We’re happy to announce that our art exhibition, Not Even Past, is coming to Dare County!  The exhibition will be held in the Professional Arts Gallery at the College of the Albemarle in Manteo, NC, from October 1 through November 7, 2025. A date for the reception, which will include our live performance piece “Palimpsest,” will be announced in the next few weeks.

The exhibition at COA is made possible with support from The Don & Catharine Bryan Cultural Series. The work also received support from the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. The work premiered in 2024 at Arts of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City, NC.

What’s the Show About?

“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.

 Moving to North Carolina from Northern Virginia 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’d put behind her after her teens and thought she’d left permanently.

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, all of which 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. By collaborating on the show, we each made a separate body of work focused on our own questions, but we ultimately found that our works speak to each other and engage us in a conversation much larger than our original visions.