We had a wonderful and enthusiastic turnout at the opening for our new show, Not Even Past, on Friday, September 6, at Arts of the Albemarle in Elizabeth City, NC.

The show will be on view at Arts of the Albemarle through October 26. Check out their website for hours: https://www.artsaoa.org

The exhibition started with a change of location. 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.