After an enchanting 2 weeks in Italy, where sites and history  from centuries past, filled our every minute, I worried that re-entry to Chapel Hill might be difficult. But my fears were quickly abated.

First, we are anxiously awaiting the birth of our premier GrandBaby. He is due any day and clearly the anticipation of his appearance is keeping the entire family excited with prospects of this new treasure. While this excited Grandma is certain she is about to have her own grand artistic  masterpiece in swaddling clothes, I really do also want to recount some recent noteworthy events in our local art scene.

Both UNC and Duke museums offered unusual and thought provoking programs this week. At the Ackland, Diane Davis, the resident photographer and archivist, presented her work. Diane is digitally archiving the entire Ackland Art collection. Her presentation began in the scanning laboratory where Diane explained how  the sophisticated camera lens, lighting systems, scanning computer and integrations systems are operated. After the technical demonstration, Diane shared a slide show of some of her favorite items that she has unearthed from the thousands of prints she is methodically recording. The end result is that once scanned and labeled, students, art historians and art lovers will have digital access to these images. Museums all over the world are slowly following this path. With the union of computer, cloud, technology this opens “pandora’s box” of art image access to ALL!

Thursday night the Nasher Museum at Duke offered a dynamic program entitled “The Guerrilla Girls: Conscience of the Art World “. Just as their name denotes, guerilla girls are feminists, who in a radical style of protest, have taken on a guerilla warfare approach to bringing attention to the inequalities in representation of woman artists and artists of color. Their approach is a unique  merge of humour, drama, satire and rebellion. They combine their guerilla philosophy of protest with gorilla mask attire and remain anonymous behind their frightful gorilla masks. With this novel angle, they deliver shocking and depressing statistics about the lack of female artist representation and respect through out the modern world. For example: They pose the question : “Do woman have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” Their statistical answer: “Less than 5% of all the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.”

Their delivery offers suggestions of how we as a society can change this unfortunate bias. One of my personal favorite suggestions is : “Be Crazy”. Of course the point of revolution is to go over the edge to bring about change – as change will not happen in a static laissez-faire world. The Guerilla Girls are inspirational – their real message can be distilled down to a desire for Simple, Equal Human Rights for ALL,. This seems so basic, so obvious, so correct, and so important, but still in our modern age is a goal we have not achieved.

So readers: It is fun to be home and even though our continent does not carry the history of the Renaissance in its back pocket….We do give the world fresh insights and valuable contributions.

Ciao,

Anahid in Chapel Hill