Newsletter 1/22: 'Craft Across Continents' will get you thinking — and smiling
Plus: Mecklenburg home sales fell 20% in 2023; Arboretum Publix appears to be a go; New CLT1st podcast with daily local info; Judge blocks new voting law; Bojangles throws shade at Chick-fil-A
Today’s Charlotte Ledger is sponsored by T.R. Lawing Realty:
Charlotteans Lorne Lassiter and Gary Ferraro have spent decades collecting a vast range of museum-quality art pieces from around the world. Now, 5 dozen are on display through May at the Mint Museum Uptown.
by Lawrence Toppman
Halfway through the “Craft Across Continents” show at the Mint Museum Uptown, I laughed out loud.
I’d been walking around with the respectful admiration one shows toward thoughtfully conceived art, mixed with envy that Lorne Lassiter and Gary Ferraro filled their home with these five dozen pieces before deciding to donate them to the Mint. Then I came to Nancy Callan’s “Superman Stinger,” a glossy, massive bee butt in red, yellow and blue glass.
“You’ve been missing something,” I thought. So I started over and found whimsy in every room. Pieces tricked the eye, seemed utilitarian but could never be, contained visual or verbal puns, and in one case left me smiling with utter incomprehension. Beyond beauty, beyond accomplished technique, lay a sense of fun.
The show starts with a double entendre. Get past the wall panel about Lassiter and Ferraro’s collection — roughly half of it by Japanese artists — and you come to Anna Skibska’s “Smok.”
The word means “dragon” in her native Polish, and the sinuous bits of glass floating above you could indeed be the spine of such a beast, or smoke coming out of its nose. She invented the technique needed to make “Smok,” melting and fusing glass with a blowtorch to create lattices of thin glass rods that could be assembled into a large sculpture.
(I learned this by reading the text printed nearby. You’ll want to read all of these cards, which clearly explain techniques and concepts. A minus: Many are less than two feet off the ground, mounted near low-lying works. A plus: Three sofas offer relief for aching backs and knees.)
The wide-ranging “Craft Across Continents” exhibit blends works made from glass, ceramics, bamboo and more. Pieces include (l-r) “Superman Stinger” by Nancy Callan, “Smok” by Anna Skibska and “Maunder” by Dustin Farnsworth. (Courtesy of the Mint Museum)
Take a few steps, and you come to Gareth Mason’s “Shadow Aghast.” What does the British artist want us to see in this complicated figure, made from stoneware, porcelain, feldspar, shards, layered slips and oxides, ironstone, copper and glaze? Is it a tribute to American face jugs, with apparently pursed lips and something bulging that could be an eye? Is it a blowfish, the fugu beloved by Japanese gourmets that’s poisonous when badly prepared? As so often in this exhibit, you apply your own interpretation.
The obvious and the obscure: Kohara Yasuhiro’s “Basket” could simply be a riff on an everyday item. To me, it resembled a Japanese garden, with the green glaze down in the center gleaming like still water and the sturdy stoneware “handle” arching like the bridge over such a pond. (You can peer down into a lot of these pieces, and you should.)
Some works are overt. Dustin Farnsworth’s multimedia “Maunder,” best seen from underneath, depicts a disconsolate girl forced by immense acoustic mirrors to listen to every sound in her world. These look like butterfly wings around her head, giving us the impression she’s an insect fatally pinned down by social media.
Yet even when an artist’s design is clear, his meaning may not be. Sharif Bey’s “Raptor and Sphere,” an immense necklace of “claws” made of vitreous china and mixed media, could be worn by no chieftain on Earth. Bey might be honoring people who tolerate suffering in order to achieve beauty and power, or he might be mocking them.
Some entries have no layers of meaning I could detect. North Carolina blacksmith Elizabeth Brim, perhaps playing on her name, made “Hat” out of steel and dark paint. It’s easy to miss, as it sits around a corner from the main gallery, and it’s oddly appealing. But it’s just a hat.
The simple and complex — and a modern-day ‘Andy’: If you like simplicity, the most visually alluring work will be Kino Satoshi’s “Fall Wind 17-18,” an exquisite, pearl-green curve of porcelain and glass like a wave that will never break.
If you favor complexity, scratch your head in front of Anne Lemanski’s “Blue Go-Go Skeleton.” A grinning stack of bones has his head in the stars (the zodiacal sign of Cancer), his fleshless feet on the Earth (cubes of iron and copper), and his body surrounded by a bee, a fox, a mockingbird (I think), a giant praying mantis and mathematical symbols. It lost me yet found me fascinated.
I stood longest before “The Passion of Andy," by Greenville, S.C., artist Russell Biles. His masterwork consists of five small pairings in porcelain and glaze of characters from “The Andy Griffith Show.”
In one, Howard and Floyd the barber celebrate their gay relationship. (You knew they were.) In another, drunken Otis and hellraiser Ernest T. Bass confusedly seek salvation for their sins. In a third, Walmart employee Goober seems to console cousin Gomer Pyle, whose stint as a Marine left him legless and dependent on armfuls of drugs.
But the centerpiece! Smirking Opie drapes his arm around Aunt Bee, a pill-addled zombie, while drawing back the tail of his shirt to reveal a pistol. Next to them, a panicked Barney supports the dying Sheriff Andy, whose chest pulses blood from a bullet wound and whose arms have been flung wide in a crucifixion image.
The small-town, heterogeneous harmony of the TV show has fragmented under the pressures of gun violence, ill-omened military engagements, demands for LGBTQ rights and evangelistic promises of salvation. I smiled, all right, but I also gasped to think of the difference between Andy’s world and ours.
➡️ If you’re going: “Craft Across Continents” runs through May 5 at the Mint Museum Uptown, 500 S. Tryon St. Hours: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Wednesday and Friday, 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. The museum will validate parking up to $10 in the Levine Center for the Arts Parking Garage on Brooklyn Village Avenue between Tryon and Church streets.
Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews about two times each month in the Ledger.
Today’s supporting sponsor is Landon A. Dunn, attorney-at-law in Matthews:
Mecklenburg home sales fell 20% in 2023; optimism for 2024 as mortgage rates cool a little
The number of homes sold in Mecklenburg County in 2023 fell by 20% last year, the second straight year of double-digit declines, according to new data.
Higher-than-usual mortgage rates have kept many prospective sellers staying in their homes, which has led to fewer homes available for purchase, real estate agents have said. The plunge in home sales, to 15,326 in Mecklenburg in 2023, follows an 18.2% drop in 2022, according to numbers from the Canopy Realtor Association.
Price growth slows: It’s unusual for growing Charlotte to have back-to-back years of double-digit declines in the sale of houses. The lack of available inventory is contributing to higher home prices, which rose 2.4% in 2023 in Mecklenburg, to a median value of $425,000, according to Canopy data. But that’s a far slower rate of price growth than in previous years: Prices rose 17% in 2022.
The slide in home sales in Mecklenburg is roughly in line with national trends. The National Association of Realtors said last week that home sales fell 18.7% and that 2023 was the weakest year for home sales since 1995.
Local real estate agents have said they are optimistic that lower mortgage rates will lead to a reversal of the trend in 2024. Rates last year hit a high of more than 7%, or about double the figure from two years ago. The average national rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage was 6.88% last week, according to Bankrate.com.
Hot or not? Despite the big drops in home sales to the lowest level in years, Charlotte media tend to describe the local housing market as “hot.” WCNC declared last week, for instance, that “Charlotte’s real estate market remains hot.” Many continue to cite predictions from Zillow, which hilariously forecast a year ago that Charlotte would be “2023’s hottest market” in the country. This year, Zillow put Charlotte No. 7 on its “hottest housing market” list, according to the Charlotte Business Journal. —TM
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How local stocks of note fared last week (through Friday’s close), and year to date:
Bojangles throws shade at newly reopened Cotswold Chick-fil-A: ‘Open 7 days a week’
CHICKEN WARS HEAT UP: The Chick-fil-A on Randolph Road in Cotswold reopened late last week after being rebuilt over the last five months, following the recent reopening of the newly renovated Bojangles next door. It’s the first time Cotswold’s Chick-fil-A and Bojangles have both been in operation in more than two years. Bojangles quickly put up lettering on its marquee that read: “Better Food / Open 7 days a week / Its Bo Time!”
Building permits issued for Publix near the Arboretum
The long-awaited Publix by the Arboretum in south Charlotte looks as though it is finally moving forward.
County records show that building permits were issued late last month for the new store, at 7933 Providence Road, on the southeast corner of Providence and Pineville-Matthews roads.
Publix announced the store in May 2021, but since then, internet sleuths have been posting on Nextdoor and other social media that they thought the store wasn’t going forward, speculating that renovations to the Arboretum Walmart cooled the grocer’s plans and caused it to delete the store from its “coming soon” list online. (Guess you can’t believe everything you read on Nextdoor.)
But now it looks as though it’s a go. A spokesman told The Ledger in November that the store was going forward. —TM
Queen City Podcast Network launches new daily podcast with Charlotte information: CLT1st
If you’re reading The Charlotte Ledger right now (and you are), you probably have at least some interest in keeping up with local information.
Now, there’s a new fast-paced, won’t-waste-your-time podcast focused on Charlotte that you might want to check out and build into your daily routine. It’s called CLT1st, and it’s by local people and for local people. Each episode, released Monday through Friday, is 8 minutes or less. It’s a brief look at Charlotte news, with events, tips and more.
The Ledger is happy to help support this new effort from the Queen City Podcast Network: Our reporters have appeared on the show a few times since its soft launch in December.
CLT1st draws on only locally owned news sources for its information — which includes The Ledger, The Charlotte Post, Queen City Nerve and a few others who are headquartered right here in Charlotte. (Ledger managing editor Cristina Bolling was a guest on last Tuesday’s episode, talking about the growing pickleball scene in Charlotte.)
Co-hosts Stuart Watson and Amy Bristle say it’s a different kind of newscast — one with “minimal murder and mayhem.” You can check it out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other popular podcast platforms.
You might be interested in these Charlotte events
Events submitted by readers to The Ledger’s events board:
THURSDAY: The Future of Charlotte Health Care, with N.C. Health News and The Charlotte Ledger, 5:30-7:30 p.m., Brown Bag Catering, 5321 Piper Station Drive, Charlotte. Join The Charlotte Ledger and North Carolina Health News for a discussion of the future of health care in Charlotte. You’ll hear from our team working on health care coverage, learn about major trends in local journalism and health care, get a behind-the-scenes look at how we develop stories on complex issues like medical debt or the state's mental health crisis and have a chance to help us shape our reporting on this critical issue. Drinks and appetizers are on us. Space is limited, and you’ll need to RSVP. Free; donations accepted.
THURSDAY: An 18th Century Evening, 6-9 p.m., Charlotte Museum of History. Experience a night of classical music in an intimate setting at the Charlotte Museum of History’s “An Eighteenth Century Evening” on Thursday, Jan. 25, featuring the North Carolina Baroque Orchestra performing works by Chevalier, Mozart, Handel and more. $35.
◼️ Check out the full Ledger events board.
➡️ List your event on the Ledger events board.
In brief:
Judge sides with voting rights groups on new N.C. law: A federal judge on Sunday ruled that part of a new North Carolina law that invalidates the same-day registration of voters when a postcard mailed to them is returned as undeliverable cannot be enforced because it “creates an unacceptable risk that eligible voters’ ballots will be erroneously removed and not counted.” Voting rights groups had said the provision passed by the Republican-controlled General Assembly would impede the right of people to vote.
Teachers asked to repay money: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is asking 225 high school English teachers to repay $1,250 after it erroneously added the bonuses to their paychecks this month. The money was intended for new teachers. The district said it was an “unfortunate oversight.” (WSOC)
Flight attendant accused of recording minors in lavatories: An American Airlines flight attendant from Charlotte was charged with trying to record a teen girl using a lavatory on a plane in September by hiding his iPhone on the toilet lid. He was also charged with recording minors using the lavatory on several other flights. (WSOC)
Chapel Hill schools buck legislature on gender identity: The board of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools declined to update some of its policies to conform with a new state law that requires school officials to alert parents when a student uses a different pronoun and to bar instruction about gender identity in grades K-4. The refusal sets up a potential showdown with Republicans in the General Assembly who voted for the “Parents’ Bill of Rights” legislation last year. (Associated Press)
Arrival sued over nonpayment of rent: Electric vehicle maker Arrival is being sued by its landlord, who says in court documents that the company is late on multiple rent payments for industrial space at Meadow Oak Commerce Center near Charlotte’s airport. Landlord Pool 5 Industrial NC LLC is seeking $34.5M in damages for leases it said ran through 2032. Arrival announced to great fanfare in 2020 that it was establishing its North American headquarters in Charlotte and opening two factories here. (Biz Journal, subscriber-only)
Foxcroft Wine expands: Charlotte-based Foxcroft Wine Co. plans to open a location in Raleigh. It will be the sixth location: The wine bar has three in Charlotte, one in Greenville, S.C., and plans for a spot at Birkdale Village in Huntersville. (Raleigh Magazine)
Clarification: Big Wells Fargo signs, but not that big
A brief item in Friday’s newsletter gave the not-quite-right size of the proposed signs Wells Fargo is proposing to install atop the company’s skyscraper on South Tryon Street. They are each 1,880 square feet. (They are not 1,880 feet — that would be humongous, at more than twice the height of the building! Thanks to Ledger reader Joe for pointing that out.)
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Executive editor: Tony Mecia; Managing editor: Cristina Bolling; Staff writer: Lindsey Banks; Business manager: Brie Chrisman, BC Creative