Please join us for the opening reception for “Not Even Past,” our latest collaborative exhibition. The exhibition and reception are at Arts of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City, NC, on Friday, September 6, from 4 to 7 pm, during the First Friday Art Walk.

We did a long writeup about the show in an earlier post (Upcoming Exhibition), but here’s the short version. Moving to North Carolina in 2018 sent each of us on a personal quest to understand what the state’s histories meant for us. Suzanne, descended from early white settlers and growing up in Raleigh, had to reckon with returning to a state she thought she’d left permanently after her teens. For Lynne, the daughter of Italian immigrants who grew up in the Bronx, coastal North Carolina was a paradise of natural wonders wrapped in enigmatic norms, attitudes, and stories that seemed part of an entirely different America than the one she grew up in. Not Even Past is our provisional artistic reckoning with historical and personal questions, contradictions, and storylines we are still trying to unravel.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” wrote William Faulkner in 1951. We’re not the first people to appropriate Faulkner’s great insight, but to us it seemed to encapsulate an important part of our experiences in making sense of the present.

Please join us. We’ll share more details in future posts.

Image: Suzanne Scott Constantine, “The Road Less Traveled,” mixed media on cradleboard and mat board, 2024