WALTER Magazine - February 2024

Justin Kase

Conder (DEBRA AUSTIN); Taylor McDonald (BRIGHT BLACK);

Forrest Mason (OYSTERS); Getty Images (STAMP)

2023/24 SEASON

EDITOR’S LETTER

Left: My WALTER bag went on vacation! Right: Me, Addie and Cristina all bundled up at the office.

Ihad a few opportunities to travel over the fall, and I can say: there’s nothing like stepping off the jetway into RDU Airport. It’s always so clean, and such a relief to know that home’s a short drive away. As soon as we drive past the Whole Foods on Wade Avenue, I start noticing all the little changes that happened while I was gone: leaves budding out or changing color, new flowers blooming, progress on some giant construction project.

When we first moved here, I went to the DMV to get my new driver’s license. After spending the previous decade-plus going to New York City DMVs, I had pretty low expectations. I just assumed it would be excruciatingly slow, stinky and staffed by surly workers. (Have you seen Zootopia? The sloth is spot-on.)

But much to my surprise, the office was nice and clean, and the staff were friendly; efficient but unhurried. When I mentioned I’d just moved here, the man who helped me with my license took the time to write me a list of recommendations of places to visit. Among them: Poole’s Diner, Flying Saucer for drinks, Boulted Bread and The Morning Times for coffee. He knew his stuff! I still have that list somewhere.

It totally tickled me that this man was not only willing to go out of his way to make me feel welcome, and that he was so proud of this city that he wanted to showcase it from the very beginning.

Of course, after seven years here, I have the same kind of zeal when friends and family come to visit. An old college friend came through recently with her family, and we basically had to tear her boys out of the NC Museum of Natural Sciences. We took Josh’s parents to Madre on their last visit, and they were duly impressed by the hoppin’ Friday-night scene. When our nieces and nephews come, we’re happy to offer a playground tour of the city. I’ve already teased them with photos of the new Downtown Cary Park.

Whatever your feelings about Valentine’s Day, maybe take this month to fall back in love with Raleigh. Try a new restaurant or revisit an old favorite. See what’s new at your favorite museum, or maybe use one of our milder days to try out a new hike. And share with us what you love most!

Ayn-Monique Klahre Editor

FEBRUARY 2024

EDITORIAL

Editor

AYN-MONIQUE KLAHRE ayn-monique@waltermagazine.com

Creative Director LAURA PETRIDES WALL laura@waltermagazine.com

Associate Editor ADDIE LADNER addie@waltermagazine.com

Contributing Writers

Catherine Currin, Finn Cohen, Jim Dodson, Mike Dunn, Dale Edwards, Hampton Williams Hofer, Colony Little, David Menconi, W. Jason Miller, Liza Roberts, Trudy Haywood Saunders, Crystal Simone Smith

Contributing Poetry Editor Jaki Shelton Green

Contributing Copy Editor Finn Cohen

Contributing Photographers

Jessica Crawford, Justin Kase Conder, Mehmet Demirci, Richard Gruica, Rob Hammer, Bob Karp, Forrest Mason, Catherine Nguyen, Taylor McDonald, Joshua Steadman, Bert VanderVeen

Contributing Illustrators Jenn Hales, Gerry O’Neill

PUBLISHING

Publisher DAVID WORONOFF

Advertising Sales Manager JULIE NICKENS julie@waltermagazine.com

Senior Account Executive & Operations CRISTINA HURLEY cristina@waltermagazine.com

Finance STEVE ANDERSON 910-693-2497

Distribution JAMES KAY

Inquiries WALTER OFFICE 984-286-0928 info@waltermagazine.com

Address all correspondence to: WALTER magazine, 421 Fayetteville Street, Suite 104 Raleigh, N.C. 27601

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Owners

JACK ANDREWS, FRANK DANIELS III, DAVID WORONOFF In memoriam FRANK DANIELS JR.

© WALTER magazine. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without the express written consent of the copyright owner. Published 12 times a year by The Pilot LLC.

Chocolate.

The Universal Love Language.

CONTRIBUTORS

W. JASON MILLER / WRITER

W. Jason Miller is a professor at North Carolina State University. Supported by a fellowship at the National Humanities Center, he is completing the book Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood: Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, and the Birth of Black Power, and is credited for discovering long-lost audio of MLK’s first-ever “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered nine months before the March on Washington. Miller relishes hiking all landscapes, from Dix Park to Patagonia. “Sharing Gregg Hecimovich’s 20-year search for Hannah Crafts touched upon all my favorite topics: forgotten history, archival evidence and heroic artistry.”

TRUDY HAYWOOD SAUNDERS / WRITER

CATHERINE NGUYEN / PHOTOGRAPHER

Catherine Nguyen is an advertising and editorial photographer specializing in interior design and architecture. A New York native, Nguyen has a background in management consulting and marketing. After realizing her passion for creative pursuits, she attended The Academy of Art University in San Francisco to study photography. “It was such an honor to photograph Janet Cowell’s home. There is so much history within the walls and soul in her furnishing and decor choices. The way the light warmed the rooms and highlighted the lines of her vintage pieces was a bit of magic.”

BERT VANDERVEEN / PHOTOGRAPHER

A lifelong Tarheel, Trudy Haywood Saunders writes about food, culture and travel destinations in North Carolina and beyond. Her work has appeared in Southern Living, Garden & Gun, Travel + Leisure, Our State and other print and digital publications. She is also the author of two middlegrade fiction books. “Raleigh is blessed with an abundance of nationally-recognized chefs who are sought-after leaders in the industry. It was my pleasure to talk with many of them for this story and to share their culinary travel adventures, both around the country, and around the globe.” Learn more at trudyhaywoodsaunders.com.

Bert VanderVeen has been photographing North Carolina people and places for over 25 years, from Murphy to Manteo. Together with his wife Becky, they run VanderVeen Photographers, based in Greensboro, continuing a family business that has spanned five generations. “I didn’t want to be a photographer, but I’m forever fascinated by people, and want to hear their stories. And I was too slow a writer to capture all of the nuance inside them,” says VanderVeen. “Photographing Garland’s Truffles was a unique experience: being in the middle of the Triangle but feeling like you are on a farm far away, looking for rare, delicious jewels in the earth.”

courtesy contributors

Ghyslain chocolat des beaux arts

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OUR TOWN

What winter doldrums? February offers plenty of ways to warm up with cozy concerts, silly races and decadent dinners. Or, for a chilly thrill, bundle up to catch the antics of Bald Eagles on Jordan Lake.

WINTER DELIGHT “Camellias are endlessly amazing,” says horticulturist and author Brie Arthur. This blooming shrub, which thrives in cold weather, first made its way to North America from China in the 1700s. Now, there are more than 300 species and thousands of cultivars of the most common camellia, camellia japonica, each with its own variation in color, configuration of petals and leaf shape. “If you don’t want to look at a neighbor or your garbage cans, just put a camellia there,” laughs Arthur, who notes that camellias do well in the shade, which makes them a great choice under Raleigh’s oak trees. “I don’t think any landscape should be without a camellia.”

Juli Leonard

DATEBOOK

WALTER’s list of things to see, do and experience this month.

by ADDIE LADNER

KRISPY KREME CHALLENGE

Feb. 3 | 6 a.m. - 1 p.m.

What started as a silly challenge for Park Scholar students at North Carolina State University has turned into a popular race and beloved Raleigh tradition. In its 20th year, the Krispy Kreme Challenge is a test of both physical and gastrointestinal endurance. Participants begin the challenge at the historic Memorial Belltower on Hillsborough Street, then run 2.5 miles through downtown to the iconic Krispy Kreme at the corner of Peace and Person Streets. There, they make their best effort to down one dozen glazed doughnuts. Then comes the hardest part of the challenge: running the 2.5 miles back to the belltower in under an hour — while keeping those donuts in their bellies. Proceeds from the race benefit UNC Children’s Hospital. From $50; 2011 Hillsborough Street; krispykremechallenge.com

RHAPSODY IN BLUE

Feb. 1 - 18 | Various times

Kicking off Carolina Ballet’s 2024 season is a modern ensemble inspired by George Gershwin’s popular jazz composition, Rhapsody in Blue. “Many years ago, at a dinner party hosted by a friend, this song was playing in the background. My friend suggested that I choreograph a ballet to it, and it clicked right away. Over the years, I’ve reshaped it to better reflect the music’s essence and historical context,”

says Zalman Raffael, Carolina Ballet’s artistic director and CEO. Other performances that evening include An American in Paris, choreographed by Amy Hall Garner, Carolina Ballet’s resident choreographer, and Gershwin Shorts, a premiere from principal guest choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett. “The evening offers different takes on Gershwin’s music, which lets the audience really see the unique styles of each choreographer,” says Raffael. From $50; 2 E. South Street; carolinaballet.com

VALENTINE’S DAY AT IL FALÒ

Feb. 16 - 17 | Various times

Add some fire to your Valentine’s Day this year by way of Brier Creek’s Italianinspired eatery, Il Falò, at the Westin Raleigh-Durham Airport Hotel. Savor a curated romantic five-course meal with edible delights from start to finish, many inspired by the wood-fired oven. Begin the meal with raw oysters, then pick between a charred carrot and ginger soup or a blood orange and fennel salad. For the heartier parts, enjoy a Duck Pain Perdu, then choose between a lobster or beef entree. “One of the courses I’m most excited about is the Lobster Rotolo, which is handmade pasta filled with herb ricotta and baked with a lobster fondue sauce,” said chef de cuisine Tanesha Depina. Finish it off with a red velvet cake with miso caramel and brown buttercream for dessert. Depina says while the menu at the bistro is generally French- and Italian-influenced, many of the Valentine’s Day dishes have Asian nuances: “There’s a sesame cracker and chili crisp with the carrot and ginger soup and miso caramel with the red velvet cake. I wanted to pay homage to the great Asian dishes I’ve had in the Triangle lately, particularly at chef Michael Lee’s restaurants.” $65 per person; 3931 Macaw Street; ilfalo.com

SYMBOLS OF HOME, RALEIGH

Feb. 2 - 28 | Various times

Boylan Heights cafe and provisioner

Rebus Works will host clay artist Marina Bosetti’s latest body of work, Symbols of Home, Raleigh this month. The pieces are centered around this city’s flora and fauna, as well as symbols of North Carolina and the many colors and patterns found here. There will be an opening reception on Feb. 2 from 6 to 8 p.m., or immerse yourself in the show on your own time, perhaps with coffee in hand, any time of the month during cafe hours. Free; 301-2 Kinsey Street; bosettiarttile.com

THE BARBER OF SEVILLE

Feb. 2 - 4 | Various times

Based on a French play about love, matchmaking and deception, THe Barber of Seville first premiered in Rome in 1816, and the North Carolina

Opera is excited to bring it to Raleigh audiences. “Barber is the funniest of all operatic comedies, and this is a wonderful cast of young singers for it,” says Eric Mitchko, the opera’s general director. In this story, the barber in question, Figaro, helps his pal Count Almaviva disguise himself to court Rosina, a maiden under control of her cranky elderly guardian. Performed in Italian with English subtitles. From $24; 2 E. South Street; ncopera.org

NATE THE GREAT

Feb. 2 - 18 | Various times

Based on the classic children’s book series by John Maclay, Nate the Great at the Raleigh Little Theatre is a must-see for families wanting some musical levity this month. Nate is a serious young boy who acts as a detective. When his friend Annie loses a prized possession and, for the first time ever, Nate can’t crack the case, he is forced to learn new tactics and work with his friends. The story touches on relationships, problem-solving and family. From $13; 301 Pogue Street; raleighlittletheatre.org

ARTHOUSE

Feb. 10 | 5:30 p.m.

Laissez les bons temps rouler! It’s carnival season at Raleigh’s Contemporary Art Museum. At its annual fundraising gala, ArtHouse, expect a multicourse Cajun meal, lively music and an even livelier dance floor. Proceeds benefit the incredible power the arts have on our community. Phenix Fire is performing along with music by DJ Rang. Throughout the night guests will enjoy unlimited drinks and small bites while they explore the entirely transformed space, including a dance floor, multiple lounges and bars, and surprise entertainment and decor around every corner. The Benefactors Dinner starts at 5:30 p.m. with a cocktail reception (tickets start at $500). Then, the doors open for the gala at 8 p.m. “Dress code is formal but cutting-edge, think Met Gala!” says Dana Carlsten, CAM’s marketing and development coordinator. From $150; 409 W. Martin Street; camraleigh.org

ADULT NIGHTS: TAYLOR’S VERSION

Feb. 23 | 7 p.m.

Calling all over-21 Swifties! Make friendship bracelets to party like you’re 22 at this grown-ups-only evening at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Enjoy themed activities, dancing, drinks and more. Rocky Top Hospitality will be serving delectable food in the Daily Planet Cafe as well as beverages like beer, wine and soda, plus specialty cocktails (including drinks named the Lavender Haze and Champagne Problems). “Museum employees are passionate about many things: birds, turtles, dinosaurs and, apparently, Taylor Swift,” says museum event specialist Abby Lewis. “We’d been brainstorming a new topic for the February Adult Night and someone suggested a Taylor Swift-themed event — we quickly saw the excitement growing. Forty-five minutes later, colleague Luka Rolleri handed me an 11page document with Swift Science ideas including swift education — as in, the birds, swifts.” From $25; 121 W. Jones Street; naturalsciences.org

FOR THE LOVE OF ART

Feb. 13 | 1 - 4 p.m.

Raleigh home and design hub Paysage Home has partnered with Wine & Design this month to host a lovely evening of painting and vino at their North Hills location. With a guiding instructor, decorate one stemmed and one stemless wine glass to take home as a personal keepsake or a gift for someone you love. Champagne and light appetizers will be served. $55 each; 4151 Main Street, #120; paysage.com

SUN RECORDS LIVE

Feb. 14 - 18 | 7:30 p.m.

Nashville-born record label Sun Records brought greats such as Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley into the world. This year will be the label’s 70th anniversary, and Theatre Raleigh will celebrate it with Sun Records Live - THe Concert, an evening full of its biggest hits. Raleigh native Collin Yates, who has performed in regional theaters up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and Theatre Raleigh alum Jon Rossi, who previously performed in Million Dollar Quartet on Broadway, will make up two members of the show’s cast. “Sun Records Live grew out of the success of the Broadway smash hit Million Dollar Quartet. This rocking and rollicking evening of music dives deeper into all the incredible hits and hit makers that came out of Sun Records,” said Lauren Kennedy Brady, the theater’s producing artistic director and a former Broadway performer. From $70; 6638 Old Wake Forest; theatreraleigh.com

CHATHAM

COUNTY LINE

Feb. 17 | 8 p.m.

The long-running Raleigh-based roots band will play a lively show at The Rialto Theatre for the release of their latest album. Hiyo, the group’s 10th studio album, still has the cadre of bluegrass instrumentation the band has

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become known for, but adds guest musicians, more eclectic components and influences from other genres to make it “an entirely new sound for us,” says band member John Teer. Dave Wilson, the chief lyricist of the group, is excited to share these songs in their hometown of Raleigh, and specifically at The Rialto. “Making the record is one thing,

but performing it live for our fans is another,” says Wilson. Afterward, the band will stick around for autographs and photo ops. From $25; 1620 Glenwood Avenue; therialto.com

MANA- BEYOND BELIEF

Feb. 22 | 6 p.m.

Step outside your film comfort zone at this screening of the documentary MANA- Beyond Belief at the Gregg Museum of Art & Design. Roger Manley, former director of the museum and co-director of the film, will present the documentary and moderate a Q&A session afterwards. Centered around the concept of mana, a Polynesian word defined as the supernatural forces and energy possessed within an object or person, Manley and fellow filmmaker Peter Friedman journeyed to five continents in search of examples of this concept. Free; 1903 Hillsborough Street; gregg.arts.ncsu.edu/programs.

INVISIBLE BEAUTY

Feb. 24 | 2 p.m.

At the North Carolina Museum of Art, see a self-directed documentary about the life and work of fashion pioneer Bethann Hardison, who has been working since the 1970s to make the fashion industry more inclusive. $5; 2110 Blue Ridge Road; ncartmuseum.org

Elevated Experience

East End Bistrot is restaurateur Giorgios Bakatsias’ newest fine dining concept

by CATHERINE CURRIN

photography by FORREST MASON

Rich, red walls complement a lush floral wallpaper by Dolce & Gabbana; those same crimson walls are a backdrop for a hand-painted mural of an elegant woman among flowers by local artist Arianne Hemlein. Delicate stemware holds exquisite wine selected by sommelier Scott Hardiman; textured white dishes display fine French fare by executive chef William D’Auvray. To dine at East End Bistrot is to feel transported from the mundane, to find luxury in every detail.

The latest concept from Giorgios Bakatsias, the restaurateur behind Rosewater Kitchen & Bar, Las Ramblas and Vin Rouge, among many others, East End Bistrot is set in one of Raleigh’s newest developments, East End Market. Bakatsias enlisted D’Auvray, with whom he opened Parizade in 1992, to helm the “French chophouse” vibe for the menu. “We’re trying to be an opulent fine dining experience, but not taking ourselves too seriously,” D’Auvray says. “I’m not trying to be at the point where you feel like you need to wear a coat and tie.”

That said, the experience at East End Bistrot (including, one notes, the prices) may demand a little glamor from its guests. Interior designer Tula Summerford created its eclectic yet elegant feel. “This space is a tale of two cities: Raleigh and Paris,” she says. “I am obsessed with everything French, and wanted to create a joyful explosion of energy and color.”

Immediately prior to opening East End, D’Auvray worked as a restaurant consultant, but around here he’s best known for operating old Raleigh favorites Fin’s and bu-ku. So it’s no surprise that D’Auvray’s menu features classic French dishes like steak au poivre and beef bourguignon — but also incorporates his knowledge of seafood and Asian traditions.

“What we’re trying to do is work with what we know is an incredible ingredi-

ent, and then not over-manipulate it,” he says, nodding to delicacies like turbot from Hawaii, bay scallops from Nantucket and chanterelle mushrooms from France.

D’Auvray’s raw menu celebrates his love for the finest seafood, with oysters on the half-shell, bluefin toro and a yellowtail sashimi with Calabrian chilis.

But there’s also a self-proclaimed “best burger in town” that’s only available Tuesday through Thursday, served with pomme frites and a decadent duck fat aioli. Also on Tuesdays exclusively, East End’s plant-bedecked patio transforms into a champagne terrace, complete with bubbles, light bites and music.

Perhaps the kitchen best sums up the

dining at East End. Through a sliver in a giant wall of dimensional gold tile, you can get a glimpse of D’Auvray and his team at work. “Since all of the big decisions take place in the kitchen, I wanted it to be a focal point,” says Summerford. As with the rest of the restaurant, the view into the kitchen is the the perfect marriage of craft and glamor.

GARDEN THE SHORT LIST

February can bring winter’s coldest temperatures — but we do get a few surprisingly warm days! Garden expert Tina Mast of Homewood Nursery shared this short list of to-dos to tackle on those days. —Addie Ladner

TOOL TIME

Now is the time to assess your gear. What needs cleaning? How are your gloves holding up? “Sharpen and oil hand tools, then sharpen your lawn mower blades as well as change its oil, filter and spark plugs,” says Mast. “Rusty tools can be soaked in white vinegar overnight and then scrubbed with a scrubbing pad to remove rust. Dry them well and coat them with mineral or camellia oil.”

START SEEDS

Mid-February isn’t too early to start seeds outside for plants like herbs, cruciferous vegetables and spring roots like radish and carrots. “But watch the weather since it can be uneven in winter,” says Mast. Inside, sweet peas, larkspur and poppies can be started, as well as summer herbs like basil, chives and sage.

TREAT PESTS AND DISEASE

“This is a great time to kill overwintering insects such as mites and scale on shrubs and trees, including roses and fruit trees,” says Mast. Remove debris under the trees, like dead leaves and blooms, then smother insects and egg masses by spraying plants with All Seasons Spray Oil. For severe infestations, try a fungicide such as Fung-onil.

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The Search for Hannah Crafts

A new book tells the story of the North Carolina native who authored the first known novel by an African American woman

by W. JASON MILLER

Adisheveled manuscript titled The Bondwoman’s Narrative was listed only as “Lot 30: Unpublished Original Manuscript” when it appeared in a Swann Auction Galleries catalog in 2001. Written between 1853-1859, few people knew the hand-sewn pages pressed clumsily between two boards even existed. Barely meeting its retainer, the manuscript received only one bid. But The Bondwoman’s Narrative became a bestseller when it was published in 2002, after being quietly purchased and then authenticated by esteemed historian

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. As news spread that this was the first known novel written by an African American woman, the skill of the book’s writer amazed and confounded readers and scholars like. People publicly asked, “How could an African American woman of this era write such elegant prose?” And if so, “Who was she?” Amid rampant speculation entered Gregg Hecimovich, a scholar currently serving as Hutchins Family Fellow at Harvard University. Initially, he was as skeptical as others. “The idea that the novel was written by a formerly enslaved

courtesy Gregg Hecimovich

fugitive appeared to me too good to be true,” Hecimovich says. “I got into the research as a skeptic.” Hecimovich devoted two decades of work to solving that mystery — and his book The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts, published in October, reveals more about the writer’s identity and true marvel of her work.

I sat down with Hecimovich at his home in Chapel Hill 10 days before he spoke about his book with Gates at an event at Harvard University. He defines the survival of Crafts’ book to me as nothing less than a “gift received.” “She became a New York Times bestselling author because of the sheer genius of the work,” Hecimovich says. “The novel itself is profound, artistic and funny. It’s a page-turner.”

There’s only one handwritten copy in existence, written solely by the author on paper secreted away from her captors, with letters scripted using a goose quill lifted from an inkwell. Revisions were made by pasting slips of paper in place with a thimble — you can see the dimple marks it left behind on the manuscript. The completed pages were sewn together between twin boards that serve as its makeshift covers.

Uncovering Crafts’ identity required locating overlooked property records,

conducting extensive forensic paper analysis and even studying handwritten notes made on the backs of ignored calendars. In family histories located in people’s homes, Hecimovich found “a runway to follow,” using many documents that are more than 170 years old. Hecimovich gently turned every one. The research took him 20 years.

Because Crafts taught herself to write, her manuscript contained several unusual stylistic elements typical of an autodidact. For words that split unexpectedly, she placed hyphens at the start of following lines rather than at the far right of her margins. She also grounded her quotation marks as double commas, staked at the feet of her words, rather than parasailing them in the air.

When Hecimovich began his quest in 2002, many experts were highly skeptical that an enslaved woman could write such a remarkable novel. In going through the archives, he had a realization: “There was a moment happening in the margins of

the enslavers’ papers and journal entries that earlier generations of scholars weren’t really paying attention to.”

Hecimovich learned that living in Murfreesboro, in northeastern North Carolina, in 1852 meant Crafts would have had “ready access to an extensive library less than a block away” at Chowan Baptist Female Institute. Beyond library archives, he says, “it was really the generations of descendent communities who held this history.”

Through his writing, Hecimovich allows us to see Crafts at the very moment she chooses to name her captors. After risking a hard-won freedom via the Underground Railroad in 1857, Crafts finally had her first chance to write without fear. Where her original manuscript read “Wh—r,” Crafts now found the courage to add the letters “eele” above that dash to spell “Wheeler,” pointing to John Hill Wheeler, a lawyer, politician and planter from Murfreesboro.

Crafts’ identity was most often repre-

sented as an “X” on ledgers, but Hecimovich noticed entries located on the backs of day calendars at the Library of Congress, where Wheeler wrote down the actual names of his captives. This was the clue Hecimovich needed. With a new purpose, he found himself drawn to Bertie County.

Befriending descendent communities over years of visits, Hecimovich realized in talking to actual people that the story was there. “Racist practices have simply kept it out of our histories,” he says. “I entered these communities as a listener.”

“There was a moment happening in the margins of the enslavers’ papers and journal entries that earlier generations of scholars weren’t really paying attention to.”

In her novel, Crafts prominently included a famous grouping of trees near the plantation where she was born in Bertie County known as “The Gospel Oaks.” The final one of these trees fell in November of 2011. While standing there, Hecimovich received a phone call. Divinely, he learned that a letter had been found linking the author to a farm

— GREGG HECIMOVICH

where she found her freedom in New York State. It allowed Hecimovich to definitively confirm Crafts’ identity as the author of The Bondwoman’s Narrative Standing by that fallen tree, the land seemed to have one last story to tell. Such literacy has been “overlooked by scholars who turned their back on it,” says longtime preservationist and Bertie County historian Dr. Benjamin Speller. “It means a lot that the academic communication channels and the gatekeepers are finally paying attention,” he says. “Something of this kind of historical importance should have been picked up a long time ago — and there’s more stories like this still out there.”

Slave records that include Hannah Crafts and her relatives.

courtesy Gregg

Hecimovich

Pressed with Care

Decree Company practices a vintage art to create custom stationery

by COLONY LITTLE

photography by ROB HAMMER

The storefront window at Decree Company frames a Chandler & Price letterpress machine that is more than 100 years old. There, you can witness the oversize flywheel of the press whirl into action. It sets three rollers in motion that spread ink onto a large, round plate, then deposit the ink onto a template. The operator then inserts a piece of paper in front of the template and pulls a crank arm; this presses the ink and image deep into the paper. “We love people watching what we do. It’s like a functional museum,” says Tracy Taylor, a

master engraver in the studio.

In an age of instant communication, a handwritten letter is a gift, for both the writer and the recipient. “I think every time I’ve sent a written letter or thankyou, my anxiety reduces as I’m thinking about that other person; there’s something more to it than just hitting ‘send,’” says Decree co-owner Ryan Dart. “I think that that feeling comes across to the person who receives it also.”

The team at Decree Company is in the business of creating magical moments with paper. All of the store’s stationery

is designed and created in its Martin Street studio. Dart, along with co-owner Robert Buhler, founded the business in 2020, originally operating out of an old warehouse space; the two opened this flagship store in 2022.

The studio boutique specializes in handcrafted, bespoke stationery designed and created by a passionate team of illustrators and artisans. Their designs range from whimsical and graphic to gilded and classic. According to Buhler, personalized stationery is extremely popular right now. And it takes a village to create them: illustrators, graphic designers, machine operators and engraving specialists among them.

The process begins with a consultation with lead designer Madeleine Albright, who studied animation and illustration at North Carolina State University. “I wanted to work with Robert and Ryan because I knew this would be heavy in illustration with the creative process,” she says. “They allowed me the creative freedom to have fun with it.”

As a graphic designer and an illustrator, Albright can create intricately drawn designs like floral arrangements, pet portraits or replicas of the lace pattern from a wedding gown. Once the design is created, the image is transferred to a template through a chemical process called etching, which burns images onto a copper plate. These plates are used with letterpress printing, which uses the machine to push the inked image into paper.

A more specialized process called engraving is sort of the opposite of letterpress: instead of pushing the design into the paper, a machine creates a raised impression of the image in ink. The machinery, process and materials in the engraving process are more involved and time consuming than traditional letterpress. It requires two plates, a negative and a positive, to push the image forward from the back and deposit the ink into the page from the front. But engraving supports the use of fine typefaces and intricately drawn templates that result in a refined, luxurious feel. Decree

frequently uses inks infused with gold and silver, which add light and a sculptural quality to the designs.

Taylor is sort of an omni-craftsman: he came to Decree with experience in printmaking, ceramics and, strangely enough, cheese (he was also a cheesemonger for six and half years). “This trade is something I’ve always appreciated — I’ve done screen printing, lithography and intaglio printing, but this kind of fabrication is special,” says Taylor. “Working with an artisan craft that has stood the test of time — it’s such a unique visceral experience, it’s all tactile.”

While traditional printing and letterpress techniques each offer advantages in time and cost, the beauty of engraving lies in craftsmanship and passion that goes into it. While there are printing guilds and trade groups, the Decree team perfected its techniques in-house. “It’s a very difficult process, but the final product is absolutely stunning,” says Buhler.

For visitors to the store who are interested in experiencing the craft of letterpress, Decree also offers group classes in the shop. As Valentine’s Day approaches, visitors can take a class to create something unique for a special loved one. Taylor recalled one memorable class:

“Last year we had a writing group come in at the beginning of February and after everyone printed cards, they had each person write a love note. That was such a fun collaboration.”

For each team member at Decree, the rewards of their distinct line of work vary. For Albright, it’s the role she plays in commemorating important events through paper. “I love talking to a client about whatever they’re excited about for their life,” she says. Taylor noted a surprising outcome that comes from facing the challenges he encounters mastering this craft form. “Even when I’m working through problems like having to fix a machine or something, it’s fun,” he says. “We are merely stewards of these machines, and that’s one of the things that I really love about our ethos: we’re trying to help keep a craft alive.”

He and Dart both relish pulling a page off the press. “Madeleine produces some things that are just so adorable,” says Taylor. “There was a woman who once got some stationery of her two dogs, and every time I printed it, it was just so funny seeing their little faces. I don’t think we could ever get tired of flipping over a piece of paper and not love what we’re doing.”

Robert Buhler, left, and Ryan Dart.

an EYE on EAGLES

I’ve been fascinated by our national symbol, the Bald Eagle, since my teenage years. Back then, my family had a cottage on a tidal tributary of the Potomac River near Stafford, Virginia. Bald Eagles were quite rare in the East, but we were fortunate to have a nest across the water from our place. I was always thrilled to see them flying over or catching fish when I was out in my canoe. They’re large raptors, but capable of some impressive aerial maneuvers. To be able to observe them was quite a privilege, especially back then.

Then some 40 years ago, I was lucky enough to be present when a juvenile eagle was released at Lake Mattamuskeet, on the North Carolina coast, as part of a statewide reintroduction effort. Everyone involved was nervous when the first juvenile left its enclosure and flew out over the lake. But it was also thrilling to witness what would be the start of this species’ comeback to our state.

Thanks to protection and conservation efforts, Bald Eagle populations have rebounded, and they now are commonly seen near large bodies of water throughout almost all of North America. Here in the Piedmont, Falls and Jordan Lakes provide great eagle habitats since they are large, shallow lakes with good fish populations and an abundance of protected, forested shoreline. Back when I worked at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, I frequently spotted eagles perched in dead snags or soaring over Jordan Lake on my commute from Pittsboro to Raleigh.

A few years ago, I started seeing great photos on social media of eagles and other fish-eating birds taken at the B. Everett Jordan Dam. There, they would concentrate to feed on fish stunned by their passage through the dam’s turbines. On my first visit, I saw three or four eagles either perched or actively fishing in the tailrace below the dam.

Checking out the antics of dozens of Bald Eagles at Jordan Lake

words and photography by MIKE DUNN

So last February, with lake levels high and lots of water being discharged through the dam, I drove the 25 minutes from our house over to the dam again. My plan was to go over in the early morning hours, stay a couple of hours, then head home before lunch.

There were already a handful of bird watchers, photographers and anglers strung out along the banks when I arrived. Looking downstream, I could see a large number of Bald Eagles roosting in trees on both sides of the tailrace. Steve McMurray, a ranger at Jordan Lake State Recreation Area, shared that the lake is now home to over 25 eagle nests, and he estimates the winter population at more than 60 eagles, with perhaps double or triple that number in the summer. I counted over 40 on this visit, many more than when I had visited the year before. But what really thrilled me were the sounds — so many eagles calling! Bald Eagle vocalizations are not well known by most people; it’s a squeaky “Ki-kiki-ki-ki-ki-ker” that sounds more like a seagull than a majestic bird. (In many movies and television ads that show an eagle flying, it’s paired with the sound of a Red-tailed Hawk’s scream).

The eagles I saw were a mix of juveniles and adults. It takes four to five years for a Bald Eagle to acquire the signature white head and tail feathers. Juveniles are generally dark brown, with variable amounts of whitish mottling on their undersides. The beak is dark in the first year or two, gradually changing to the all-yellow bill of the adult bird. The head and tail feathers transition to pure white and the mottling disappears to leave a solid dark brown body by year five or six.

Bald Eagles are superbly adapted to finding prey and catching it. The eyes of an eagle are one of its most impressive features. They are almost the same weight as a human eye, even though an adult eagle might weigh only 10 to 14 pounds. No one knows exactly how much better an eagle can see than us, but estimates range anywhere from four to eight times the visual acuity of a human.

Another notable feature is the Bald

Eagle’s impressive beak. The beak (as well as the talons) is made of keratin, similar to our fingernails. It has a hooked tip and large size relative to the bird’s head. Its talons are also well-adapted to grab slippery prey like fish: they’re strongly curved and the bottom of their feet have rough projections that help hold the prey firmly. The crushing strength of each talon is estimated to be at least 400 pounds per square inch, easily killing their prey (that is at least 10 times stronger than the average grip strength of a human hand). But the talons can also be used for a delicate operation like preening feathers.

Given their large size (wingspan exceeds 6 feet) and superb predator adaptations, Bald Eagles can easily dominate the scene at a carcass or feeding area. They’re also happy to steal their prey from other predators, like cormorants and osprey.

If a cormorant doesn’t swallow a fish right away (crappie, the dominant fish I saw by the dam, are fairly deep-bodied, so it can be tough to get the whole fish down), the eagles perched nearby or soaring overhead take notice. An eagle may dive-bomb a cormorant, causing it to hastily drop its meal. The eagle then swoops in, talons down, snags it off the surface, and flies off to a nearby tree to dine on its stolen prey. As for the osprey, Bald Eagles may also nab a fish in midair from their raptor cousins, which is always an aerial display worth seeing. What I’d planned as a two-hour photo trip turned into an all-day event that had me twisting and turning at times to try to catch the action. It was a thrilling day of observing some of the large concentration of Bald Eagles that call Jordan Lake their winter home.

Left: A Bald Eagle snags a fish. Right: A juvenile Bald Eagle.

MUSIC Watch & Listen

A new movie from hip-hop duo Little Brother reflects on 20 years of making music

by DAVID MENCONI

LYERS

One of the great hip-hop groups in North Carolina history, Little Brother, came together as students at North Carolina Central University at the dawn of the 21st century as part of the Justus League hip-hop collective.

The trio of Phonte Coleman, Thomas “Rapper Big Pooh” Jones and producer/DJ Patrick “9th Wonder” Douthit debuted with 2003’s The Listening, an underground classic. The album was recorded in bare-bones circumstances, using a makeshift dorm-room studio. But that didn’t keep it from becoming a viral sensation through online forums

like Okayplayer.com. Of its time but also seemingly timeless, The Listening evoked its own world with deep layers of samples and hard-headed practicality in the lyrics. It was and is an instant classic.

Twenty years later, Little Brother is now just Coleman and Jones, and they’re making their way into the film world in much the same way they entered music. This time it’s with a documentary, May the Lord Watch: The Little Brother Story. Made over the course of five years, it traces Little Brother’s complicated history.

Fittingly, Little Brother is rolling it out guerilla-style. There have been some theatrical showings, but most of its viewings

photography by ANTOINE

Thomas Jones, left, and Phonte Coleman

so far have been on YouTube.

“The movie industry reminds us a lot of the record business, know what I’m saying?” Coleman says with a laugh. “We’re just using what we have available to us — some screenings, trying to get into film festivals. But all that said, it’s on YouTube, so just go watch it. Meet people where they’re at, that’s what we’ve always done. We were one of the first rap groups to ‘go viral’ at a time when nobody even knew what that was, let alone how to monetize it. Our story had to do with hearing music that was freely accessible, so the movie about our career should be experienced the same way. That’s what felt the most righteous to us.”

If the Little Brother way has always been the leap of faith of putting things out there with little regard for the bottom line, it’s working out pretty well. Between grant money from the Southern Documentary Fund and contributions from some of the 150,000-plus viewers who watched the film in its first three weeks, they’re not too far in the hole. And the response has been gratifying, with The Washington Post citing the film as proof that “hip hop can address middle age gracefully.”

Even back during their collegiate days, Little Brother was always sonically old-school, with a sound akin to groups like A Tribe Called Quest. Albums like The Listening and 2005’s The Minstrel Show had a lot to say about life, music and the temptations of selling out. Both those albums played like movies in album form, with between-song skits and recurrent characters on the fictional WJLR (Justus League Radio) and UBN (U Black N-----) Network.

“Our story had to do with hearing music that was freely accessible, so the movie about our career should be experienced the same way. ”

— PHONTE COLEMAN

mittently involved in some Little Brother projects in the years after. On his own, 9th Wonder became one of the top producers in hip-hop (Jay-Z, Destiny’s Child, Erykah Badu, Kendrick Lamar, Rapsody) as well as a leading on-campus academic at Duke, Central and Harvard. Jones and Coleman continued on as Little Brother until splitting for a time in the early 2010s, while Coleman concentrated on The Foreign Exchange, a group that began as a side project but picked up a Grammy nomination in 2009. Coleman and Jones got Little Brother back together fulltime about five years ago. Their split with Douthit was not entirely positive, a topic the documentary does not shy away from. (Douthit chose not to appear in the film.)

to make it clear it wouldn’t be a hit piece. The center of it is really not about the split, it’s more about the ebb and flow of Phonte and Pooh’s relationship.”

Watching that onscreen turned out to be a surprisingly emotional experience for both Coleman and Jones, especially when they took the film out for prerelease test screenings in five cities.

“It was surreal standing in the back watching people watch me,” says Jones. “This was different from them hearing us rap. Now they’re watching our story, seeing our moms, Phonte’s grandmother, my best friends. There are no words to describe that feeling.”

Word from the fans has been gratifyingly positive, too.

Douthit departed the lineup after The Minstrel Show, although he was inter-

“We asked and he just never responded,” says May the Lord Watch director Holland Randolph Gallagher. “We tried

“We wanted it to be fair and honest to everyone,” says Coleman. “The story is the story and we wanted it told with love and care for the music we’ve created. The feedback we’ve gotten is that that comes through. Best compliment was from a homie in L.A.: This is everything I wanted, but nothing I expected. There it is. That’s like a 100-percent Rotten Tomatoes rating to me. We won, bruh, I don’t care.”

Gather at GUSSIE’S

If you walk into Gussie’s and immediately feel at home, that’s the point. The brainchild of Raleigh native Vance Daniels and his partners Katie and Clayton O’Kane, it’s upscale but unfussy, a place where you can get a great drink without an attitude to match. “There’s a lot of pretense that can come with delivering a cocktail,” says Daniels. “That was the thing we wanted to remove. The stuffiness of getting a great drink.”

Daniels was born and raised in Raleigh, then spent two decades in Los Angeles working in the hospitality industry — bartending, serving and co-owning at places from dive bars to fine dining. He met the O’Kanes while working in the bar below their apartment in Los Angeles. The couple also were industry folks and have each worked in bars and restaurants across the country. “I was sort of their front porch in L.A.,” says Daniels. “We had a big patio and Katie and Clayton would come down with their dogs. We all became friends.”

As they got to know each other, they traded philosophies on the hospitality industry. “We just realized that we had a lot of the same core values,” says Katie. “We aligned on things like work-life balance and the physical, mental and financial health of our team and ourselves.”

The trio dreamed of opening their own concept, and were ready to make a change from Los Angeles. They floated a few cities around the country — like Austin, Denver or Philadelphia — then Daniels suggested Raleigh. Once the O’Kanes visited for a weekend, they were sold. “It’s like the quote from When Harry Met Sally,” says Katie. “You want the rest of your life to start right away.”

by CATHERINE CURRIN

The three moved to Raleigh in 2023 with a rough vision. When they found the space on W. Morgan Street, which was most recently the home of Soul Taco, they landed on the bar-with-food concept. “We saw the potential and what

A new bar on W. Morgan Street offers an unpretentious spot for a well-crafted drink

photography by MEHMENT DEMIRCI

Left to right: Vance Daniels, Katie O’Kane and Clayton O’Kane

was nearby, and we landed on the idea of a neighborhood bar,” says Katie.

The name Gussie’s comes from Clayton’s great grandfather, August — it was his nickname. “When we were trying to come up with a name for a spot, we talked about all the things we wanted it to be,” says Katie. “Not too masculine and not too feminine. Not too light, not too dark. Something that could have been here for a long time. That name just kept coming back.”

The team worked with Cincinnatibased designer Julia Petiprin (a longtime friend of Daniels’) to make the space their own. The look and feel of the bar was crucial; the three wanted it to be approachable and welcoming. The ivy green and cognac palette, rich leather upholstery and eclectic art makes for a homey feel. The bar opened in December.

The drinks are well-crafted, but the

names hint that they’re not taking themselves too seriously. The Biggest Pickle, for example, is a savory yet refreshing combo of gin, dill vermouth, cucumber and lime. The popular Fat Lip is served up with tequila, apple, ginger and lemon. Everything is made in-house and seasonal when possible, from the cocktail syrups to the fresh orange cream soda. “We try to have fun with it,” says Katie. “With the drinks, we try to be appropriate for the weather that we have, but then also try to do some things that maybe people haven’t tried before.”

And while they’re a bar first, Daniels is proud of the food menu they’ve developed with the help of Michael Bean, the former chef at the NC State University Club. “First we wanted to be approachable and affordable in pricing,” says Daniels. “Then from there, it went to elevated bar food, which is a term you hear a lot,

Fat Lip

INGREDIENTS

2 ounces blanco tequila

1 1/2 ounces Fuji apple juice

3/4 ounce fresh lemon juice

3/4 ounce ginger syrup

DIRECTIONS

Shake and strain into a coupe.

but it does cover a lot: food that’s easy to share, food that you can snack on while standing along the drink rail.”

Menu highlights include the Animal Style fries (meant for sharing) and the Double-Double smashburger, both nods to West Coast burger joint In-N-Out. There’s also chile con queso served with pork rinds, poke tuna bites and crispy Brussels sprouts. For those in need of a quick meal or something to take away, there’s also a bottle shop in the corner of the space, with grab-and-go beer, wine, sandwiches and snacks.

Taken together, Gussie’s feels special, but not over the top — a place that feels familiar, but that can always offer something new. “It goes back to the bartender not being pretentious, right?” says Daniels. “If you don’t know something but you feel welcome there, you’re much more likely to ask.”

Burning Bright

Jby FINN COHEN

photography by TAYLOR MCDONALD

une of 2020 was a seismic month for the United States: pandemic, protests, economic recession, lockdown. And for Tiffany Griffin and Dariel Heron, the married founders of the Durhambased candle company Bright Black, that tumult was translating into an overload of work: a nearly 1,200% jump in orders from one month to the next.

That spike was the result of a Twitter (now X) thread of Black-owned candle companies; Bright Black’s “Ida” candle — named for Ida B. Wells and representing the work of Black women advancing

women’s right to vote — was at the top of the thread. The deluge of orders was a shock to a small company that had only been operating for a year.

“Dariel was like, we don’t even have jars,” Griffin says. “No one did! Nothing was going anywhere in the world.”

Bright Black had to stop taking orders on full-size candles because they couldn’t fill them. Then, a couple weeks later, Beyoncé listed Bright Black on her website as part of a directory of Black-owned businesses. That set off another wave of demand, and by August they had to stop

Bright Black uses its candles to honor African American history and culture

taking orders for miniature candles.

“We didn’t even feel joy; we couldn’t feel happy about it because it was so much stress,” says Griffin. “We didn’t have staff, we didn’t have childcare.”

They resumed orders by November of that year, and since then, Bright Black has been busy. They’ve hired staff and found a storefront. They’ve been commissioned to make custom candles by the NBA and WNBA, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the filmmaker Jordan Peele and the former first lady Michelle Obama (their “Ida” scent was repurposed in a limited series for the 2020 election by her organization, When We All Vote). They developed two different thematic collections: “Diaspora” features scents inspired by “cities of Black greatness” — like Kingston, Jamaica (rum, grapefruit, sugar cane); Salvador, Brazil (acai palm, sea salt); and Durham, North Carolina (tobacco and whiskey) — while the “Genres” set celebrates musical genres created by the Black diaspora, like Gospel (chamomile, myrrh, lilac), Bachata (tropical essences) and Hip-Hop (shea butter, evergreen).

Growing up in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the 1990s, Griffin was captivated by the ways that Hollywood films directed by Black filmmakers were centering Black urban life, like Boyz n the Hood and Poetic Justice. She was struck by what they were getting wrong.

“In my experience of the 1980s and the aftermath of the ‘80s, my experience of poverty and the crack epidemic and HIV, this notion of ‘villain and hero’ was missing the mark,” Griffin says. “You could have a mom steal from her sister and then be at a PTA meeting because she cared about her kids’ education; you have to hold both of those things in ways that the films were not doing.”

Griffin entered Boston College in 1998 intending to make documentaries that could handle the nuances she wanted to highlight. But she ended up studying psychology and communications, receiving a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan. After two years of postdoctoral work at the Uni-

versity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she entered a fellowship to Washington, D.C., working for a senator from New Mexico. But that experience was “more politics than policy,” she says, so she joined USAID (the United States Agency for International Development) at a time when the State Department was trying to coordinate development around the concept of “resilience.”

“I was basically brought in to define ‘resilience,’ to figure out how to measure it, to help people design programs to incorporate it, and to take data and weave that into better programs,” says Griffin.

Over the course of seven years, Griffin traveled back and forth to countries like Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Senegal, looking at ways to create policies to prepare communities for things like conflict, famine, flood or inflation. But over time, she and Heron (whom she met on the first day of college but didn’t start dating until later) wanted to get out of D.C., especially after having a child. Durham, which she was familiar with from her time at UNC, hit all the right notes: small, diverse and growing.

as well as the development and production center. Large jars of oils sit on shelves in the back, where their small team works on filling orders. Griffin can spend between three months to a year developing and testing a scent, using oils from fragrance houses in Durham and in Georgia. “A moment or a persona can be hard to nail,” she explains.

The scents are incredibly distinctive, with tones that can fill a room. The Salvador candle in the Diaspora collection is elegant, almost like a cologne, while the flagship Hip Hop candle is a deep, rich combination of shea butter and oud.

The Gospel candle was inspired by one of Griffin’s aunts: “She was like, you can’t make a music collection without gospel!” she laughs. All the candles come in black matte vessels, with wooden wicks that can burn up to 80 hours. Bright Black also sells body oils, as well as a charcoal soap made in collaboration with Durham-based no-waste company Fillaree, in a blend of myrrh, cassia and citrus.

“There is this thread of using whatever sphere I’m in to share stories about Blackness... Particularly to highlight accurate stories.”

— TIFFANY GRIFFIN

Candles may seem like a stark pivot, but the idea had been in the works for a while. Griffin and Heron made their own candles out of curiosity and frugality while still in D.C., gifting them to their families one Christmas to great acclaim. But it wasn’t until they struck on the idea of making a scent based on the creativity of hip-hop that a larger vision emerged, and Griffin drew up a business plan.

“There is this thread of using whatever sphere I’m in to share stories about Blackness,” Griffin says. “Particularly to highlight accurate stories, as opposed to falling back on stereotypical narratives.”

Bright Black’s location in Durham’s Lakewood shopping center serves as a retail outlet for the candles and scents

It’s still the candles that provide the biggest canvas for Griffin and Heron to express themselves, and those expressions aren’t going unnoticed.

In 2022, to celebrate Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, they developed a candle called “Justice” with Desiree Davis, an artist in Cary. The image on the vessel depicted Lady Justice as a Black woman with dreadlocks.

“Dariel was like, THat’s gonna be blasphemous, people are gonna lose it,” says Griffin. “I’m like, Why? THe Greeks interpreted it through their image, why can’t we interpret it through our image?”

The candle is no longer available, but Bright Black keeps making them for one particular customer: Justice Jackson herself. “She places orders all the time,” says Griffin.

SCULPTURE in SILK

Kenny Nguyen’s unique medium weaves tradition with ingenuity

by LIZA ROBERTS

“Every time I start a piece, I imagine there’s a body underneath it,” says Quoctrung Kenny Nguyen, a former fashion designer who makes rippling, three-dimensional sculptures out of paint-soaked silk. “Instead, there’s this absence of a body, in sculptural form. It’s beautiful like that.”

Torn into strips, dredged in paint and affixed to unstretched canvas, Nguyen’s silk segments fuse to become a malleable but sturdy material that he molds with his hands and pins in place. Every time he hangs a piece, he changes the pin placement — and with it, its shape, shadow and energy. Some have a “more architectural feel,” others are more organic.

These works explore and illustrate Nguyen’s experience with reinvention, cultural displacement, isolation and identity. His chosen material — with

its direct ties to the cultural history of his native Vietnam, where the fabric is revered and traditional “silk villages” keep ancient techniques alive — is a key component. “Identity is changing all the time,” he says, “and the work keeps evolving, in a continuous transformation.” It all begins with the fabric in his hands. “Silk is already a transformation: from the silkworm, to the silk thread, to a piece of silk. So it’s holding a metaphor.”

More than one: “People see silk as a very delicate thing,” he says, “but actually it’s one of the strongest fibers on earth.”

Nguyen’s work has earned him solo exhibitions and dozens of awards, residencies, grants and fellowships all over the world. It began to take off commercially in a big way during the pandemic, when he started using Instagram to share images of his pieces, and after Los Angeles-

based Saatchi Art named him one of the “best young artists to collect” under the age of 35 from around the world. He now has art consultants and galleries representing his work all over the country and in Europe, and has had to move his studio out of the garage of his family home and into a former textile mill to keep up with demand. He no longer works alone, with three assistants (all art students from UNC Charlotte) helping him with prep work, photography and studio management. His biggest challenge is no longer finding an audience; it’s managing the business.

Nguyen couldn’t have imagined this kind of success when he immigrated here in 2010 from Ho Chi Minh City with his family. He was 19 and had a BFA in fashion design from the University of Architecture Ho Chi Minh City. But he

courtesy Kenny Nguyen

couldn’t find a job and spoke no English. “It was just a culture shock. You can’t communicate with anybody. You feel so isolated. I was struggling,” he says.

Art called him. Nguyen enrolled at UNC Charlotte to study painting — Davidson artist Elizabeth Bradford was one of his teachers — and found himself yearning for a way to incorporate his own culture and passions into the work. In the end, they came together was a happy accident.

During the summer of 2018, three years out of UNCC, Nguyen had just arrived at an artist’s residency in rural Vermont, where he planned to continue painting the “very flat, very traditional” types of canvases he’d been creating until that point. But in his rush to get out the door, he left a container with most of his colorful paints and brushes behind. In fact, he realized that he’d managed to bring only three materials with him: a bucket of white paint, skeins of silk and some canvas. “What can you do with that?” he wondered. He began ripping pieces of silk, dredging them

in paint, affixing them to canvas, “and you know, it just happened.”

Quickly, he decided he was on to something: “The material was speaking for itself.” Bits of transparent silk dripped off his canvases, letting light shine through. “I decided I didn’t want the frame anymore. I decided: let’s sculpt it.”

To get there, though, he knew he’d have to manipulate his silk in new ways. “Silk has such a value in the Vietnamese culture,” he says. “For me, to destroy a piece of silk, to cut it into pieces… that’s a big deal. But I pushed myself to do that.”

He hasn’t stopped. “The work is evolving in such an amazing way,” he said in late December. “I’ve just been in the studio nonstop, producing work.” Nguyen says that kind of work ethic has been crucial to his success. Some of it is rooted in his early years working in fashion while in school, some of it is hard-wired and a lot of it is simply his love of the work.

“The more that I work with the materials, the more I realize how it works and

the more capacity I have,” he says.

He’s experimenting with large-scale work, which can be challenging to mold in lasting sculptural forms, but not impossible. His largest works are now as many as 40 feet long, and he makes them in five or six different segments, which he then sews together. “It’s not evolving in a straight line,” he says. “There are a lot of tests, and a lot of failures. Little accidents happen, unexpected things happen, and I pick up on that.”

When Nguyen’s not working on commission for collectors with requests for particular dimensions or colors, he often goes right back to where he started, letting colors and shapes come to him intuitively, sometimes reworking old pieces that didn’t originally come together, pulling out paints he hasn’t used in a while, relying on instinct. His materials never stop inspiring his creativity.

“It amazes me,” Nguyen says, “that the material, this silk, can hold a sculptural form.”

Opposite page: Part of Kenny Nguyen’s Home/land exhibition at Sugarlift Gallery in New York City in 2023. This page: Nguyen working on his sculptures.

Winter Dad, Summer Son

Reflecting on warmth on a chilly day

by JIM DODSON illustration by GERRY O’NEILL

My son, Jack, phoned the other afternoon as I was enjoying an ounce of something superbly aged and watching winter birds feed from my favorite wooden chair. It was a clear but cold afternoon, the kind I like. This day was also special in another way as well.

“Hey dad,” he said. “How’s it going?”

“Pretty well,” I said. “I finished the book today.”

“Congratulations,” he said. “I know that’s a big relief. Can’t wait to read it.”

“At this point you might be the only one,” I joked, pointing out that my editor

at Simon & Schuster has probably given up on the book and forgotten my name.

“Oh no,” he said. “It’ll be just fine. You always say that.”

He was right about this. I’m naturally superstitious about completing books. They’re a little like children you spend years rearing, hoping you got things right only to send them off into the wide world with gratitude and not a little worry. This was my 18th literary child, one I’d grown unusually close to over the years. Now, it seemed, this special child was about to leave me.

The book, a true labor of love, is about

a pilgrimage I took along the Great Wagon Road, which my Scottish, German and English ancestors took to North Carolina. Foolishly, I thought I’d travel the historic colonial road from Philadelphia to Georgia in roughly three weeks and take a couple more years to write about the interesting people I met along with whatever I learned about America, or myself.

In fact, it took nearly six years to complete the project, counting the two years off the road due to Covid. Even so, I was pleased to have finished the book, though — as is almost always the case — I felt a

bit sad that the experience was over. Its fate was almost out of my hands.

So, I switched to our usual topic — the weather.

“How’s the weather there?” I asked.

“Great. Hot and sunny. Just the way I like it. How about there?”

“Cold and clear. Maybe some snow on the weekend. Just the way I like it.”

Jack laughed. “I always forget that. How much you love winter.”

My son is a journalist and documentary filmmaker living in Lima, Peru, where, as you read this, it’s late summer. Before that, he spent nearly four years living and working in Israel, enjoying the heat and people of that ancient, contested land. Fortunately, he left a short time before the latest unspeakably horrible war erupted.

I knew he was worried about friends back in Israel and Gaza and wished he was back there helping to cover the war, where more than a dozen journalists have been killed. His mother, old man and big sister, however, were grateful that he wasn’t one of them.

In a world that forever seems to be coming apart at the seams, for the moment at least, I was glad that he was in sunny and warm Peru, a place I almost cannot imagine, but which must be quite beautiful. Jack is fluent in Spanish and Arabic, a true traveler of the world.

I was born on a cold, snowy morning in Washington, D.C., a true-blue son of winter who thrives in early evening darkness, bone-chilling winds and lots of snow, a Southerner who could happily reside in Lapland.

How upside-down is that?

On the other hand, perhaps we’re simply fated to be this way. The ancient Greeks claimed unborn souls choose the time and place of their birth. Jack clearly picked the hottest part of summer to make his appearance (just like his mama, a mid-July baby).

My mom was born in late January, traditionally the coldest part of winter. My birthday in February follows hers by just five days. She loved winter almost as much as I do.

Jack’s big sister, Maggie, was born during a January blizzard. The morning we brought her home from the hospital, I had to slide down a steep, snowy hill with her in my arms to reach our cottage, as the unplowed roads were all impassable due to the heavy snow. It was one of the happiest moments of my life. Though she resides in Los Angeles today, she loves good, snowy winters almost as much as her old man.

The ancient Greeks claimed unborn souls choose the time and place of their birth. Jack clearly picked the hottest part of summer to make his appearance (just like his mama, a mid-July baby).

Though I speak only English and enough French to get me in trouble whenever I visit France, he and I have many things in common — with one notable exception.

Jack was born on a warm August morning in Maine. He thrives in the heat and is an authentic son of summer, a northern New Englander who digs tropical heat and desert landscapes.

Not surprisingly, we winter people are a relatively tiny tribe. A recent study of people in Britain determined that only 7% of its citizens claimed to be “winter people.” Then again, summer in Britain can sometimes feel like an endlessly cold and soggy winter day, one reason you find so many sun-burned Brits residing on the Costa de Sol and the Mediterranean at large.

University of Pennsylvania psychologist and author Dr. Seth Gillihan studies the effect of weather on people’s moods. In his book A Mindful Year, which he cowrote with Dr. Aria Campbell-Danesh,

he notes that there is a positive link between someone’s birth and preferred season. “People who are born in the winter, their internal clock seems to be set to the length of days in the winter,” he told Metro.co.uk.

The internal clock of so-called winter people, he adds, “is not as affected as someone who’s born in the summer, whose circadian rhythm (the body’s 24-hour ‘internal clock’) is expecting a longer light period.” Among other things, he aims to debunk popular misconceptions about the so-called “winter blues,” pointing out that seasonal affective disorder — SAD for short — affects only a small percentage of the population, less than 3% in the UK.

The idea that people who live in warm, sunny places are naturally happier than folks who reside in cold climates is challenged, he adds, by data that indicates Europe’s northernmost countries with the longest winters — Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden — rank among the continent’s seven happiest countries.

In a few weeks, North Carolina winter will begin to slip away. The welcome winter snows of my childhood here seem fewer than ever. The good news is that by February’s end, my garden will be springing back to life, heralding my second-favorite time of year.

Winter will be coming on in Peru. I’m hoping my summer-loving son will decide to come home to share its glorious return with me.

Southern Comforts

by CRYSTAL SIMONE SMITH

illustration by JENN HALES

Heavy snowfall, a seldom, wondrous gift that halts us in a moment of witness and settles silent like buried memories. In the window, past my sons sledding, my mother drifts on the scraped path where she would return from the store with ham hocks she placed in a pot of beans. Daylong sorting, soaking, and simmering — a way made, in the old country way, I still crave. It’s a true tale I tell sons as we cup tomato soup with croutons and stir mugs of hot chocolate. It’s a longing I fill with a story after many years of giving them all the things I did not have instead of the many things that I did.

Crystal Simone Smith is the author of Dark Testament (Henry Holt, 2023). She is also the author of three poetry chapbooks. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including POETRY Magazine. Smith teaches in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University.

As local chefs grow in notoriety, they’re taking the show on the road — and the foodies are happy to follow

have apron, will travel

by TRUDY HAYWOOD SAUNDERS

This

Ricky Moore and a guest in Rome, Italy.

Last summer, I took a 40-minute ride from Missoula, Montana, along a road shadowed with ponderosa and lodgepole pines, into the Garnet Mountain Range to get to The Resort at Paws Up.

This remote, family-friendly glamping destination, situated within a 37,000-acre working cattle ranch, boasts horseback riding on mountain trails, rafting on the Blackfoot River, archery lessons and even UTV rides to an abandoned ghost town.

But what I was really there for was the food. Raleigh’s Scott Crawford, the five-time James Beard Award semifinalist behind restaurants Crawford & Son, Jolie and Crawford Cookshop, was a featured chef for the Montana Master Chefs event, an annual event held each September since 2006. Some of the country’s most sought-after chefs are invited to attend, representing different areas of the country or themes. Last year, the event focused on North Carolina chefs. Alongside Crawford were William Dissen of The Market Place in Asheville, Dean Neff of Seabird in Wilmington and Annie Pettry, an Asheville native currently at Decca in Louisville, Kentucky.

Over two days, 75 guests got to taste their specialties. Among the items on the menu: Crawford’s coal-roasted beef ribs with garlic-kanzuri glaze, Pettry’s BBQ’d heirloom carrots, Dissen’s grilled tiger prawns with lemon-chili butter, and Neff’s smoked yellowfin tuna with shaved turnip and carrot slaw.

It used to be that friends asked each other, Where did you go on vacation?, but now the next question is often, What did you eat on vacation? “I like to go to places that have a foodie scene,” says Rich Burt, a fellow guest who’s been to several of these events. “It’s always fun to discover new chefs, restaurants and wineries.”

As our local chefs earn more and more accolades, the demand to invite them outside of the area has increased — and so have their fans’ desires to tap these chefs’ expertise to turn a vacation into a culinary experience.

WANDERING APPETITES

Part of the reason that the resort was able to draw so many Triangle chefs to the area is that its fine dining restaurant, Pomp, is headed up by chef Bret Edlund and his wife, Krystle Swenson, a James Beard award-nominated pastry chef, both of whom previously worked with Crawford in Raleigh. The two were recruited to Paws Up in 2021 and suggested Crawford when they began planning this year’s event. “I was attracted to the event because of their reputation, my relationship with Bret and Krystle, and the beauty of that region,” Crawford says.

Clockwise from top left: Scenes from Ricky Moore’s tour to Croatia, including participants enjoying dinner, vintage wine vessels, oysters and local wine, and toasting in a vineyard.

this page and right page : Richard

Gruica; Getty Images (STAMP)

“These culinary trips give chefs the opportunity to get out of their normal routines, spend time with other chefs and be inspired by the collaboration.”

Upscale resorts and destinations throughout the country and beyond are welcoming Raleigh chefs. Cheetie Kumar, a fivetime James Beard Foundation nominee for Best Chef: Southeast, who recently opened Ajja in Five Points, has also taken her chef’s apron on the road. “I love to travel,” Kumar says. “I feel fortunate to have been invited to take part in so many great events around the country.”

Her first out-of-state event was the Southern Foodways Alliance Femme Fatale dinner in 2015, with fellow Raleigh chef Ashley Christensen, in Louisville, Kentucky. Since then, Kumar has participated in several food and wine events including the Palm Beach Food and Wine Festival, the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen and the Charleston Wine + Food Festival. She has also

It used to be that friends asked each other, Where did you go on vacation? , but now the next question is often, What did you eat on vacation?

participated in multiple culinary events at the famed Blackberry Farm in Walland, Tennessee. “Working in other places, surrounded by talented chefs, offers a peek into their creative process,” Kumar says. “The ingredients and techniques they use always become part of the luggage home.”

Christensen agrees that the benefits of participating in culinary events make it well worth the effort. She has visited France, Scotland, Uruguay and other countries with other chefs to travel together as they cook, eat and learn. “There’s something to learn everywhere, whether you’re 2 miles or 2,000 miles from home,” Christensen says. “I give the blue ribbon to Japan for fully blowing my mind by way of food and hospitality at every turn.” She credits her experiences in Uruguay for the wood-fire cooking technique that she employs at her Raleigh restaurant, Death & Taxes, and a trip to Naples as inspiration for Poole’side Pies: “It’s really cool to dine with other restaurant folks and talk through shared challenges, all while learning and being inspired by the space you’re sitting in.”

TASTE LEADERS

While resorts are using chefs to draw guests, chefs are also leading guests on culinary adventures themselves. “I want people to have a truly unique immersion in the food, wine and traditions of the places we visit and access to places they wouldn’t have on their own,” says Doreen Colondres, a chef and author who is the wine educator at Vitis House, a professional wine school in Raleigh. Colondres has led culinary tours through Spain and Italy, where she encourages her guests to

this

page and right

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Jessica Crawford; Getty Images (STAMP)

mingle with locals. In the wine regions of Ribera and Rueda, in Spain, Colondres’ groups sampled wines at vineyards, participated in an olive oil tasting and experienced a wine harvest.

Colondres recalls one stop in southern Italy, where they met a chef known for his pizza. “We went from understanding how he produced the flour, to understanding how to make buffalo mozzarella, to tasting eight different pizzas in his restaurant,” Colondres says. Sandra Hill, a Raleigh resident who traveled with Colondres, especially enjoyed “tasting country food and wine in bodegas.” Colondres is now planning tours to Scotland — for whiskey tastings, of course — and Bordeaux, France.

Raleigh chef Florence Melin, who started Le Gourmet Getaway in 2022, led a guided trip to her native Paris and Brittany, France, with a group of 12 last June. “We focus on understanding where the food comes from, meeting growers and farmers and cooking with amazing chefs,” Melin says. “I loved seeing the positive impact on travelers, as well as on the local farmers, growers and guides.”

Chef Ricky Moore, owner of Durham’s Saltbox Seafood Joint and winner of the James Beard Foundation award for Best Chef Southeast, led a tour in Croatia in October in partnership with Richard Gruica, a former chef who now specializes in culinary-centric tours. The weeklong escape began in Zagreb and continued along the Adriatic coast before concluding on the vineyard-covered peninsula of Istria.

The two led a group of 25 travelers to meet with chefs, farmers and wine producers, “forming a familial-like bond in the process,” says Moore. One of his favorite stops was at a goat farm near Istria — in “the middle of nowhere.” “We had beautiful goat cheese, yogurt from the goats. We had stewed goat and homemade bread from the hearth,” Moore says. “Everything came from the goat and I thought that was meaningful.”

The tours can be just as good for the chefs as they are for the foodies. “Chefs need outlets,” says Moore. “It renews you, refreshes you.” Moore is, in fact, already planning a reunion dinner here in North Carolina with his group, where he plans to prepare Croatian-inspired cuisine with ingredients they experienced there. He’s already got another culinary tour in the works, with Lima, Peru, a likely destination.

RETURNING THE WELCOME

Just as local chefs are willing to fly out, the relationships they’ve built have drawn big-name chefs to Raleigh. Christensen is a host of the Triangle Wine and Food Festival, which benefits the Frankie Lemmon School, to which she has attracted chefs Jason Stanhope, Nancy Silverton and Billy Durney. “I believe there is a currency among chefs and restaurant folks,” Christensen says. “I joyfully accepted an invitation to cook with Emeril Lagasse at his event in NOLA, and he then was thrilled to come and cook in Raleigh for a great cause.”

The word has gotten out — Raleigh clearly has something special to offer — and the demand for both Raleigh chefs to travel to both near and exotic locales, and for Raleighites to explore with them, is only increasing.

Clockwise from top left: An acorn squash dish; a scene in Montana; chef Scott Crawford.

At the fringes of Boylan Heights, Janet Cowell’s renovated home displays a life of purpose

PRINCIPLED LIVING

by AYN-MONIQUE KLAHRE

photography by CATHERINE NGUYEN

SUNNY OUTLOOK

Janet Cowell sits in the kitchen of her renovated Boylan Heights home. She took inspiration from British design magazines, and considers this space “a little Anglo, a little bohemian.”

Shortly after Janet Cowell became president and CEO of Dix Park Conservancy, she started looking for a home downtown. She wanted something that would be walkable to work and found it in Boylan Heights: a two-story Queen-Anne/Colonial hybrid duplex on W. South Street. “The home’s on the edge of this historic neighborhood, right up against the growth and change that’s happening across Raleigh,” says Cowell. “I know that eventually I’ll be next to some apartments.”

Built sometime in the 1920s, the house was likely first a single-family home. It served as a rooming house at one point and was divided into two apartments in the 1950s. The bones were still there, but some odd choices had been made to divide it up — the front door, for instance, opened onto a stacked washer-dryer — and it was generally in disrepair. “The house was really dilapidated, with a lot of wear and tear and lots of bootleg jobs over the 70-or-so years it had been divided into apartments,” Cowell says. “But it’s efficiently laid-out and still has lots of its historic character.” Among its assets: original hardwood floors, a pretty banister (under many coats of paint), an old fireplace, high ceilings and nice southeastern light. “The

bones were there, with lots of elements we could keep,” she says.

Cowell enlisted David Maurer and his team at Maurer Architecture to renovate the house. She’d known Maurer since her time on City Council and had also started working with him on renovating the historic Stone Houses on the Dix Park grounds. Cowell charged the team with shoring up the house and bringing it closer to its original layout, reflecting her commitment to historical preservation.

She also had a somewhat unexpected request: to keep the rental unit. “It was a cool project — to save a historic house, but keep an apartment in there for naturally occurring affordable housing downtown,” says Maurer. “A lot of people just want to maximize square feet.”

Brooke Tate from Maurer was the project manager for Cowell’s home. The floor plan had been “very compartmentalized for apartment living,” says Tate. Many interior partitions had been added over the years, as well as two doors onto the porch and a poorly done addition on the back. “We took everything back to the original plan, then added to it,” says Tate. They removed the addition and put on a new one to create space for a sunroom downstairs and a mudroom and deck for the apart-

WARM WELCOME

The parlor can act as a guest room, thanks to a Murphy bed hidden inside a cabinet (Cowell painted it green to match the walls) and a closet they added. “My mother is in her 80s and insisted that I have a first-floor guest room,” says Cowell. The sofa and side chair came from her grandparents. She found the 1920s-era French doors online through an architectural salvage shop based in Minneapolis. The fireplace mantel is not original to the home, but from a different home in the neighborhood; Cowell chose the Zellige tile to match the spirit of the home.

FINE DINING

The fireplace mantel in the dining room also came from a Boylan Heights neighbor. Above it is a portrait of Cowell’s cat Leo, which she made at a painting class at the City of Raleigh Museum. The chairs were a find through Father & Son Antiques; she rcovered the seats herself. Throughout the home, Cowell chose more modern lighting to play off the older architectural details.

OFFICE SPACE

The desk belonged to Cowell’s father: “He wrote a lot of sermons here.” The chair came from her time working as a State Senator for the North Carolina General Assembly (see opposite page).

On the desk is one of her grandfather’s cactus lamps from the 1940s. “He made a bunch of funky lamps that I rewired,” she says.

ment upstairs; they also added a downstairs bathroom. They saved much of the original wood, and plaster where they could, and made some modifications to the original floor plan, like widening doorways. “We wanted the home to work for how we use homes now, but with an appreciation for the past,” says Tate.

While the Maurer team worked on the structure, Cowell worked on the interiors, finding period-appropriate details like doors, mantels and hardware through architectural salvage stores and neighbors. “I tried to keep the architectural details the same, but get more modern through lights and tile,” Cowell says. “She really had the interior vision,” says Tate.

Much of the furniture from her previous home, a ranch with a basement in Laurel Hills, wasn’t going to fit in the new place, though. “I gave a lot of stuff to the Habitat ReStore — I wanted to do it right, to give things to people who were actually going to use them,” Cowell says. The items that came along included family heirlooms like a bunch of “funky” lamps made from cacti that her grandfather had gotten on a trip to Arizona in the 1940s; the desk her father, a minister, used to write his sermons; and a Victorian-era sofa from her grandparents. “It’s all pre-war and it just fits into this house,” she says.

Throughout the home, decorative accents point to her life as a minister’s daughter, world traveler and civil servant: A

stained-glass window salvaged from a church offers privacy in the downstairs bathroom; bits of fabric from a trip to India are framed above her bed; and, if you look closely, the cheerfully painted canvas in the upstairs hallways offers a thoughtprovoking message about housing and mental health.

After just under a year of construction, Cowell settled into her home in late 2022. She already knew many people in the neighborhood from her time working for the city, and she has met many more over the last year (especially by volunteering for the Boylan Heights Art Walk). “In the beginning, I was so focused on getting the home how I liked it, I didn’t realize how much it was going to change my lifestyle,” Cowell says. “Obviously I chose it for the location, but now I really can walk to work, to Memorial Auditorium, to multiple restaurants. It’s fabulous to have this walkability, and it’s changed the way I interact with Raleigh.”

For Maurer, the project was special for two reasons: “It was a real honor to work with Janet on her personal residence after being friends for so long. And it was an honor to work on a project that’s literally the last house on the fringe of the Boylan Heights Historic District. It could have scared people away, but Janet took a property that had been overlooked for years and turned it into a gem.”

SERENE SPOTS

Above left: Cowell often works sitting at a church pew she found at Granddaddy’s Antiques in Burlington. “Maybe it’s from all my hours listening to my father, but I find it very comfortable,” she laughs. The art over the pew is by a Cambodian folk artist that Cowell met while traveling through the country when she was living in China in 1989. It depicts the 1953 protests against the French as their colonial rule came to an end. Above right: A detail of her office chair. Below: The stained glass over the window in the first-floor bathroom is from a church in Minneapolis (it’s pictured in the small frame). She likes it because it reminds her of her father. The room is filled with photographs of him and her family.

BRIGHT SPOTS

Above: The renovation removed an old addition and added a sunroom and utility space on the back of the house, which created room for a bathroom, laundry and porch on the second floor for the apartment. Bottom left: Cowell used a period-approriate William Morris print wallpaper in the laundry room. Below right: A detail from the shower in the primary bathroom; Cowell used tile in rich colors for each of the bathrooms.

WORDLY VIEWS Cowell displays souvenirs from her travels in her bedroom, including a piece of fabric found in India that’s draped over the headboard. She uses an old desk from an elementary school in rural Kentucky as a nightstand. “They were using these wooden desks until the mid-1970s.”

CREATING COMFORT

Above left: In a nook above the fireplace in Cowell’s bedroom hangs a portrait of Mary Magdalene and a pair of icons from a friend of hers who recently passed away, who was Greek Orthodox. Above right: The vanity in the bath is an antique/architectural salvage. Below: Cowell moved the original mantel from the parlor into the guest room, but left the finish as it was when she found it because she loved the patina, and left the brick from the original structure exposed in the fireplace.

OUTSIDE IN

“Everyone in our firm is passionate about historic preservation, so we’re very happy to help a homeowner like Janet save a home and repurpose it,” says Brooke Tate. Part of their work included putting in a periodappropriate door and uncovering sidelights that had been boarded up, as well as closing two doors on the wraparound porch that had been added as apartment entrances. “This home is in such a visible location and so connected to downtown, it’s gotten a lot of attention,” says Tate. Below: Cowell stuck to the original layout of the home upstairs. She found the art in the hallway at Fountain House, a nonprofit in New York City that supports people suffering from mental illness.

With grace and strength, Debra Austin paved the way for Black ballerinas

Raising the Barre

by HAMPTON WILLIAMS HOFER photography by JUSTIN KASE CONDER

From the front of a sunlit studio on Stony Brook Drive, Debra Austin guides the next generation of dancers at our city’s professional ballet company. Her soft demeanor does not betray the force that she has been in the world of ballet: fiery on stage, meticulous as a teacher and brave in blazing her own way in a historically white, elitist art form.

Austin was the first Black female dancer to join the New York City Ballet and later the first Black ballerina to become a principal dancer with a major American ballet company, the Pennsylvania Ballet. Fortunately for Raleigh, her transcontinental journey as a ballerina, wife and mother landed her here, as a ballet master for Carolina Ballet and teacher at The School of Carolina Ballet.

For Austin, the art of ballet holds immense importance. “It matters because it’s so beautiful,” she says. “Gorgeous costumes and bodies and music — it’s an incredible art form. Like anything, you have to learn to appreciate it, and then you can see the beauty of ballet.”

Austin was 8 years old in 1963, when she and her family moved from Harlem to the Bronx. She befriended a new neighbor who was taking ballet with a teacher down the street. But after one class, the teacher, a former Rockette from Radio City Music Hall, promptly informed the Austins that their daughter had “no talent.” Undaunted, Austin and her parents found another studio. “I believe in finding out for yourself what you can and cannot do,” Austin says. By the time Austin was 12, she had earned a Ford Foundation Scholarship into the prestigious School of American Ballet, the associate school of the New York City Ballet, which boasts the largest repertoire of any American ballet company. Four years later, renowned choreographer George Balanchine came in to observe a class just after the summer break. He saw something in Austin and handpicked her to join the New York City Ballet, making her the company’s first Black female dancer in 1971, at age 16.

“From the moment Debbie flew onto the New York City Ballet stage with all her might and flight and grace, with the most gorgeous legs and feet, as lithe and stunning as a gazelle, Mr. B knew a ballet star was in the making,” says Austin’s longtime friend Lilly Tartikoff, a ballet prodigy in her own right. “She was my best friend from the moment we met and remains one of the most genuine, talented, kind and beautiful women I have ever known.”

Austin danced many principal parts in the New York City Ballet productions, including Symphony C, Divertimento #15 and Ballo Della Regina, in which Balanchine choreographed a signature solo for her. (Austin’s daughter, Olivia Boieru, 26, has watched her mother’s Ballo Della Regina solo over 1,000 times. “Each time I watch the video, I wish I could have been one of the lucky people to witness in person that amount of joy, grace and strength on stage,” she says.) Of the per-

formance in Ballo Della Regina, THe New York Times declared that Austin “reigned supreme… soaring into space.”

After nine years with New York City Ballet, Austin moved to Switzerland to join the Zurich Ballet, where she was promoted to soloist. There, she expanded her repertoire by dancing numerous principal roles, including Myrtha in Heinz Spoerli’s Giselle, and touring throughout Europe. Then, in 1982, Austin further solidified her role in history by accepting a contract with the Pennsylvania Ballet under then-artistic director Robert “Ricky” Weiss. Weiss made Austin a principal, which in turn made her the first Black ballerina to reach the rank of principal dancer with a major American ballet company.

In Pennsylvania, Austin shined in lead roles in Swan Lake, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Giselle and Coppélia, and danced the Sugar Plum Fairy and Dewdrop in Balanchine’s THe Nutcracker. While

A photograph by Steven Caras of Austin dancing as the Dewdrop in a 1988 performance in Balanchine’s The Nutcracker.

“He cast me in so many classical ballets because he believed in me, and that was not always the story with other directors.”

Debra Austin

breaking barriers as a Black woman in ballet, “race wasn’t at the forefront of my career,” Austin says. But she does recall one incident when she was cast as a lead in La Sylphide, one of the world’s oldest surviving ballets, which features dances by an air spirit called a sylph. The man staging the production claimed he didn’t really “see” Austin as playing a sylph. When

Weiss asked him why, he said he simply hadn’t seen a Black sylph before. Weiss replied: Well, have you ever seen a sylph before? “Ricky was colorblind, and I was fortunate,” Austin says. “He cast me in so many classical ballets because he believed in me, and that was not always the story with other directors.”

While in Pennsylvania, Austin met

Romanian dancer Marin Boieru, who won the gold medal at the International Ballet Competition-Varna, and who has performed as a principal dancer and toured in numerous companies in the U.S. and Europe. Austin and Boieru danced together for eight years before Austin’s retirement from dancing in 1990 at age 35. They were married in 1992 and both went

Opposite page, clockwise from top: Debra Austin with Rudolf Nureyev in Apollo; in costume for Bolero; in The Nutcracker; a color image from Bolero; Balanchine in the wings during Ballo Della Regina; a newspaper clipping; as the black swan in Swan Lake This page: Austin today.

Balanchine, she has always been a role model for me,” Paranicas says. “She has not only elevated the world of ballet with her exceptional skill but has also become a symbol of inclusivity and diversity.”

At Carolina Ballet, Austin helps make ballet accessible to everyone, training 10-year-olds up to pre-professionals, opening doors for young dancers to learn and train.

Both now ballet masters teaching classes at Carolina Ballet, Austin and Boieru impart their knowledge onto young dancers and company hopefuls. Jan Burkhard, principal dancer with Carolina Ballet and chairman of the faculty for the School of Carolina Ballet, counts herself fortunate to have worked closely with Austin for nearly two decades. “Debbie has the ability to give you confidence in your dancing. She has bestowed her knowledge on many, and anyone can attest to its authenticity and honesty,” says Burkhard, “Anyone who has had Debbie as a teacher is lucky.”

Carolina Ballet has grown to become one of the country’s premier professional ballet companies, producing some 400 ballets and garnering international acclaim. While Austin has returned to the School of American Ballet as a guest teacher and serves on the Alumni Advisory Committee on Diversity and Inclusion there, she remains devoted to Carolina Ballet as head mistress.

“She’s the most unassuming, gentle being to ever grace this studio, oozing the love she has for ballet, and she shares it with anyone willing to absorb it,” says Zalman Raffael, Carolina Ballet’s artistic director and CEO, who has known about Austin for 20 years, since he was a child honing his craft at the New York City Ballet. “Debbie is an icon. A legend if there ever was one.”

on to teach ballet in Florida.

Then Weiss was hired as the director of a brand new regional ballet company: Carolina Ballet in Raleigh. Believing in their artistic values and vision, Weiss recruited Austin and Boieru to train and develop the dancers at Carolina Ballet, and they moved to Raleigh in 1997. “Our daughters were 5 and 18 months,

and bringing a young family here was perfect,” Austin says. They’ve made Cary, and the Carolina Ballet, their home.

Austin’s lifelong friend Mary Paranicas has relished her front-row seat to Austin’s extraordinary journey: “From our early days of playful twirls in the living room, to her signature jumps in roles choreographed for her by George

Austin still spends her days in a ballet studio, now coaching, teaching the next generation her mastery of Giselle. Her daughters are grown, flown, pursuing their own passions, but still inspired by where they came from. “Balanchine saw something in my mom, which led her to pave the way for countless women and women of color,” Olivia says. “Every day, I am proud to be her daughter.”

This and opposite page: Austin leads a rehearsal for Carolina Ballet. Opposite page, bottom right: Austin with her husband, Marin Boieru.

HUNT HARVEST & S

Garland Truffles in Hillsborough is credited with fueling the truffle craze in the United States — but it hasn’t been an easy path

by DALE EDWARDS

photography by BERT VANDERVEEN

About three years after he planted 4,500 hazelnut trees on his sprawling orchard, Franklin Garland could see small circles of dried, brown, dead grass starting to form at the base of each tree. He smiled, satisfied that things underground were working as they should.

Garland is a truffle farmer, the owner of Garland Truffles, a rolling 10-acre orchard on the outskirts of Hillsborough. Over the decades, he has served as president of the North American Truffle Growers Association, which represents more than 100 truffle growers nationwide. NATGA has dubbed him “the founding father of the truffle industry in the Americas.”

The brown area, called the burn or “brûlée,” is a sign that the tree’s roots and the fungi attached to them are growing together. That’s a good thing, because most of the activity needed to grow truffles takes place underground. The symbiotic partnership between the roots and the fungi is fueled by the nutrients from the other plant life at the surface around the tree. As the brûlée expands around each tree in the rows of the orchard, the circles grow together to form a sort of scalloped edge.

But it takes a long, long time.

Back in 1979, when he was 28 years old, Garland didn’t know truffles from a chunk of dirt. That’s when his father Raymond, an investor and devoted reader of THe Wall Street Journal, showed his son

an article about a new method out of France that used inoculated trees to produce truffles. The elder Garland knew his son was into growing things — Franklin was already experimenting with raising off-season tomatoes in his greenhouse — and thought truffles might be something he could try. Plus, it could turn out to be a good investment.

“My dad said, let’s check this out, so we did,” Franklin says. They learned of a French company that was holding meetand-greets and selling the inoculated plants in the U.S., so the two headed out to Santa Rosa, California.

“They wined and dined us and showed us everything about truffles… except the truffles themselves,” he says.

“We had a very nice meal, drank very

good wine, but no truffles. We were very skeptical.”

But Franklin was determined to see if this rare buried treasure was for real, so he and his dad traveled to France to further their exploration of growing truffles. Franklin visited a nursery that had a large greenhouse, similar to the one he already had going in Hillsborough, that was full of small plants. But still, he saw no actual truffles.

Finally, “we went to a restaurant in the city of Lyon, and that’s where we had our first truffle,” Franklin said. “It was a truffle omelet, and I was hooked. I fell in love with the taste. With the aroma. I knew then that I had to grow truffles. Even if it was just for me.”

Today, the driveway leading to Garland

Truffles is about a half-mile long. It threads through mature trees and past winding creeks before you reach the house that Franklin built himself, trimmed in brilliant yellow and blue. Just past the backyard, hazelnut trees slope away and curve throughout the property.

In 1975, Franklin bought the mostly wooded tract of land where he would later build his home and his greenhouse. In 1980, just a year after learning about truffles in the first place, he purchased and planted 750 inoculated trees and became a farmer. Of that initial group, 400 survived. In 1992, the first truffles at his orchard were harvested, and for the next 10 years, Franklin’s farm produced about 50 pounds of truffles per harvest — an exquisite delicacy that can fetch

more than $1,000 per pound. Clearly, Franklin’s father was right about truffles being a strong investment.

Speaking of investments: the Garlands say it’s a good idea, when the time is right, to invest in a trained truffle dog to harvest the truffles. While pigs are commonly used in France, and an Italian breed of dog, the Lagotto Romagnolo, is known for its excellent nose, Franklin prefers more common breeds. “The best truffle dog I’ve ever had was a yellow Labrador. He would paw at a spot, dig around it, pop out a truffle, take it in his mouth and then drop it in my hand,” Franklin says. “Can’t beat that.”

The Garlands now have two standard poodles that Franklin trained to sniff out the tasty, buried treasures. “You can

Opposite page: Franklin Garland’s home, which he built himself. This page: Franklin teaches guests about truffles.

pretty much train any kind of dog to find truffles,” Franklin says. “Some breeds do a better job than others of letting you know where they are. Our poodles sniff out the truffles and paw at the ground where they’re growing.”

Since their orchards have been established, the demand for these rare spores has been constant. Franklin and his wife Betty, who is co-owner and operator at Garland Truffles, enjoy finding new uses for them. In addition to truffle omelets, Franklin and Betty have made truffle butter, truffle ice cream and truffle champagne.

While 50 pounds from a harvest may not sound like a big deal, for a long time, the Garlands were able to have year-afteryear success growing truffles in the U.S.,

Susi Gott Séguret, chef and founder of the Seasonal School of Culinary Arts in Asheville, credits the Garlands with proving that truffles grown on American soil were just as viable as the ones grown in Europe.

which set them apart from other wouldbe fungi farmers. Franklin’s truffles attracted the attention of renowned chefs and even celebrities. Franklin and one of his truffle-sniffing dogs earned an

appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman in 2004, and in 2007, Martha Stewart, who had an interest in growing her own truffles, traveled to North Carolina to visit the farm. While there, Franklin prepared an omelet using truffles harvested from his inoculated trees. Stewart raved about the dish, and later invited him on to her show to prepare the omelet.

Susi Gott Séguret, chef and founder of the Seasonal School of Culinary Arts in Asheville, credits the Garlands with proving that truffles grown on American soil were just as viable as the ones grown in Europe. “Franklin and Betty supplied the truffles in the early years of the Asheville Truffle Experience festival,” Séguret says, referring to an annual event

This page, clockwise from top: Slicing a truffle for cooking; truffle butter; a tour group enjoys a truffle-infused feast. Opposite page: Macaroni and cheese made with truffle sauce.

where ticket holders try an eclectic menu of truffle foods and drinks, mingle with aficionados, and learn about planting and harvesting the prized spores.

“There are different truffle species that are commonly eaten, and each of them has a distinct profile,” Séguret explains, noting Garland Truffles primarily produces the tuber melanosporum variety, also known as the black truffle. “It’s my favorite — it has a flavor that hints at molasses or black olives. It’s kind of a deep, dark, sexy flavor.”

In 2004, Franklin’s original orchard was wiped out by the disease Eastern Filbert Blight, or EFB. Fearing any planting of the same kind of truffle trees would meet the same fate, he spent the next seven years experimenting with his

own version of inoculated trees before finding one that was resistant to the disease. In 2012, the Garlands were once again ready to make their mark as truffle farmers in the U.S., planting 4,500 new trees that are even now producing truffles in spots. By next year, Garland Truffles should be providing between 500 to 1,000 pounds per harvest and will be among the largest truffle-producing orchards in the nation.

In addition to selling truffles, Franklin and Betty sell trees that they have inoculated through their own technology and formulas, which they keep secret. The pair hosts classes and workshops for people who are interested in starting their own truffle farms. (Though “we get

a lot of lookie-loos,” Franklin says. “They are more interested in coming here and getting free truffles to eat.”) The Garlands are bluntly honest with people who sign up. “If you don’t have a lot of money to get started and a lot of time and money to maintain it, we’re going to discourage you from trying truffle farming,” Betty says. “It’s an expensive undertaking. We want people to understand that you need deep pockets to grow truffles.”

“And patience,” Franklin jokes.

And if all goes as planned, next year, the Garlands’ poodles will have oodles of truffles to find, and Franklin cannot wait.

“I just love them,” he said. “From the first time I tasted them, I’ve never stopped loving truffles.”

Opposite page: Gavan Garland follows Dusky the truffle-sniffing poodle. This page, clockwise from top: A group follows Gavan and Dusky; Franklin Garland (left) and his son Gavan; Franklin sniffs a truffle; digging for truffles.

Come for island life. Stay to enjoy life.

Make the most of every wave. At Wilmington and Island Beaches our stays have plenty of ways to help your family kick back and cool down after a long beach day. Enjoy historic riverfront or oceanfront accommodations with views that will surely take your breath away. Discover the best of the Carolina coast all in one place.

Get Out & Explore!

Raleigh is the perfect jumping-off point for destinations from the mountains to the sea — and beyond!

BIRTHPLACE OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

Halifax, NC

Ma ke plans to take the ideal day trip from Raleigh to Halifax County, NC. Just a scenic drive away, the Town of Halifax offers a captivating journey back in time. Halifax’s historical significance as the “Birthplace of American Independence” beckons history enthusiasts and curious travelers alike.

Begin your day trip by strolling through the well-preserved historic district, where colonial architecture and informative museums transport you back to 1776. Here, you can learn about the adoption of the Halifax Resolves, a pivotal moment in American history.

Fa rm-to-table enthusiasts will delight in The Hen & The Hog’s commitment to sustainable, locally-grown produce. For barbecue aficionados, Halifax County is a pilgrimage destination. Here, you can savor the legendary Eastern North Carolina barbecue — slow-cooked, pit-smoked, and perfectly seasoned. The tender, smoky, and vinegar-based barbecue is a taste of tradition passed down for generations. Ralph’s Barbeque in Weldon or Grandpa’s Kitchen in Littleton are worth the journey! Top off your day with a cocktail at Weldon Mills Distillery and take home their award-winning bourbon.

In Halifax County, you can savor history, soak in nature’s beauty, and enjoy a delectable meal, making it a perfect day trip destination for Raleigh residents looking for an unforgettable experience.

HALIFAX COUNTY CONVENTION & VISITORS BUREAU VisitHalifax.com

HALIFAX COUNTY VISITORS CENTER 260 Premier Boulevard Roanoke Rapids, NC 27870 (I-95 NC Exit 173) 252-535-1687, 800-522-4282 Monday-Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

EXPLORE GLOBAL. SHOP LOCAL.

Adventures Beyond “Airplane Mode”

Great Outdoor Provision Co. makes gearing up for travel easy. Wherever you are bound, let our friendly and experienced crew customize your adventure kit so that your only surprises are good ones. With the best selection of travel equipment comes attentive insights on how to best enjoy the beyond. From fly fishing classes to guided trips on local waters, Great Outdoor Provision Co. can help you switch from airplane mode to active mode. For inspiration on your next adventure, join us at The Rialto on February 28 & 29 for our adventure travel film series. See QR code for ticket information.

VILLAGE DISTRICT

919-833-1741

GreatOutdoorProvision.com

Blane Chocklett & Flip Pallot

photo by Oliver Sutro

HERE, CHAMPIONSHIP GOLF IS JUST THE START.

Pinehurst Area, NC

The eyes of the world will be on the Pinehurst, Southern Pines, Aberdeen area in 2024 as the U.S. Open takes place at Pinehurst No. 2, June 10-16. But for visitors to the Sandhills of North Carolina, there are a few new things to experience in the year ahead.

In Southern Pines, the BHAWK Distillery opened in January. The facility is owned by Army veterans Brad and Jessica Halling and their Sergeant’s Valor and Madam Colonel products will express gratitude for extraordinary service through premium spirits.

In downtown Carthage, Moore County’s newest brewery is the latest rendition by Southern Pines Brewing Company. The two-story restaurant/bar revived the old Tyson & Jones Buggy Factory and along with more than 50 taps, the brewery will feature a downstairs speakeasy, world-class cocktail program and pizza flights!

The World Golf Hall of Fame returns to its original home in Pinehurst and is expected to open just in time for the U.S. Open in June. Maintained by the USGA, the museum will showcase an array of golf artifacts and displays for everyone to enjoy. On the first day of spring, the ever-popular Pinecone Pathways program returns as 100 glass pinecones created by glassmakers at Starworks are hidden by the Pinehurst, Southern Pines, Aberdeen Area CVB along more than two dozen trails in Moore County. The program will last for five weeks starting on March 19 and ending on Earth Day (April 22).

La stly, on April 3, Pinehurst Resort will officially open its newest course in three decades. Pinehurst No. 10 was designed by Tom Doak and is a sprawling layout with rolling fairways, elevation changes and amazing views. Plan your visit to the Sandhills by visiting HomeofGolf.com.

PINEHURST, SOUTHERN PINES, ABERDEEN AREA CONVENTION & VISITORS BUREAU

155 W. New York Avenue, Suite 300 Southern Pines, NC 28387

910-692-3330

HomeofGolf.com

FIND YOUR TRAIL TO VINEYARDS & THE GREAT OUTDOORS

Elkin, NC

El kin, nestled in the heart of North Carolina’s Yadkin Valley, offers a charming blend of outdoor adventure and refined indulgence. The town is a haven for nature enthusiasts, boasting an extensive network of picturesque trails that wind through lush forests and alongside the serene Yadkin River. Hikers and bikers can explore the scenic beauty of the Elkin & Alleghany Rail Trail, while those seeking a more challenging trek can venture into the nearby Stone Mountain State Park.

In addition to its natural allure, Elkin has become a burgeoning destination for wine enthusiasts. The Yadkin Valley is recognized as a prominent wine region, and Elkin stands as a gateway to its vineyards and wineries. Visitors can embark on a delightful wine trail, sampling the finest vintages produced by local winemakers who have perfected their craft. The town’s wineries offer a welcoming atmosphere where patrons can savor award-winning wines while taking in breathtaking views of rolling vineyards. Elkin, with its harmonious blend of outdoor recreation and vinicultural delights, provides a unique escape for those seeking a perfect balance between adventure and relaxation.

TOWN OF ELKIN, NC 226 N. Bridge Street

Elkin, NC 28621 336-258-8900

RESEARCH LAB 67 MILLION YEARS IN THE MAKING

Dueling Dinosaurs

The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences is the largest institution of its kind in the Southeastern US and the state’s most visited museum. Their 300,000-square-foot campus features seven floors across two buildings for guests to discover. In the Nature Exploration Center, exhibits and live animal displays reveal North Carolina’s rich habitats, wildlife and geology from the Appalachian Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. The Nature Research Center provides an unparalleled opportunity to see science in action, featuring hands-on, interactive spaces and glass-walled laboratories where visitors can watch researchers work in real-time.

On April 27, the Museum will open Dueling Dinosaurs — a combination exhibit and research lab 67 million years in the making. The state-of-the-art experience first transports visitors to the Cretaceous, then dives into hypotheses of how the mostcomplete fossils ever found of a tyrannosaur and Triceratops were buried together. At the center of the exhibit, the SECU DinoLab will offer visitors unprecedented access to Museum paleontologists as they work to unearth these groundbreaking specimens in plain view. Over time, research on the Dueling Dinosaurs will answer questions that will change the study of dinosaurs forever, and the Museum invites you along for the ride. Admission is free.

NORTH CAROLINA MUSEUM OF NATURAL SCIENCES 11 W. Jones Street Raleigh, NC 919-707-9800 NaturalSciences.org

SAVOR & SUPPORT THE LOST COLONY

Roanoke Island, NC

Wine! Beer! Food! Music! Old and new world wines from around the globe will be poured, accompanied by local fare served with warm OBX hospitality, at The Lost Colony Wine & Culinary Festival. With the breathtaking Roanoke Sound as your backdrop, the sixth annual festival takes place at Waterside Theatre.

On Saturday, April 13 this wine, beer and culinary event will take place on the grounds of The Lost Colony. Many of the Outer Banks’ favorite restaurants and best chefs will be serving their specialties, complementing the body and aromas of the wines poured and craft beers featured.

Presented by TowneBank, admission includes wine tasting, craft beers, local fare, silent auction, an art show and live music. The popular Beer Garden showcases local breweries, including some beers ONLY found on the Outer Banks. With drink in hand, stroll behind the historic Waterside Theatre Stage to take in the amazing views across the sound to Jockey’s Ridge sand dunes and the Wright Brothers Memorial. Great music will further engage your soul while you bid on fabulous items in the silent auction, where all proceeds benefit The Lost Colony production! This popular event is sponsored by The Outer Banks Visitors Bureau.

THE LOST COLONY

1409 National Park Drive

Manteo, NC 27954

252-473-6000

TLCWineFest.com

General Admission: $80

VIP Ticket: $95

SIP,

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THE WHIRL

WALTER’s roundup of gatherings, celebrations, fundraisers and more around Raleigh.

RPD FOUNDATION RECEPTION

On Oct. 12, the Raleigh Police Department Foundation held a reception at the Carolina Country Club. Hosts for the event were Cece and Peter Scott, Caroline and Jim Stone, Jody and Tom Darden, Kate and Tommy Fonville, Joan and Prentiss Baker, Margaret and Ted Bratton, Hilda Pinnix and Al Ragland, Catherine and Mason Williams, Joy and Temple Sloan III, and Rosemary and Smedes York.

L.T. McCrimmon, Estella Patterson, Brenda Gibson, Donald Gintzig

Estella Patterson speaking

Peter Scott

Jim Stone

Tommy Fonville, Prentiss Baker, Brenda Gibson, Jim Stone, Catherine Williams, Caroline Stone, Mason Williams, Estella Patterson, Cece Scott, Peter Scott, Jody Darden, Tom Darden, Al Ragland

Brenda Gibson Kathy Brown, Garry Brown

THE WHIRL

RED-CARPET SPEAKER SERIES

On Oct. 19, The Cardinal at North Hills held a Red-Carpet Speaker Series event featuring NFL legend, sports commentator and corporate speaker Joe Theismann. Theismann hosted a first responders’ luncheon and spoke on the “Challenge of Change,” a topic close to his heart due to a catastrophic leg injury he sustained on live television at the height of his career.

On Dec. 1, Gallery C hosted a First Friday opening reception for Turkish-American guest artist Hulya Kucuk. Kucuk is a multimedia artist with a background as a clothing designer for the European and Russian markets. Gallery C’s Guest Artist Program highlights emerging talent in the visual arts.

Guests enjoy meeting Joe Theismann

Bob Brainard, Don Paschal, Barbara Nowland, Joe Theismann, Bobbie Furr, Sue Heusner, Don Rose

Jaime Pacheco, Joe Theismann Joe Theismann, Craig Harris

HULYA KUCUK AT GALLERY C

Rob Huckabee, Kate Marshburn

John Gilmore, Jessica Gilley

Hulya Kucuk, Gokhan Kucuk

Courtesy

The Cardinal at North Hills Davis Choun

4 Augusta Way, Pinehurst, NC 28374

5 Beds | 5 Baths | 6,345 square feet | $1,850,000

Absolutely breathtaking property with over two acres of private and tranquil settings. Charming Historic Estate, just one and one half miles from the historic Village of Pinehurst. Located off Donald Ross Drive, the “Parson’s Estate” is a rambling, all brick home set amidst beautiful gardens and waterfalls. Across the back of the home is an expansive patio overlooking the terraced stacked stone gardens leading to the private pond. Numerous updates include new windows throughout. The home’s interior is exquisite, special features abound in every room. Carved mill work and deep moldings grace the formal and casual rooms. Beautiful hardwood floors, Hunt room with handsome built-ins, custom wine cellar, gourmet kitchen with butler’s pantry and the ensuite master bedroom with fireplace are a small part of what makes this home desirable to the most discerning of buyers. Pinehurst Membership transfer.

THE WHIRL

WEAVER DENTISTRY OPEN HOUSE

Weaver Dentistry hosted an open house on Nov. 9 to celebrate its new office and to honor the rich history of a practice that has provided quality dental care since 1899. Patients, dental professionals and friends of the practice gathered with Dr. Greg Weaver, Dr. Jayme Wood and the staff for food and fellowship.

courtesty

Greg Weaver

Greg Weaver, Jayme Wood

Greg Weaver, Susan Weaver, Carly Price, Duncan Price

Julie Nickens, Greg Weaver, Amy Lowe

Cathy Godbold, Heather Stutts, Jayme Wood, Jacquie Williams, Gracie Luzardo, Amber Snider, Beryal Denton, Greg Weaver, Jillian Boufford

CIVIC CREDIT UNION INSPIRATION CELEBRATION AWARDS

On Nov. 16, Civic Credit Union hosted its inaugural Inspiration Celebration Awards. The evening celebrated the nearly $2 million that Civic Local Foundation has given to strengthen communities. Ripe For Revival was recognized as Nonprofit of the Year, Mikayla Watts was named Student Scholarship Recipient of the Year, and Civic Local Foundation celebrated $1 million in scholarship awards through its partnership with UNC’s School of Government.

DALHOUSE SOFT OPENING

Dalhouse, A Store for Children hosted a friends and family for a soft opening on Nov. 16. Over 75 people showed up to support the small business. Dalhouse was founded by Caitlyn Scott, a North Carolina native who spent her early career working in the fashion industry in New York City.

Liquid Pleasure

LaToya King, Dayatra Matthews

Aimee Wall, Dwayne Naylor Kara Cox, Will Kornegay, Beth Gardner, JT Tyndall

Matt Hupman, Caroline Hupman, Caitlyn Scott, Paul Scott, Betty Hart, Kristen Neal, Brad Minsley, Kelly Minsley, Jeb Neal, Shelby Neal

Amy Yarbrough, Caroline Crockett, Caitlyn Scott, Bonnie Hall

Jess Carter, Kelli Briggs Isaac Matthews, Rae Matthews

Jazmine Kilpatrick, Mikayla Watts, Crystal Prevatte

A Grand Vision

The new Downtown Cary Park was decades in the making — and it’s perfect for today

by AYN-MONIQUE KLAHRE photography by JOSHUA STEADMAN

The Downtown Cary Park opened to much excitement in mid-November, a 7-acre plot packed with all the amenities you could want: walking paths, play spaces, an amphitheater, dog park, concessions and more. Just 20 minutes from downtown Raleigh, it’s nestled between Academy and Walker Streets, close to popular restaurants and the performing arts center, and will be a new anchor for Cary.

Over the decades, the property had been developed around the edges, but not in the interior. But in 2001, the Cary Town Council approved a plan to create a park as a focal point for downtown. “For a town of our size — especially back then — it was impressive for the leadership to have that kind of foresight,” says Joy Ennis, the park’s general manager. Five years ago, the town selected OJB, a national

landscape and urban planning firm, to design the park with input from the community.

Today, the park offers several unique amenities. There’s an inventive play area featuring a pair of play structures that look like cardinals. A large stormwater pond acts as an attractive water feature, with stones at the perimeter that entice kids to play. A skywalk rises into the tree canopy to offer a different perspective. And dog owners love the Bark Bar, where they can enjoy a beverage as the pups cavort (divided into areas for the “Biggies” and the “Smalls”). Ennis says she might be most excited about the botanic gardens, though: “We planted 66,000 plants, and once they’re established, they will create these amazing, quiet spaces for

people to enjoy.”

Though the park is just a couple months old, “it has been completely adopted by everybody,” says Ennis. “People are using it just how we hoped they would.” From an economic standpoint, Cary is already seeing the benefit as the park draws residents and visitors to the area, and Ennis believes that it will serve as a destination in Cary in the decades to come. “The design and bones of it are so strong, it has real staying power,” she says. “And it’ll evolve as we create more programming and events.”

“It’s a world-class park that you’d expect to see in a bigger city,” says Raleigh resident Ryan Johnston, who recently visited with her family. “It’s forward-thinking in its design and practical about how the community will use the space. We’ll keep making the trip to use the park!”

Your children. Your family. Your health. Your well-being. Your place.

From pregnancy and childbirth to mammograms, menopause and more, the care is as compassionate as it is comprehensive. Covering everything and anything female from outpatient and inpatient surgery to specialty and subspecialty care, and the most advanced technology. After all, when it comes to you, your health and your family, you’re the decision maker. And the decision is clearly WakeMed Women’s.

WakeMed Women’s