“Meet the Artist” with Mark Alice Durant

On Thursday, September 12, we welcome Mark Alice Durant to “Meet the Artist” night at CPW. Durant will read from his book Summer of the White Fox, and After as well as discuss the mission of Saint Lucy Books. He will have copies of Summer of the White Fox, and After available for sale throughout the evening. Don’t miss your chance to get a signed copy! This event will be live-streamed on CPW’s YouTube page at 6pm.

For six weeks, in the summer of 2019, a mysterious creature appeared every evening in Durant’s Baltimore neighborhood. Was it a biological anomaly, an apparition, a portentous sign, or all the above? The visitation of this ghostly entity prompted a season of reverie; in the dimming twilight, as the vulpine creature darted in and out sight, Durant reconsidered his own life narratives and questioned his insatiable desire to photographically capture the otherworldly visitor.

In 2020, as the COVID pandemic forced a global redefinition of our notions of personal safety and collective responsibility, Durant faced his own serious health crisis as well as the illness and death of beloved family members. Durant’s episodic account of his hospitalizations and his dwindling ability to understand what was happening to and around him is as vivid as it is harrowing. Grief, fear, tenderness, wonder, dark humor, and the comforts of art and nature are inextricably bound in this photographic and narrative exploration of trauma and mystical transience.

Join us every Thursday evening at CPW, when we host illuminating talks with local and visiting artists. “Meet the Artist” allows the public to get to know new work, to hear about artistic processes, and to meet friends and other local artists. The evening takes place at CPW’s gallery at 474 Broadway in Kingston, NY. It is free and open to the public. Coffee, tea, and snacks are served. “Meet the Artist” is made possible by a generous grant from the Arnold and Augusta Newman Foundation.

Mark Alice Durant is an artist and writer living in Baltimore. He is author of Summer of the White Fox, and After, Maya Deren, Choreographed for Camera, and 27 Contexts: An Anecdotal History in Photography. His essays have appeared in numerous journals such as Aperture, Art in America, Photograph Magazine, Dear Dave, and many catalogs, monographs, and anthologies including Rania Matar: She, Seeing Science: How Photography Reveals the Universe, and Vik Muniz Seeing is Believing. He has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, UCLA, University of New Mexico, the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, and is currently a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Durant is publisher / editor of Saint Lucy Books.