by Tracy Davis This month, as more than 150,000 bluegrass lovers converge on Raleigh for the International Bluegrass Music Association’s annual conference and the accompanying Wide Open Bluegrass festival, the city will be humming along to the music with a…
by Jessie Ammons Made and played in Raleigh If you’ve been downtown during the first week of September in the last five years, you’ve likely stumbled upon Hopscotch Music Fest. “We’re one of the few festivals in America our size…
by Tony Avent When most folks decide to grow a fig, they opt for something like brown turkey fig, or at least something relatively edible. Me, I’m more interested in the ornamental figs – all members of the plant genus…
by Jessie Ammons photograph by Travis Long “I can’t wait for the Meredith College Sizzlin’ September concert. I have been a student at Meredith for the past two years and this is always one of my favorite things.” –Kate…
by Kevin Barrett, cocktail director at Foundation photograph by Nick Pironio A few months back, when spring and summer were meeting, I took a trip to Central America to visit my friend Lazlo and climb some volcanoes. He would prefer I…
by Andrew Kenney photographs by Tim Lytvinenko Cliff Bleszinski lived on the Internet before the rest of us did. The video-game chat rooms of the late 1990s buzzed about his work, and they exploded when “CliffyB” himself logged on. He…
by Dennis P. Weller, curator of Northern European Art, North Carolina Museum of Art As I watched more than 150,000 visitors file through the North Carolina Museum of Art’s Rembrandt in America exhibit I curated in 2011, a small voice in…
by Mimi Montgomery photograph by Travis Long “We wanted this to be a little community for runners where everyone felt comfortable, from the best of runners to people who had never run before.” – Kimberlie Meeker, co-owner, Runologie Kimberlie Meeker…
by Ann Brooke Raynal photographs by Jason Dail Growing up in Greene County, Darrell Dail, 79, watched his father Frank make homemade scuppernong wine. The family’s grapes came from vines grown with cuttings from Dail’s mother’s family farm in Pitt…
Photographer Shawn Rocco took a trip to the N.C. Arboretum in late June. Using a 100mm macro lens, he captured some of the botanical beauties in the early evening light before a summer storm rolled in. The magnified perspective makes…
by Liza Roberts illustration by Vanessa Mercante Boyd When Vanessa Mercante Boyd, a native of Marostica, Italy, moved to North Carolina in 1997, the trained artist was working in technology, writing code, and enjoying a flourishing, computer-tethered career. “I thought technology…
by Jesma Reynolds photographs by Catherine Nguyen A self-professed serial renovator, Carole Marcotte has breathed life into her family’s Spanish Colonial in Hayes Barton. Carole Marcotte gets a thrill out of solving design problems. With the precision of a mathematician…
by Scott Huler Through the fog of a dimly lit bar, a two-beer buzz, and the blood rushing through my brain, my eyes focus on Fritz, as his grinning visage seems to float towards me. Fritz is short, with the…
by Mary E. Miller photographs by Nick Pironio Hearing the raucous laughter that accompanies any Sunday afternoon convening of Rode Hard the Band, it’s hard to imagine that the first notes played, the ones that formed this group, were blue….