NON-PROFIT
ORGANIZATION
US POSTAGE
PAID
PENLAND, NC
PERMIT #1
P E N L A N D@L 1 N E
PENLAND SCHOOL OF CRAFTS
PENLAND NC 28765
SEPT '90
Not Bored on the 4th of July
About 150 friends, neighbors, former residents and guests joined the students and instruc
tors in Session 4 for an old fashioned, albeit Penland style. Fourth of July Celebration. The
School barbequed burgers, hot dogs and Italian sausages and provided potato salad, ice
cream and lemonade. The visitors brought salads and desserts, making it a picnic feast.
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The main activity of the evening was visiting, lounging, eating and drinking but there were
the traditional elements: a contest, a parade and fireworks. Skip Johnson's wood class
held a mousetrap-powered ping-pong ball launcher contest. Each student had created a
launching device powered only by a mouse trap and the contest was to determine whose
ping-pong ball would go the farthest and who could get it through a moving inner tube.
The parade included decorated bikes, a Bum and Bugle Corps, the Patriots for the Arts,
clowns and assorted (beauty) queens. The fireworks display designed and produced by
pyrotechnicians George Bucquet and Marvin Jensen featured a simultaneous firing of
7500 bottle rockets along with a traditional Fourth of July aerial extravaganza. If you
missed it, put it on your calendar for next year!
Picturing Penland
If you spent time at Penland in July or early August, you probably saw Ann Hawthorne
waiting patiently, camera in hand, to get just the right shaft of light on cheekbone or
thumb. Ann, who originally came to this area as a Third Century Artist with the Toe River
Arts Council in 1976, was commissioned by Penland to develop a new slide show. A
graduate of the University of North Carolina in art history, Ann also spent a year as a
Visiting Artist at Mayland and subsequently worked as a freelance photographer based in
Yancey County until 1986 when she moved to Washington, DC.
As we consider the best use of the publicity budget, we are often frustrated with how hard
it is to tell Penland's story in a few words. This is a visual place both in terms of the setting
and in terms of the work. The last slide show, put together by Dan Bailey and Debra
Frasier about ten years ago placed particular emphasis on the resident's program, but was
well used as a recruitment and fundraising tool.
Since that time there have been many changes on campus and inside the studios as new
buildings, new equipment and refurbishing has changed the face of Penland. There are
new things to tell about the program as well. All of these changes will be reflected in both
the slides and accompanying tape on which the Penland story will be told by many voices.
We expect the show to be ready for use November 1. If you have ideas about how best to
circulate the show or if you are interested in showing it to groups where you live or work,
please let us know. The slides are very exciting and really capture the look and feel and
spirit of Penland. We plan for two slide trays to be used with a dissolve unit. The twenty-
minute narrative tape will advance the slides so it will be fully automatic.
Also in the works are media-specific one tray slide shows for use at guild meetings and
conferences. We also hope that eventually we can put the show on video cassettes for use
with smaller groups. We will be using some of Ann's slides for the publications during the
next year A few are included in this Penland Line in black and white conversions.