Playmakers, the Garfield Center for the Arts’ annual summer theatre youth education camp, is gearing up for its 2025 edition. The camp will once again be overseen by director Kaitlyn Wright, this year’s Kent County Teacher of the Year.

Every year, the camp is staffed with counselors and interns, many of whom were past participants in Playmakers. The main distinction between a counselor and intern position is that interns are participating to fulfill school community service hour requirements, while counselors earn a small paid stipend. The GCA may appoint anyone with theatre experience who is interested in the positions, including students, adults and retirees who have never attended or participated in Playmakers.

If you are interested in becoming a counselor or intern for Playmakers, you must be at least 16 years old to become an intern, while counselors must be at least 17 years old. To express your interest in either position, please send an email to the GCA Executive Director, Steven Arnold, at [email protected] and you will receive additional information and application requirements.

I recently attended the opening of the exhibition Rembrandt: Masterpieces in Black and White—Prints from the Rembrandt House Museum at the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery in the United Kingdom, where it will be on view through June 1, 2025.

A fellow Dutchman, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669) is widely regarded as one of the greatest artists of all time. Apart from his atmospheric paintings, he also produced more than 300 etchings. Ranging in scale and detail, these etchings exemplify Rembrandt’s mastery of print.

Rembrandt, known by his first name (like modern-day Madonna or Sting) was a master of innovation. As an artist, he constantly sought out new possibilities and new solutions for making art. This is evident not only from his paintings, but also from the more than three hundred etchings that he made in his career. Rembrandt: Masterpieces in Black and White—Prints from the Rembrandt House Museum presents the full range of Rembrandt’s etching output, alongside prints by select forerunners and contemporaries. It also demonstrates Rembrandt’s centuries-long impact on the field of printmaking through a select group of etchings by later nineteenth and twentieth-century artists.

A Dutch Baroque painter and printmaker, Rembrandt was one of the greatest storytellers in the history of art, possessing an exceptional ability to render people in their various moods and dramatic guises. Today he is widely regarded as one of the two most important printmakers in history, along with Albrecht Dürer. From his earliest etchings, Rembrandt created original compositions oriented towards the specific character of the medium. As a result, his prints range widely from large to small, and from summary sketches to laborious and elaborate works. He addressed an equally varied set of subjects, including Biblical stories, portraits, depictions of exaggerated or characteristic facial expressions called “tronies,” observations of everyday life, landscapes, nude model studies, and even sheets packed with small sketches.

Rembrandt’s printmaking style changed over his career, and he honed his style across a wide variety of subjects. Both his progress and the variety of his output will be traced in a number of thematic sections in this exhibition. These sections will cover everything from Rembrandt’s masterful skills as a visual narrator, his bold exploration of light and dark, and how he used self-portraits to fashion his own visual identity and explore the complexity of aging. The exhibition also includes select comparative works by Rembrandt’s forerunners and contemporaries, including his teacher Pieter Lastman and his pupils, Ferdinand Bol and Govert Flinck, which will contextualize his work and shed light on his specific innovations, such as his repeated experiments with etching, tonal effects, and the dramatic portrayal of his subjects.

The exhibition is accompanied by a free educational brochure developed by the AFA with an introduction by Epco Runia, Head of Collections at the Rembrandt House Museum, and with me as editor. Following Birmingham, UK, the exhibition will be on view at the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, SC (October 24, 2025 – January 11, 2026) and the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, OH (February 7 – May 17, 2026).

Rembrandt: Masterpieces in Black and White—Prints from the Rembrandt House Museum is co-organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Rembrandt House Museum.

Anke Van Wagenberg, PhD, is Senior Curator & Head of International Collaborations at the American Federation of Arts in New York and lives in Talbot County.

I recently attended the opening of Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey to Nature’s Underworld exhibition at the Lowe Art Museum, at the University of Miami, FL, where it will be on view through July 20, 2025. This wonderful exhibition is the first two-person exhibition of these closely allied artists, offering a compelling tour through their celebrated careers and into the shadowy depths of the threatened natural world.

The first two-person exhibition of these celebrated artists, Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey to Nature’s Underworld explores their shared allegiances and sustaining friendship over a period of three decades. Maintaining singular stylistic voices, both Dion and Rockman have achieved international prominence for their own distinctive practices, while their creative and intellectual trajectories have evolved in tandem and often intersected. Together they have embarked on tropical expeditions; published dialogues; and co-edited the pioneering 1996 book Concrete Jungle, on anthropogenic ecosystems. Each has probed our strained relationship with the environment and the consequences of reigning ideologies about nature. Dion and Rockman were among the earliest artists to address, and even anticipate, the epic ecological problems we now face. Indeed, their vision has become increasingly urgent in this time of environmental collapse.

Uniting some twenty-five sculptures and paintings by both artists along with selected works on paper and a major new collaborative piece, this exhibition offers an absorbing journey into the depths of the threatened natural world.

Although working in different media, Dion and Rockman engage a number of like approaches and strategies, including intensive research and fieldwork; borrowing scientific methodology and models; and the use of allegory, dark humor, and popular culture tropes. Both artists employ methods of display found in museums of art and natural history, institutions of alleged authority and objectivity, which they slyly subvert in their works. While Dion’s preferred museological modes are taxidermy dioramas and specimen cabinets, Rockman revels in large-scale landscape paintings, densely populated and replete with didactic keys. Like natural history displays and wildlife illustrations, their works are grounded in science and close observation, but presented in a rhetorical, or even theatrical, manner.

The concept of “underworld” in the exhibition’s title encompasses several germane associations, including the mythic abode of the dead, archaeology, the Earth’s subsurface, and elements of criminality or vice. Within the context of Dion’s and Rockman’s oeuvres, the notion also incorporates unconscious beliefs about nature, invisible micro and macro dimensions, and deep denial of our culture’s harmful course. In the past two decades, during which the environmental crisis has escalated, both artists have expressed increasing pessimism and melancholy about our ecological fate. This gloom has not proved stifling, however, and Dion and Rockman continue to hone creative tactics for staging both the wonder and woe of nature’s condition.

The exhibition feels like a voyage of discovery through various pressing subjects, with the artists’ works serving as enticing guides. Beginning with a section evoking the fieldwork of pioneering naturalists and explorers, visitors encounter field-station tableaux by Dion alongside Rockman’s paintings of fauna and dramatic terrains, often with cross-sectioned views. Ensuing works address such themes as invasive and endangered species, beleaguered aquatic environments, anthropogenic landscapes, and future scenarios evincing effects of climate change and waning biodiversity.

An exhibition highlight is the debut of a grand sculptural diorama, titled American Landscape, created especially for the tour and marking an unprecedented collaboration between Dion and Rockman. This zoological group portrait, set on a golf course, features a cast of scrappy species that, according to the artists, successfully “exploit niches and opportunities generated by a human-transformed landscape” representing “the future global ecosystem.” The exhibition also includes a selection of related drawings and prints by both Dion and Rockman. In addition, participating museums have the option of developing, along with the artists, an adjunct “Chamber of Wonders” display, conceived as a flexible cabinet of curiosities intended to inspire both awe and concern about the natural world. One of the ephemera that caught my attention was Mark Dion’s Decomposition Books, full of his field notes.

Anke Van Wagenberg, PhD, is Senior Curator & Head of International Collaborations at the American Federation of Arts in New York and lives in Talbot County, MD

The accompanying 120-page catalog, Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman: Journey to Nature’s Underworld, written by Suzanne Ramljak, with contributions by Lucy R. Lippard and Patrick Jaojoco, was published by the American Federation of Arts and Hirmer Publishers.

The exhibition was organized by the American Federation of Arts and has toured at the Bruce Museum (Greenwich, CT, 2023), the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (Virginia Beach, VA, 2024), and The Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore (Saratoga Springs, NY, 2025-2025). The tour will conclude at the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State (University Park, PA, August 23 – December 7, 2025).

Working at the American Federation of Arts is just about as exciting as an art curator’s job can be, with lots of, yes curating exhibitions, publishing catalogs, and related travel (while living in beautiful Talbot County). Bringing art to a wide public has been the AFA’s mission as the leader in traveling exhibitions internationally. A nonprofit organization founded in 1909, the AFA is dedicated to enriching the public’s experience and understanding of the visual arts through organizing and touring art exhibitions for presentation in museums around the world, publishing exhibition catalogues featuring important scholarly research, and developing educational programs.  I look forward to regularly contributing to the Spy, either by contributing articles or podcast reviews and artist interviews.

I recently attended the Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism exhibition opening, first at the Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA, and now on view at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN, until May 4th. The AFA-Chrysler organized exhibition will continue on to the Cincinnati Art Museum, OH and lastly to the Seattle Art Museum. Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism explores the intersections of art, gastronomy, and national identity in fin-de-siècle France. The exhibition showcases the work of artists such as Claude Monet, Eva Gonzalès, Victor Gilbert, Paul Gauguin, and Jules Dalou who examined the nation’s unique relationship with food. The bounty of France’s agriculture and the skill of its chefs had long helped to define its strength and position on the international stage.

This self-image as the world’s culinary capital became all the more important in the late nineteenth century as the country grappled with war, political instability, imperialism, and industrialization. In this climate, France’s culinary traditions signaled notions of its refinement, fortitude, and ingenuity while they also exposed fractures that destabilized national identity. From cultivation to consumption, food was central to notions of glory but also to those of collective pain.

The transformation of the culinary world was a natural theme for artists committed to depicting daily circumstances. Food was the most quotidian of subjects yet also one uniquely suited to considering the state of the nation. Featuring approximately seventy works of art, Farm to Table showcases representations of sumptuous ingredients and severe privation, bountiful meals and agrarian crises. The works highlight the possibilities and precariousness of France’s colonial and industrial projects; the evolving norms of gender and class; the tenuous relationship between Paris and the provinces; and shifting understandings of science and the environment. Depictions of markets and gardens, farmers, chefs, and restaurants expressed cultural anxieties and aspirations. Beginning with the 1870 Prussian siege of Paris (and the resultant food crisis) and continuing through the 1890s, the exhibition spans the age of Impressionism and provides a new way to consider the era’s depictions of modern life at the
intersection of art, food, and social politics.

An accompanying catalog Farm to Table: Art, Food, and Identity in the Age of Impressionism, (2024), was edited by curators Andrew Eschelbacher and Lloyd DeWitt, with contributions by Allison Deutsch, Simon Kelly, Marni Kessler, and Shalini Le Gall, Published by Yale University Press in association with the Chrysler Museum of Art and the American Federation of Arts.

Anke Van Wagenberg, PhD, is Senior Curator & Head of International Collaborations at the American Federation of Arts in New York and lives in Talbot County, Maryland.

Jordan Tice, who launched his national tour at the Avalon Theatre’s Stoltz Listening Room last week, bridges the gap between old-time tradition and modern storytelling. Whether he discovered bluegrass icons like Doc Watson and ragtime guitarist Blind Blake before finding his way to Bob Dylan, Randy Newman, and Paul Simon—or the other way around—his music reflects a rare ability to meld past and present seamlessly.

Tice opened with Down by the River, a song originally recorded by Uncle Dave Macon in 1924. In his hands, however, it felt completely fresh. Too often, musicians treat traditional songs as museum pieces, something to be handled with reverence but never altered. Tice, by contrast, breathes new life into them, stretching and reshaping them in ways that feel both innovative and natural.

His own compositions stood comfortably alongside the classics. Walkin’, a standout original, showcased his intricate fingerpicking and sharp lyricism: “Cranes going up to the sky and then down / Buildin’ on what’s been torn down / And people for a while they’d come around…”

At times, Tice’s rapid-fire vocal delivery added urgency, though it occasionally came at the expense of his carefully crafted lyrics.

His choice of covers reflected his deep musical influences. A stirring rendition of Bob Dylan’s Tryin’ to Get to Heaven (from 1997’s unappreicated Time Out of Mind) led to one of his most expressive guitar solos of the night. Randy Newman’s Dayton, Ohio 1903 fit his style perfectly, its wistful lyrics and lilting melody capturing the sepia-toned warmth that runs through much of Tice’s music. He ended the night with Paul Simon’s lovely and optimistic Born at the Right Time, a fitting closer that left the audience on an uplifting note.

The concert also offered a preview of Tice’s upcoming album, with two brand-new songs debuting live. Quiet Light, co-written with Grammy-winner Sarah Jarosz, stood out as one of the evening’s best moments, offering a quiet yet profound reflection: “Who knows what tomorrow brings / So take your time / And let it all run across your mind.”

While Jarosz will sing harmony on the recorded version, fiddle player Patrick M’Gonigle stepped in beautifully, his vocal  harmonies and expressive playing adding richness to the performance. His skills were also on display during Mean Old World, where he took on the challenge of filling in for Aoife O’Donovan’s harmonies from Tice’s previous recordings. Nickel Creek’s Jeff Picker provided understated but essential bass lines, anchoring the sound with warmth and subtlety.

Still, Tice’s Thompson guitar was the true star of the night. Whether delicately fingerpicking through a ballad or delivering fleet bluegrass runs, his playing was both technically masterful and emotionally resonant. Instrumentals like Badlettsville and Horse County Rag, which might serve as low-energy interludes in another artist’s set, became highlights in Tice’s hands.

Currently on tour across the Eastern U.S., Tice proves that traditional music doesn’t have to be frozen in time—it can be revived, reinvented, and made new again. If his performance at the Stoltz was any indication, this is a tour well worth catching.

Mark Pelavin, the founder of Hambleton Cove Consulting, is a writer, consultant, and music lover living very happily in St. Michaels.

There was a moment near the end of veteran singer-songwriter Ellis Paul’s performance at the Avalon Theatre’s Stoltz Listening Room on Sunday night that perfectly captured why a sold-out crowd had braved the rain to hear live music. As Paul prepared to close out his set, an audience member called out a request for “Home,” a song Paul wrote two decades ago. The fan explained that the song had helped save his marriage.

Paul, visibly moved, paused for a moment before settling in at the keyboard to play it. The audience, which had been singing along moments earlier, fell silent as he delivered the lyrics with quiet intensity: “Home… sits across the table / Home… is dreaming in my sheets / Home… home… / This house is just an address / You lift me from all sadness / This house is just an address, you’re my home.”

Throughout the night, Paul proved why he remains a beloved presence in folk and Americana music after more than four decades on the road. His set was filled with stories—some true, some embellished, all engaging. “Kick Out the Lights (Johnny Cash)” recounted the famous tale of Cash “dancing with his demons” at the Grand Ole Opry, smashing out 54 stage lights in a rebellious frenzy. “Holy” captured an Irish immigrant’s determination to chase the American dream despite the doubts of those he left behind:
“His friends say, ‘Christ, Declan, please / You’re wasting your prayers on a dream.’ / He says, ‘Watch me.’”

One of the most powerful moments of the evening came with “Troy’s Song,” based on the real-life story of a Desert Storm veteran suffering from PTSD. On the brink of taking his own life, Troy found salvation in a program that pairs veterans with retired racehorses. The song’s lyrics painted a poignant picture of healing and trust: “In that ring with Whiskey and me / Our hearts beat in some kind of synchronicity / And I trusted him / And he came to trust me / We were two old warriors / Starting all over again / Building trust / Like two old friends.”

Other highlights of the night included the “only slightly sacrilegious” “I’m No Jesus,” a wryly tender love song (“Now I can’t walk on water / Can’t part the sea / The only miracle that I’ve seen / Is you walking down the aisle to me”), and the stunning “Gold in California,” which painted a vivid picture of the California coastline bathed in golden light.

Paul was completely at home on stage, delivering songs and stories with passion, energy, and humor. Many of the acts that pass through the Stoltz Listening Room are young artists on their way up, bringing the thrill of new discovery to their performances. Paul, who recently celebrated his 60th birthday, has been touring relentlessly for over 40 years, playing hundreds of shows annually. And yet, his enthusiasm remains undiminished.

In the end, it wasn’t just Paul’s songs or stories that made the night special—it was the genuine joy he brought to the stage, a joy that filled the room and reminded everyone why live music, even on a rainy night, is worth showing up for.

Mark Pelavin, the founder of Hambleton Cove Consulting, is a writer, consultant, and music lover living very happily in St. Michaels.