“Hale County This Morning, This Evening” follows Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, and their families, for five years. The documentary is done in an experimental, non-narrative style. Ross says it’s more about watching and being than listening and concluding. “It’s trying to show what it’s like to be a young black man in the historic South,” he said. What you’ll see then is a whole lot of hanging out and large swaths of everyday life. Ross’ unique mix of content plus form has been heralded as revolutionary and got attention early on from grant-funders and tony arts organizations like the Sundance Institute and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

“The reason why I didn’t make the film an installation or an art piece, why I turned it into a documentary, is because of the amount of people you can reach,” he said. “The film is an experience. It’s supposed to be participated in. I wasn’t interested in telling you anything. I wasn’t interested in making anything clear but allowing you to sort of fill in the gaps and to feel and to witness as much as possible.”

Ross grew up a military brat and considers Virginia to be “home.” He ended up in Alabama after applying to teach a photo course via the Hale Empowerment and Revitalization Organization (HERO). After completing two weeks of teaching, he fell in love with the community and made the move to Hale County. Since arriving in 2009, Ross helped build Pie Lab and managed the HERO youth program. He also picked up a video camera and started filming.

Click here to read the rest of the story on Alabama NewsCenter.

Somewhere in the crowd will be Jon, his brother, also an artist. They are twins, but not identical. Their work, similarly, is adjacent and complementary but separate and wholly its own.

The Key brothers grew up surrounded by family in Seale, Alabama – their grandfather’s cows, their grandmother’s lessons and their parents’ business acumen and collaborative efforts in creating a life together shaping them both.

Making things has always come natural to Jon and Jarrett. As far back as first or second grade they made scary movies using an old VHS camera. When they were 10, their mother brought home an HTML book and Jon instantly took to it, teaching himself to code. In school they were musical performers. “We really clinged to music and that was our first expression of art,” Jon said.

They moved from music – playing piano, flute, saxophone, trumpet – to theater. They were also into languages as kids – teaching themselves French, Japanese and German.

And then there was the craft table.

They won’t go into it, but there was a glitter incident and they no longer work in that medium. “We stopped playing with glitter,” Jarrett said. “Glitter’s not allowed in the house anymore.”

“We have glitter trauma,” Jon concurred.

Click here to get the rest of the story on Alabama NewsCenter.

Dean grew up in Huntsville, home to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center. He developed an interest in art and design at an early age and was encouraged to follow that path by his parents. He even designed T-shirts and a logo for a band his brother played in. After high school, his interest in art would take Dean 70 miles west to Florence, where he would attend the University of North Alabama. It was there his current career began to take shape.

“I got my start working for Billy Reid early,” he said. “I was in college and got hooked up with this guy named Robert Rausch, who was an incredible mentor. That allowed me to start working with Billy through him, doing their website and working on the photo shoots.”

From there, Dean left Rausch to work with Reid full time.

Rausch, a Clio Award-winning designer and photographer (New York Times, Food & Wine, Southern Living) working out of a refurbished building in Tuscumbia, and Reid, the CFDA Award-winning clothing designer, are two thirds of the Shoals area creative glitterati trifecta, completed by fashion and lifestyle designer Natalie Chanin.

When asked about Alabama’s design legacy, Dean is quick to namecheck the trio.

“I think of Billy Reid, and I think of Butch Anthony, and Natalie, Robert Rausch,” he said. “Some of the people I’ve been fortunate to know and work with.” He also talks about noted Civil Rights photographer Charles Moore, with whom he got to work via Rausch.

Click here to read the rest of the story on Alabama NewsCenter.

But while working at the Montgomery Museum of Art, that plan went by the wayside.

The Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., was planning a landmark exhibition of American black folk art, and the museum curators were having trouble helping Montgomery artist Mose Tolliver prepare.

“His vocabulary, his Southern accent, was a little difficult for some of the curators there at the time,” she said. “I was very lucky that I got to go and meet Mose and spend a good bit of time with him.”

At a post-show reception, first lady Nancy Reagan let it slip that she had acquired two of Tolliver’s paintings for the private quarters of the White House. A flood of fan mail followed, along with requests to purchase his work. Weber stepped in, continuing to visit Tolliver at his home to help him read and answer mail. (Tolliver couldn’t read.)

“I would write on the bottom of the letter what he would tell me to write and send it back to the people and then they would send money to Mose,” she recalled. “In essence, I began to help him, really just as a friend.”

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Odums is a natural-born artist who was encouraged to pursue art early on by his peers. Although he attended the prestigious New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, he didn’t see how making art could become a viable career path and shifted his focus to filmmaking after graduation. He quickly found himself shooting guerilla style music videos for everyone from Juvenile to Trombone Shorty.

But Katrina changed everything. “The entire city of New Orleans was slapped with intention,” he said. For him, that meant bringing attention to blight, displacement, and other issues plaguing the city. And a return to painting.

Odums has become known for his large scale, site-specific installations. Project Be and Exhibit Be both took place outdoors in and on abandoned buildings. For Studio Be, his current project and the third iteration of the Be series, Odums has taken over a 35,000 square foot warehouse. He’s amassed quite a following of celebrity visitors and collectors, including Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, Rosario Dawson, Kevin Durant, and RZA. After her visit to the space, Ava DuVernay was compelled to write him into an episode of Queen Sugar. New Yorkers can get a glimpse of his work up in Harlem where he recently painted a building size portrait of Dizzy Gillespie to mark the musician’s 100^th birthday and help raise awareness about the plight of the Baha’i people in Iran.

I spoke with Odums for MASS APPEAL about the balance between street and fine art, New Orleans’ recovery, and his dedication to giving back to the community.

Read more here.

“I don’t know that I would advise a young child to aspire be a rock star,” he said. “As an older person that would be my advice, but as a younger person that would not be what I’d want to hear.”

McPherson is the founder of the beloved Tuscaloosa, Alabama, rock group, The Dexateens, which was formed when he was pretty much just a kid himself.

McPherson grew up in a religious household about a mile from Mt. Meigs, Alabama. He was not allowed to listen to rock music as a kid and gravitated toward country and gospel. Once in high school, he was turned on to classic rock via his car radio and introduced to Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. While attending the University of Alabama, he met a kindred spirit in Matt Patton.

“He and I were both sort of raised in Southern, religious homes and were real familiar with gospel music and country music, and he and I also both had a love for punk rock music,” he said. “He and I talked about what it might be like to bring all those things together.”

And The Dexateens were born.

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The pairing of AWF and DYS is not an obvious one. Yes, there is a traditional school at Mount Meigs in addition to vocational training and other programs, but it is first and foremost a correctional facility for juvenile offenders. Located near Montgomery, Mount Meigs has a storied and not always favorable history, and was once home to legendary baseball player Leroy “Satchel” Paige.

“I met some of the boys and realized that they were not any different from the many young people to whom I had taught poetry writing in the Poets in the Schools program in New Orleans,” Thompson said.

She pitched the idea of a service project to James Dupree, the director at the time. He ended up green-lighting a full-fledged classroom program. Thompson enlisted award-winning fiction writer Marlin “Bart” Barton as a teaching writer and the Writing Our Stories (WOS) program was born.

Read the whole story here: http://alabamanewscenter.com/2017/10/18/writing-stories-program-helps-open-door-juvenile-offenders/

He took to Google to explore his options and found an artist residency offered by The Coleman Center for the Arts in York, a tiny town in west Alabama, 7 miles from the Mississippi border. He was accepted and packed his bags, expecting to visit long enough to complete the two-month gig. Nine years later, he’s still there.

“The minute I drove into town I knew that this was where I wanted to stay,” he said. “The feeling of, ‘this is what I’ve been looking for and didn’t even realize it.’”

For his residency, Farwell took the work of Alabama artist Mose Tolliver and created community projects that reimagined Tolliver’s work as sculpture, installation and giant puppets.

Soon thereafter, he donned his “artist for hire” hat and began teaching in schools and doing murals around town as well as getting commissions. Starting on Sept. 22, he will lead a program at the Coleman Center called the Sumter County Drawing Experiment. The project runs through Nov. 30 and includes a number of public events – a pop-art Art Party, a Shadows and Light event with music and subliminal sounds, the multiblock Biggest Drawing in Alabama, and a 12-hour Sumter County Drawing Marathon.

Farwell works in a variety of mediums. He loves quilt patterns and will be doing a barn quilt trail with neighboring Choctaw County soon. He also loves radial designs and is obsessed with and can’t stop making hex signs. He’s also passionate about refurbishing and upcycling bicycles and wants to start a bike-share program.

Generally, Farwell loves resurrecting old things and giving them new life, which probably explains why he’s so drawn to York.

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There’s more than one way to revitalize a downtown, but it seems like Patton is on the right track, or at least the cool one. Since moving back from Birmingham more than a decade ago, the serial entrepreneur and impresario has steadily helped to breathe new life into Opelika using the arts as his muse and his business base.

“To me, anything you want in a community can come from an arts initiative,” he said.

That’s something he has learned by merely paying attention. Opelika and nearby Auburn have always had strong arts councils, he noted. And Patton has civic mindedness and community building in his blood. His mother served as mayor of Opelika for two terms and recently retired as its Chamber of Commerce president.

Read more here: http://alabamanewscenter.com/2017/08/18/concoursesouth-kicks-off-in-opelika-this-weekend/

“We thought it was an urban myth,” said Judy Hood, chairman of the Muscle Shoals Music Foundation. “During the heyday, I was in junior high and high school and people would come into home room and say ‘Aw, man, Rod Stewart was down in Sheffield at that studio last night!’ and I was like, ‘No he wasn’t!’”

Except, he was. Stewart and just about everybody else – the Rolling Stones, Cher, Bob Dylan, Linda Ronstadt, Kris Kristofferson, Paul Simon, the Staples Singers, Bob Seger, to name a few – thanks to David Hood, Jimmy Johnson, Barry Beckett and Roger Hawkins, the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. By now, you may have seen the 2013 documentary that tells their full story. At the very least, you’ve heard Lynyrd Skynyrd (yes, they recorded here, too) name check them as the Swampers in “Sweet Home Alabama.”

Get the whole story here: http://alabamanewscenter.com/2017/08/02/the-swampers-return-to-their-sweet-home-thanks-to-dr-dre-and-jimmy-iovine/