The INDY’s Fall Arts Issue is here and, as Charli XCX wrote on X this week, “Goodbye forever, brat summer.” If you’re still catching up on what the pop phenomenon’s hedonistic, Sprite-colored summer means, join the club (pun intended).
Certainly, it was fun—I love the Brat album’s sugary, confident bops—but we might have the best idea of what it’s not. Here’s how the star recently clarified her political position, following a viral “Kamala is Brat” tweet: “My music is not political. Everything I do in my life feeds back into my art. Everything I say, wear, think, enjoy—it all funnels back into my art. Politics doesn’t feed my art.”
Do with that what you will, but the projects featured in this preview serve as a firm rejoinder to the idea that art can ever be truly neutral—not a surprising theme, perhaps, in an election year.
Take Queen Street Magic Boat, the Durham home of artist Catherine Edgerton, which is being reimagined as a community arts space and breaking down pervasive notions that to either be a good artist or to enjoy good art, you must have access to capital and institutions. Then, there’s comics artist Ellen O’Grady, the creator of the recently released book How Are We to Live? Comics for a Free Palestine—a topic that risks political division in the name of bearing witness and giving shape to the grief and hope of a people whose humanity is being erased in real-time.
Several of the works featured in our visual arts and performing arts roundups are stirring commentary on the task of not just bearing witness but of acting on that witness. These include artist and educator Maya Freelon’s Whippersnappers, which reimagines, at one of the state’s largest former plantations, portraits of enslaved children; the American Dance Festival’s Battleground, an earthy examination of the American military-industrial complex; and Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me at PlayMakers, a play that surveys the ways that the Constitution has failed women. Here’s Toni Morrison, saying it better than any of us could: “All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’”
More themes coalesce among these features, but the best place to start is by diving in. Don’t miss the behind-the-scenes look at long-awaited baseball musical Bull Durham, produced by Theatre Raleigh, which has had a long and lively road from Hollywood to its titular hometown, or an interview with renowned Raleigh artist Thomas Sayre, whose Duke Energy sunflower poles in Dix Park have also had their long road to blooming from source of power to source of beauty.
So, anyway, goodbye, brat summer! And hello again to the local artists who create, challenge, and question the status quo. We hope you spend time with their work.
Follow Culture Editor Sarah Edwards on Twitter or send an email to [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].