American Folk Art Buildings
architectural imagination and storied places rendered small
Film & Articles & Song Cycle
Film Rendered Small • Articles • Song Cycle Family Secrets: Kith and Kin
To view the 16-minute documentary:
Filmmakers Marsha Gordon and Louis Cherry shaped and merged, in short time and full synthesis, revelations about buildings, the two collectors, and the reality of daily life with so many small places. They brought incessant passion and confident vision, as well as tutored skills, to what they saw and learned. Marsha Gordon, PhD, is Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University, engagingly astute author, speaker, and teacher about films. Louis Cherry is among North Carolina's lead modernist architects and an unfailingly good thinker about built places in large or small communities.
Their marriage survived dealing with 1200 buildings and 2 collectors.
SCREENINGS
The film has been seen at varied major festivals and venues:
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 14 December 2019
Gregg Museum of Art and Design, Raleigh, 24 October 2019
The Halsey Institute for Contemporary Art, Charleston SC, September 2019.
With Steven Burke presentation on the collection and this area of American artifact.
Longwood Center for the Visual Arts, Farmville VA, 12 April 2019.
With Steven Burke presentation on the collection and this area of American artifact.
FIFA: Festival International du Film sur l'Art, Montreal, 20&29 March 2019
NC Modernist Houses film series, Raleigh, 8 January 2019
Glimmerglass Film Days, Cooperstown NY, 10 November 2018.
With Steven Burke presentation at Fenimore Art Museum on the collection
and this area of American artifact.
Superfine! Art Fair. LGBTQ+Short Film Series, Washington DC,
3 November 2018
Macon Film Festival, 17&18 August 2018
Yale /New Haven Documentary Film Festival, 6 June 2018
Long Leaf Film Festival, Raleigh, 11 May 2018
2018 Indy Film Fest, Indianapolis, 29 April & 5 May 2018
n July 10 2019, Rendered Small was seen on North Carolina's UNC-TV as part of the Hillsborough Trilogy -- along with The Imaginary Village of Allan Gurganus and It Had Wings, from Gurganus' lovely short story of the same name.
New York Times
A long and much pictured New York Times article revealed the range and delight of American Folk Art Buildings to an enormous audience in this country and beyond. Most readers, it seems -- unsurprisingly -- came to them for the first time. Comments are perceptive on overlaps with American architecture and culture.
19 November 2014
Our State Magazine
Artist and Big Fish novelist Daniel Wallace -- as imaginative, idiosyncratic, and
perceptive for small architecture as for large human vagaries -- has a view of the collector and the collection.
August 2010
Duke Magazine and Seasons Magazine
In July of 2014 and December of 2017, university and regional magazine articles conveyed the nicely varied takes of policy journalist Brigid Booher and
Ross Howell, novelist and journalist.
NC Newspapers and Public Radio
The 11 May 2018 showing of the film at the Longleaf Film Festival in Raleigh NC yielded print and public radio descriptions. The Raleigh News & Observer and the Durham NC Herald Sun both carried front page stories; Frank Stasio's State of Things show on NC Public Radio WUNC interviewed both the filmmakers and Steven Burke.
South Writ Large
Documenting the overlap of Southern sensibility with culture, art, and explorations here and beyond, the quarterly online magazine presents an interview about the history, characteristics, and future of the collection.
August 2021
ARTICLES
Antiques and The Arts Weekly
In Q&A: Steven Burke, editor Madelia Hickman Ring explores American Folk Art Buildings and their increasingly recognized place in national material culture.
2 August 2022
SONG CYCLE FAMILY SECRETS: KITH AND KIN
A remarkably rich American work merges buildings from the collection into music, song, performance, Southern fiction, architectural photography, and designed projection.
Andrea Edith Moore -- national and international singer, teacher, and music visionary -- conceived of a project to integrate the sung and the spoken, the musical and the visual, the 2- and 3-dimensional. Her determined subject was both realistic and wonderfully fraught: the known or unspoken human stories and behaviors ever resident in our families, communities, and houses. Significant North Carolina writers were gained to submit text: Jeffrey Beam, Allan Gurganus, Randall Kenan, Michael Malone, Frances Mayes, Lee Smith, and Daniel Wallace. Lead contemporary American composer Daniel Thomas Davis was commissioned for music to evoke as well as reflect varied stories. Interior and exterior architectural photography of Elizabeth Matheson was central to the projected imagery of Francesca Talenti, Stage Design & Director.
The concert world premiere at the University of North Carolina in 2015 spurred the work forward into a fully staged version by North Carolina Opera in January
2018 for two sold-out performances.
In September of 2019, soprano Andrea Moore completed the studio recording
Family Secrets: Kith & Kin, preserving and ensuring the life of the work
within the American repertorie.
Scored for soprano, female narrator, violin, cello, oboe/English horn, piano and banjo, this unique instrumentation evokes a sense of the sultry South while also opening
into full operatic fervor.
Through music, words, voice, folk art and visual imagery, Family Secrets: Kith and Kin reveals how places are resonant with beauty as well as mystery and explores how secrets, both big and small, define ourselves, our families, and a sense of place.
Andrea Edith Moore
Gathered for discussion following the second performance at
North Carolina Opera, January 2018:
FRONT ROW Allan Gurganus, Michael Malone, Daniel Thomas Davis, Andrea Moore, Lee Smith, Steven Burke
SECOND ROW Conductor Vincent Povázsay, Actress Jane Holding,
Stage Design and Director Francesca Talenti