It’s time to ask for your support!

Greetings all, what a long time it’s been since I lifted my head to write an update. Forgive my silence, I’ve been working.

Karen Beningfield, Kathryn Shriver and I have continued to plow diligently onward, bringing order and rhythm to CGB’s mighty decade of discovery, and we are almost at the point where I will be able to send out the bulk of our pages, layouts, chapters and proofs to the greater community of contributing artists and collaborators for review. There are hundreds of captions and credits to check, and we need releases and current contact information for the artists featured, as we intend to offer stipends to each person whose work we publish.

We’re still months away from a final review copy, but considering the sheer amount of information involved we’re pretty proud of what we’ve been able to do. My apologies that I am still not able to take the time to answer too many emails; I have a little stack of “what have I ordered” questions that have been waiting months. I wish there were three of me! What a miracle that would be.

Here is a current shop update, for those of you who are interested in booking a summer workshop with Anvi and I, or seeing our new bead kits. Workshops are now scheduled here in Savannah for the second weekends (Thursday-Sunday) of July, August and September.

Fellowship Updates

Kathryn Shriver is coming up on the end of her second full fellowship year, and Sam Norgard and Anvi Shah are just about to begin their own stints.

Sam is receiving a one-year sabbatical fellowship, meant for us to complete an academic curriculum in beadwork, and so that we can collaborate on presentation of her ambitious global sculptures, such as the Black and White Together Project, which is (excitingly) in my own studio right now, as we’ll be hosting the final assembly meetings here this summer.

Photo, a recent workshop here in Savannah. Sam Norgard and Dawn Peterson were able to stop by with Sam’s amazing Black and White Together project, which is in final assembly this summer.

You may recall from a previous update that this incredible portrait of bead artist Joyce Scott inspired Joyce herself to donate a work of her art to our team to support Sam’s sabbatical. That work is now hosted at the Goya Gallery in Baltimore, MD, and we thank them for hosting the sale. Please click the link to see the piece, and make contact with the gallery.

Anvi Shah will be coming from India at the end of June, and staying for almost six months to help us run the Savannah studio, participate in our workshops, and to help get our books out into the world. To date, we’ve been able to fund Kathryn’s fellowship through modest kit sales and workshops, but we are going to have to step up our game in order to bring this last push of work home. This is how we sent her home last time she visited, by sharing a big bag of each bead that we had in our library.

Below are a few screenshots from some of my favorite spreads in the section on my edit table at present, the CGB History chapter that opens the book. What memories, contained in these pages. (Please note that these are draft spreads, and may change.)

First, a spread that has evolved a good bit over the past six months, as we studied the Reverse Starflower (which definitely has an initial decrease) and the Herringbone Seam in general. This study led to a set of incredible double-jointed warped polygons, a few of which are shown.

From this effort came an insanely elegant (and likely important) contribution to the suite of Eggboxes in service in the world, a double-jointed version created with Kathryn’s neat seams inserted in between each increase line of the warped squares. This is the type of movement we can get on our ideas if we really put in the time to study what we are seeing, and it’s one of many examples of Kathryn Shriver just knocking it out of the park by asking “what if” and following through on the possible answers. See these pieces in person (and in fact the entire portfolio of the project) at our summer workshops.

I rarely ask for help, but now is the time. We are committed to our fellowships and they have been game-changing for us to be able to bring our project to a strong conclusion.

If you are in the position to do so, please consider signing up for a workshop, ordering a bead kit, making a (tax-deductible) donation, or pre-ordering one of our new books. Our gatherings are as COVID-safe as we can manage (precautions + HEPA filters) and they are always transformational experiences.

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About katemckinnon

Kate McKinnon has devoted herself to the study of how things are done, and how they could be done better.

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