Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
More of what’s going around:
-Daniel retires: Judy Daniel, head of Asheville’s planning department, has announced her retirement. From the press release:
Planning Director Judy Daniel announced her retirement on Wednesday, March 19 after six years leading the city’s Planning and Development Department and a career spanning 30 years.
“I am grateful for the truly dedicated and intelligent staff of the Planning and Development department and the talented and committed Department Directors with whom I have served,” Daniel said.
Daniel’s retirement will be effective July 1. In the coming months, the City of Asheville will conduct a national search to fill the position.
Daniel came to the City of Asheville as Planning Director in 2008. Under her leadership, the department developed a network of neighborhood planners to focus on improving connections and dialog with the community. In the face of a challenging economic downturn, the city’s development standards evolved to ensure Asheville’s creative, entrepreneurial and development communities could continue to grow and thrive in a city that retains a well respected sense of place.
-Thirsty Monk & New Belgium Brewing giving away Fat Tire bike today: Here’s the announcement. Looks like fun:
On Thursday, March 20th, New Belgium will set up a special photo booth at the Thirsty Monk in Biltmore Park. The event will be a release celebration for their delicious new Snapshot Wheat. Patrons will have to opportunity to pose in the photo booth with a Snapshot Wheat and various props that will be on hand and then, at 8 p.m., three finalists will be chosen and each given a key, one of which will open the lock to an exclusive and rare New Belgium Fat Tire Bike! Here’s the Facebook event page.
-Art Connections expands art tours: From the press release:
Art Connections, the area’s newest tour provider, has added additional artists and destinations for its upcoming spring tours. Last fall Art Connections began its inaugural art studio tours with a small lineup of established and emerging artists in the region. Now Art Connections has added 10 additional destinations for its spring tours.
The season kicks off Sunday, April 6 with a tour to Waynesville artist Grace Cathey’s home studio and downtown gallery, then on to the Canton showroom of Shape by Design, a collective of 14 artists who share a showroom of wood furniture, ceramics, jewelry and sculpture. This showroom is only open by appointment. …
Art Connections Tours invites small groups of guests to visit a collection of curated art and contemporary craft destinations in and around Asheville, North Carolina on one or two day tours. Through Art Connections, participants meet the makers where they work. For more information on Art Connections or to sign up for a tour see arttoursasheville.com and contact Sherry Masters at [email protected] or 828.779.6808.
-Photography exhibition set: From the press release:
On Saturday, March 29, the Asheville Art Museum is thrilled to be hosting an opening reception for local photographer Ralph Burns’s exhibition, Ralph Burns: A Persistence of Vision — Photographs 1972-2013. Burns has long been recognized as a documentary photographer whose images have captured the diverse and enigmatic nature of ritual and religion, and who has explored the subjective and often defining nature of belief, worship and culture. Like his predecessors — such as Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark and Robert Frank — Burns uses his cameras to probe a constantly shifting human landscape and to document the public and private aspects of culture and religion in transition, often working at the unclear and overlapping intersection of both. Throughout his career Burns has displayed a continuous and persistent interest in the motivations for worship and ritual while maintaining a compassionate and non-judgmental intimacy with his subjects. He has photographed both collective and individualized manifestations of what he sees as a seemingly irrepressible human need to ritualize loss, love and death, and to formally externalize and codify hope and the desire for transcendence.
The photographs in A Persistence of Vision illuminate Burns’s concerns and interactions: an Elvis fan seemingly keeping vigil over a blanketcovered, bed-ridden Elvis icon in Memphis; a penitent in Mexico carrying the statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, strapped awkwardly to his back; a man staring hard into the distance while being prayed over for healing at a Marion apparition site in Georgia; a woman in agonized ecstasy struggling with being baptized in the Jordan River in Israel.
