2018 Festival Recap

Click! 120, is now established as our “festival within a festival” and we had more visitors than ever during those 5 days (120 hours) of core programming. Two of our four keynote presenters not only spoke, but shared their work within incredible installations and were an omnipresent force of interaction during 120. Our new portfolio reviews, complete with a bowling social and a massage therapist concluded with another portfolio walk at The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. We had the Art bus tours, not one but TWO PIC grants, a billboard exhibition, and quite a bit more to engage the community.

Keith Carter was his usual brilliant self at his Keynote address at The Nasher Museum of Art, and we followed the talk with a luminary-lit stroll across the street for his monumental outdoor fifty-year career retrospective installation and celebration of the release of his new monograph Keith Carter: Fifty Years  at the Rubenstein Center for the Performing Arts (“The Ruby”) But Keith wasn’t done there–he sat in with the classical musicians we hired for the reception for an evening-capping jam session. And did we mention, he also found time to work with Duke MFA students…? We do keep our keynote presenters busy!

Keith Carter keynote Video

Mona Kuhn, however, was not to be outdone. She delivered her keynote at The Ruby and helped launch Click! 120 with the unveiling of her immersive installation “Experimental” at The Fruit in downtown Durham. In collaboration with sound design by Boris Salchow and documentary filmmaker Kent Corley, a film surrounding this project has been created and we are excited to share it here. Just like Keith, Mona seemed to be everywhere in her time here. I think she, and then her family, were at every event, and Mona even popped in as a roving reviewer for the Class of 2018! We can’t thank Keith and Mona both enough for their wonderful sharing energies.

Our final keynote of 120 was Anastasia Taylor-Lind, an incredible English/Swedish journalist. 21c Museum Hotel hosted her talk and accompanied it with a small exhibit of her work. Anastasia also worked with students, in her case with the MFA students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Later in the month we were treated to our final keynote by David Maisel at the North Carolina Museum of Art who also engaged with folks at other events in his time, including the reception for the juried Photobook exhibit.

The 2018 Click! Festival featured over 35 exhibitions. Photography blanketed the Triangle and Triad regions once again and even brightened up the roadways in between with our Billboard exhibition, which was juried by the inimitable Aline Smithson! Several other highlights deserve special mention. The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University mounted a major exhibition of regional photography in their “Across County Lines: Contemporary Photography from the Piedmont” which featured over 100 works by 39 photographers. Tim Duffy’s tintypes showed brightly at the Gregg Museum in Raleigh. Tobia Makover took over the curation for the outstanding “Murmurations” exhibit at the Visual Art Exchange.

We debuted our two “Solo Cup” prize winners, Tim Walter at Through this Lens Gallery and Patty Carrol at the 21c Museum Hotel. Cassilhaus featured “Diapositive,” a thematically adventurous show featuring six artists reimagining and re-contextualizing analog 35mm slides, and was accompanied by several artist’s talks,. Over at KONTEK the graceful work of Mark Steinmetz, drawn from the Do Good Fund Collection, was on display. We are once again extremely grateful for the hard work of the Durham Public Art Committee and Chris Ogden that brought the FENCE to Durham for the second year. The largest outdoor exhibition of photography also featured docent/artist talks including a Pecha Kucha-style night at the Durham Arts Council Theater. We awarded two PIC grants in 2018, Maria Juri’s project on photo-based quilts was on display at the Scrap Exchange and Phyllis Dooney’s grant resulted in an incredible one-night-only event from her “The Vertigo of Time” project, a combination of projections and spoken word performances on the site of her subject, the historic Stagville Plantation. (About a million links needed in this section, we will try to dig them up.)

Education continues to be a central component to our mission for the Click! Festival. Our keynote speakers all worked with students and we were pleased to offer several programs during Click! 120 including two days of seminars by the incomparable Mary Virginia Swanson, which included breakout sessions for students. Along with Horse & Buggy Press’s Dave Wofford and UNC Sloane Librarian Alice Whiteside, Mary Virginia Swanson was also a juror for our Photobook exhibit which presented 18 books on display and awarded three purchase prizes by the UNC Sloane Art library. After the Photobook exhibit reception at Horse & Buggy Press and Friends, Mary Virginia Swanson gave a talk on publishing and our jurors were joined by Lisa McCarty for a robust panel discussion at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Additionally, The Durham Arts Council, The Center for Documentary Studies and NCMA all had a variety of workshops and programs available for the public.

We were pleased once again to use the historic Varsity Theatrein Chapel Hill, where two films on Keith Carter were screened and followed by an intimate Q&A session (where wasn’t Keith?.) Two other notable talks included one by Mark Steinmetz at the Durham Arts Council, and The UNC Art Department brought in Joel Sternfeld (after a hurricane delay!) The Vintage Image Gallery had discussions on the use of color in photography prior to Kodachrome. We were delighted to work with a new partner, Counter Culture Coffee, to offer a series of talks by regional artists, coinciding with their exhibition at their HQ and their Friday morning coffee tastings.

Bonus notes:
The first ever “Diffusion Tapes” by friend of the fest Blue Mitchell. Featuring George Slade, the value of reviews, and some kinds words about Click!