look like in color, with modern hair,” says Solecki.

“Even though they’re from a different time period, people can see themselves or their families in these pictures.”

Another point of inspiration for both commissioned projects and personal work comes from Solecki’s trove of sketchbooks. She started keeping a sketchbook in college as a class requirement. At the time, it felt like an arduous task. But the practice became a habit, and now she has thousands of pages filled with images she creates via collage, ink and gouache — another form of collecting that helps her explore and preserve her inspiration. “It’s an outlet to keep things flowing, and now I have all of these ideas I can pull from that I use for paintings,” she says. “I’m leaving these little breadcrumbs for myself.”

Each page of Solecki’s sketchbooks is a work of art unto itself. A two-page spread may feature 12 pen-and-ink studies of cityscapes and buildings, for

out space for herself to build a diversified portfolio of work, which has given her career flexibility. She moved to Charleston in 2012 and now she’s been settled in Durham for five years. In addition to client work, she continues to teach art classes. At the Durham Arts Council, she offers courses in subjects like illustration and gouache painting. “My students range from 13 to 80. It’s really cool to see who becomes friends and who inspires each other,” she says. “It’s a big part of my practice again; if I can get one person to push through the project they’re working on, that makes me happy.”

Solecki discovered at the end of one of her classes that a student, a 75-year-old woman, had never picked up a paintbrush before. “I thought, this is incredible,” she says. “That’s why I love to teach!

I helped give someone in their 70s a whole new skill to explore.”

Solecki has also illustrated numerous book covers and magazine editorials for Bitter Southerner, Parents, WALTER

“I have all of these ideas I can pull from that I use for paintings... I’m leaving these little breadcrumbs for myself.” — Kristen Solecki example, or colorful character studies of birds or cats using magazine clippings as a starting point. “Right now I’m working on these little faces,” she says of a page where she’s painted a series of pastel gouache boxes to frame tiny portraits of young women. Some of the boxes are blank, to revisit later. “If I’m finding myself stuck, I’ll come back and say, OK, where did I leave off?” she says. “It’s great to have a point of reference to get back to a thread or idea. I leave a lot of pages open to finish later.”

When Solecki graduated from college, she worked as a preschool teacher in Philadelphia, where she met parents from a variety of creative backgrounds.

They exposed her to the breadth of opportunities she could pursue with her talents. She started doing freelance projects on the weekends and got involved in art markets and gallery shows, carving

and other publications. Most recently, she illustrated a children’s book titled Your Heart is Your Home by Kyle Tibbs Jones. The book encourages creativity, open-mindedness and courage for people exploring the world. “When I was writing the books, Kristen’s illustrations literally danced around in my head,” says Jones. “The vibe of her work is positive, powerful and a little quirky. We had loads of fun working together!”

Solecki’s illustrations are thoughtful invitations to readers to meditate on the messages in the book. On one page a child shares a day with a loved one at a museum, while on another, collaged trees are placed on a painted backdrop of a park lawn, with people from all walks of life enjoying a day outdoors. “The message is, don’t lose yourself — grow on who you are,” says Solecki. It’s a message she embodies, too.

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Clockwise from top: A spread from the book Your Heart is Your Home.

One of Solecki’s book covers.

A painting titled Dear Reader. A gouache paging titled Feminism BCWS.

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Clockwise from top: Solecki works in her studio in Durham. One of Solecki’s sketchbooks. A gouache painting titled Springtime.

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PRESENT

MUSIC off REMEMBRANCE A storied piano and violin from Nazi-era Germany will be brought to life for a special afternoon performance. Featuring violinist Jacqueline Saed Wolborsky and pianist Mimi Solomon.

SUNDAY, MAY 5th at 2 PM North Carolina Museum of Art Auditorium

Limited seating. Free tickets available at visit.ncartmuseum.org/events

THE WHIRL WALTER’s roundup of gatherings, celebrations, fundraisers and more around Raleigh.

DOSE YOGA RIBBON CUTTING On Feb. 16, Dose Yoga + Smoothie Bar founder Emily Coules celebrated their newest location in the North Hills Innovation District with a pre-opening event. Coules, a wellness expert, unveiled Dose’s meditation room and a firstof-its-kind Contrast Therapy Room. Friends, family and yogis gathered to see the stunning new space, designed by Dusty Slemp.

Jamie Robbins

Brian Coules, Shannon Cox

Sydney Santorno, Christina Callahan, Sinead Corrigan, Leanna Redfern

Nicole Willis, Karley St. Pierre

Kiley Randel, Savannah Baldwin, Kate Grunberg, Jason Grunberg Stacey Buescher, Emily Coules

Ben Gist, Brian Coules, Jeremy Deckelbaum, Ben Payne, Eli Kahn

Connor O’Donnell

Macauley Prickett, Joseph Ekberg

To have your event considered for The Whirl, submit images and information at waltermagazine.com/submit-photos

THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 87

THE WHIRL

McKenzie Shelton, Embody Media + Design

KAMALA HARRIS VISITS ELLA WEST GALLERY On Mar. 1, Vice President Kamala Harris was in Durham as part of the administration’s Investing in America tour. During her visit, she stopped by Ella West Gallery to see the new exhibition Stephen Hayes: Reclaiming the Discarded.

Harris was joined by North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper and U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo.

Linda Shropshire (far left), Wally Adeyemo (far right), Roy Cooper and Kamala Harris (center), with representatives from the governor’s office

Subscribe to our NEWSLETTER Kamala Harris

Stay current on the best in art, culture, food and fun!

Kamala Harris, Horace James Shropshire, II, Linda Shropshire

THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 89

THE WHIRL HBA 2024 HALL OF FAME

On Dec. 7, the Home Builders Association of Raleigh-Wake County swore in its newly elected president, Christy Beck. The HBA also recognized Hall of Fame recipients Jim Allen, President of the Jim Allen Group and Tom Anhut, President/ CEO of Waterstone Properties, LLC for their outstanding contributions to the home building industry.

May

3-Oh!

AT THE WEYMOUTH CENTER

Horses Benefit Kids Derby Watch Party 3PM - UNTIL Come early for the Team Show Jumping Event from 3-5pm and stay for the Kentucky Derby Watch Party that begins at 5. Prizes for Best Dressed, Win/Place/Show Raffle, BBQ from Parker’s with Butter Cake from Ashten’s, Mint Juleps and Live Music. Tickets start at $100 with VIP package available.

Jim Allen

MAY 12

Young Musicians Festival 2-4PM The Young Musicians Festival is an annual event that invites young musicians from Moore, Lee, Hoke, Montgomery, Richmond, Cumberland, and Scotland counties to compete in the lovely setting of the Weymouth Center for cash prizes. Auditions are being held on May 11 starting at 11am with the finalists performing on May 12. Free and open to the public. Registration required.

MAY 15

Christy Beck, Greg Beck

Ladies Wine Out 5:30-7:30PM Sip, Savor, and Support! The Women of Weymouth present their annual happy hour(s) outside on the beautiful Weymouth grounds. This crowd-pleasing, much-anticipated event features delectable appetizers and desserts by Scott’s Table, a wine tasting by Standing Room Only, a liquor pull and 50/50 raffle! $55 Members/$60 General Admission

A WELCOME PLACE weymouthcenter.org 555 E. Connecticut Ave. Southern Pines, NC

MAY 19

“Come Sunday” Jazz 11:30-2PM Join us for a family friendly event on Weymouth’s beautiful grounds. Bring a Blanket, chairs, and picnic basket. Relax with the swinging sounds of Raleigh’s Thrio band. Cash Bar. VIP Packages available. Sponsored by Spark the Arts in conjunction with the NC Arts Council. Tickets start at $27.50 (kids under 12 are free).

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Come Sunday Jazz Series is sponsored by the NC Arts Council’s “Spark the Arts.”

Tom Anhut

courtesy HBA of Raleigh-Wake County

MAY 4

Taylor McDonald

LIZZIE HANES STUDIO GRAND OPENING On April 11, Lizzie Hanes celebrated the opening of her new facial and brow studio on Bernard Street. The event included drinks from Bittersweet, makeup by Samara, chair massages by Intuitive Healing and artwork by Inslee Fariss. Friends, family and clients showed up to see the expanded space.

Savannah Davidson, Maryanna Johnson

Janie Morgan, Lizzie Hanes, Lyric Thompson, Anna Rose Medley, Erica Mobley

Ayn-Monique Klahre, Julie Nickens, Kelli Fletcher

Kerrin Young, Carter Hudson, Lizzie Hanes

THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 91

FIRST PLACE Magazine/Niche Publication The North Carolina Press Association Awards

GOLD OZZIE AWARD Design, Single Magazine Issue City & Regional Magazine The Folio Awards

“It’s brilliant.”

- Sir Walter Raleigh

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RTP Photo and Video (DISCOVERY BALL); 627 Photography (DESIGNED FOR JOY)

THE WHIRL DISCOVERY BALL NORTH CAROLINA Discovery Ball North Carolina took place on Mar. 15 at The Pavilion at Angus Barn in Raleigh. This second annual event, presented by Martin Marietta, raised $540,000 for the American Cancer Society’s research program and patient services. The event highlighted colon cancer survivor Elizabeth Alexander, who shared about her courageous fight and the need for colon cancer screenings and more research.

Emily Johnson, Justin Coleman, Beth Brooks, Oliver Brooks, Alan Wolf, Charles Archie, Katie Knoerzer, Edie Johnson, Mark Daves, Jim Murray

DESIGNED FOR JOY GIVING CIRCLE MEETING On Feb. 27, Designed For Joy’s Giving Circle members gathered at a quarterly meeting to discuss how to raise and spend funs for the nonprofit.

Designed For Joy provides women in crisis with stability through immediate employment and support, removing the stigma of vulnerability, through its studio on W. Cabarrus Street.

Taralyn Farrell, Abigail Roush, Grace Morris, Elise Wilansky

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THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 93

THE WHIRL

Brenda Gibson, Estella Patterson, David Meeker

Judy Zelnak, Estella Patterson, Stacey Lundy

Estella Patterson, John Kane, Willa Kane, Bryan Kane

MARY ANNE K. JENKINS RECEPTION On Sunday, Feb. 18, Gallery C held the opening reception for an exhibition for Mary Anne K. Jenkins (1929-2017): A Collection from the Estate at Gallery C. The reception, which featured work the Jenkins had collected over her lifetime, was attended by more than 50 people, including her adult children, Reid and Grace Jenkins.

North Carolina Zoo Plan your visit at NCZoo.org 94 | WALTER

Katie Rascoe, Reid Jenkins, Grace Jenkins, Kathy Keel

Ricky Weiss, Charlene Newsom

Bennett Scarborough Photography (RPD RECEPTION); Charlene Newsome (GALLERY C)

RPD RECEPTION Bryan Kane and John Pitt hosted a reception for the Raleigh Police Department Foundation. Other hosts included Trey Bailey, Mark Chesson, Juston Good, Gabe Guillois, Jamie McCaskill, Jeff Marcus, Bill Marlowe, David Meeker, John Mikels, Patrick Shanahan and Temple Sloan IV.

Samantha Everette

DREAMVILLE 2024 Setting a new record for Dorothea Dix Park, J. Cole and his Dreamville team played host to more than 104,000 guests at Dorothea Dix Park the weekend of April 6-7, with fans traveling from more than 20 countries and all 50 U.S. states. The week prior saw additional programming across Raleigh, including a comedy showcase, game night, car show, block party and daylong educational panels with music industry legends at CAM Raleigh.

Nazje Jackson

Abdi Sal

Nik Freeland

ReeCee Raps, Frankie Zombie

Mandii B

Rose Logan

THe Art & Soul of Raleigh | 95

END NOTE

Free Moms This quirky nonprofit offers joyful moments to students

by NELIE TAHSSILI photography by JESSIE GREENBERG

W

alk onto North Carolina State University’s Centennial Campus on a Thursday morning or Wolf Village on Thursday afternoon, and you’ll see a smiling group of women giving out cookies and hugs. Rain or shine, they’re there; sometimes they bring friendly dogs, too.

The scene is the brainchild of Nancy Nelson, who founded NCSU Free Moms in 2019. “I was praying for a way to do something for young people and saw a street sign that said ‘Mother Nancy’ — and it clicked,” says Nelson. “I could offer a mother’s unconditional love for students who might be having a tough time away from home.”

Now, the NCSU Free Moms meet on campus every Thursday to spread love and provide a safe space for students to be recognized and celebrated. Volunteers give out baked goods, hugs and flowers. There’s even a Happy Birthday stand, with sashes and singers at the ready. After starting with only a few volunteers, Free Moms has grown to include more than 400 volunteers, and Nelson estimates that they serve more than 2,500 students a week. Free Moms now has a presence on four other campuses around the South, as well.

Nelson’s proud and grateful that her vision has changed the lives of many students: “We have made such a positive impact on this campus.”

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WALTER

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T H E A RT & S OU L O F R A L E IG H

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