9-7-2009
12:00 PM

Berea College Bluegrass Band
The Berea College Bluegrass Band will perform a special Labor Day concert at the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center Gallery. We welcome folks to bring their lunch and join us from noon to one and listen to some great music from some great musicians. Ashley Long a 2008 graduate and Will Haizlett a 2009 graduate will return to join the group during their performance. Please come and enjoy what is sure to be a very special event that you truly won’t want to miss.

9-22-2009
8:30 AM                   

bell hooks “Answering the Call: Spirituality & Education”
Loyal Jones Appalachian Center Gallery

Let us talk together about the ways in which spirituality influences education—how we teach and how we learn—celebrating the ways divine wisdom serves as a guiding force. bell hooks is Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies at Berea College. Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, she has chosen the lower case pen name bell hooks, based on the names of her mother and grandmother, to emphasize the importance of the substance of her writing as opposed to who she is. She is the author of over thirty books, many of which have focused on issues of social class, race, and gender. Her latest book is titled Belonging: A Culture of Place.

9-25-2009
7:00 PM

Up The Ridge
Directed by Amelia Kirby and Nick Szuberla, 60 min. (2008)

A documentary film about urban prisoners in isolated rural prisons.
Wise County, Virginia 1999: Wallens Ridge State Prison. A struggling rural coal-mining community fights for economic survival by building two super-maximum security prisons to house the state’s prisoners. Within a few months reports of human rights violations and cultural tension begin surfacing. Prisoners from urban Virginia, as well as Connecticut, New Mexico, and Washington D.C. in a state run beds for hire program, are transferred to rural Appalachia where former coalminers are now correction officers. The stakes were raised when Human Rights Watch issued a scathing report of abuse and racism in the prisons. The prisoners, prisoner families, and correction officers find themselves in a vortex of cultural and political conflict.

9-29-2009
8:30 AM

bell hooks “Answering the Call: Spirituality & Education”
Loyal Jones Appalachian Center Gallery

Let us talk together about the ways in which spirituality influences education—how we teach and how we learn—celebrating the ways divine wisdom serves as a guiding force. bell hooks is Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies at Berea College. Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, she has chosen the lower case pen name bell hooks, based on the names of her mother and grandmother, to emphasize the importance of the substance of her writing as opposed to who she is. She is the author of over thirty books, many of which have focused on issues of social class, race, and gender. Her latest book is titled Belonging: A Culture of Place.

10-5-2009
6:00 p.m.

Silas House reads from Eli the Good

Loyal Jones Appalachian Center Gallery

Famed Kentucky novelist Silas House will read from his just-released novel, Eli the Good. Copies will be available to purchase and to have the author sign. Deborah Payne will also be present to play music.

10-15-2009

36th Annual Celebration of Traditional Music
October 15-18, 2009

The Celebration of Traditional Music strives to represent homemade music passed on from person to person in the Appalachian Region and the musicians who play it. Old time string band music, blues, traditional gospel singing, ballads, and acoustic instruments are featured in a family-friendly atmosphere. Berea College’s students, faculty, and staff welcome the public to enjoy this festival of roots music and dancing on our campus. Bring your instruments, feet, and voices, and enjoy the many jam sessions and opportunities to learn how to sing, play, and dance to this music. This year we are featuring many great acts including; The Horse Flies, Whitetop Mountain Band, Don Pedi, Sparky and Rhonda Rucker, John Haywood, and the Berea College Bluegrass Ensemble. For more information visit the CTM website.

10-23-2009
7:00 PM

Stranger with a Camera
Directed by Elizabeth Barret, 60 min. (2000)

In 1967 Canadian filmmaker Hugh O'Connor visited the mountains of Central Appalachia to document poverty. A local landlord, who resented the presence of filmmakers on his property, shot and killed O'Connor, in part because of his anger over the media images of Appalachia that had become icons in the nation's War on Poverty.

Filmmaker Elizabeth Barret, a native of Appalachia, uses O'Connor's death as a lens to explore the complex relationship between those who make films to promote social change and the people whose lives are represented in such media productions. Through first-person accounts of the killing and the perspective of three decades of reflection, Stranger with a Camera leads viewers on a quest for understanding—a quest that ultimately leads Barret to examine her own role as both a maker of media and a member of the Appalachian community she portrays.

11-6-2009
7:30 PM

Robert J. Conley, Appalachian Heritage Featured Author Reading
Loyal Jones Appalachian Center Gallery

Robert J. Conley is the author of The Cherokee Nation: A History, the authorized history of the Cherokee and of A Cherokee Encyclopedia, as well as over seventy other novels, poetry collections and other books.  He was born in Cushing, Oklahoma, in 1940 and is an enrolled member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee. He earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English from Midwestern University and has served as Assistant Program Manager for the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.  He currently lives in Sylva, North Carolina, and holds the Sequoyah Distinguished Professorship in Cherokee Studies at Western Carolina University.  He is married to Evelyn Conley who chairs the Indigenous Education Institute and serves on the staff of the Rural Development Leadership Project.  Featured artist, Sean Ross, strives to compose visions that tell the honest, “everyday story of the Cherokee people”, with images unfettered from the preconceived notions of the masses, showing the human-ness so often overlooked. This is in the hopes of building a greater understanding and appreciation of this great people.

11-10-2009
11:00-11:45 AM

1:15 - 2:00 PM

Linda Tate
Appalachian Center Gallery

Power in the Blood: A Family Narrative traces Linda Tate’s journey to rediscover the Cherokee-Appalachian branch of her family and provides an unflinching examination of the poverty, discrimination, and family violence that marked their lives. In her search for the truth of her own past, Tate scoured archives, libraries, and courthouses throughout Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Illinois, and Missouri, visited numerous cemeteries, and combed through census records, marriage records, court cases, local histories, old maps, and photographs. As she began to locate distant relatives — fifth, sixth, seventh cousins, all descended from her great-great grandmother Louisiana — they gathered in kitchens and living rooms, held family reunions, and swapped stories. A past that had long been buried slowly came to light as family members shared the pieces of the family’s tale that had been passed along to them.  The project emerged from a summer Appalachian Studies workshop held at Berea College. She is the author of A Southern Weave of Women: Fiction of the Contemporary South and the editor of Conversations with Lee Smith. She taught at Shepherd University in West Virginia for fifteen years and now lives in Boulder, Colorado.  Cosponsored with Women’s Studies.

11-16-2009
3:00 - 5:00pm

Loyal Jones Appalachian Center Gallery
Reception celebrating the exhibit Miners and Mining:  Forty-Five Years of Photographs by Warren Brunner

11-20-2009
7:00 PM

Hazel Dickens: Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song
Directed by Mimi Pickering, 60 min. (2001)

From the coalfields of West Virginia to the factories of Baltimore, Hazel Dickens has lived the songs she sings. A pioneering woman in Bluegrass and hardcore country music, Hazel has influenced generations of songwriters and musicians. Her songs of hard work, hard times, and hardy souls have bolstered working people at picket lines and union rallies throughout the land. In this intimate portrait, interviews with Hazel and fellow musicians such as Alison Krauss, Naomi Judd, and Dudley Connell are interwoven with archival footage, recent performances, and 16 powerful songs including “Mama’s Hand,” “ Working Girl Blues,” and “Black Lung.”

Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song profiles a "modern" woman dealing with contemporary issues from a feminist perspective, which has evolved from her own experiences: being Appalachian, being displaced physically and culturally, being poor and working class, being a woman artist in a man's world, and being a bearer of tradition.

12-4-2009
7:00 PM

Long Journey Home
Directed by Elizabeth Barret, 60 min. (1987)

Long Journey Home explores the ethnic diversity of the Appalachian region, the economic forces causing people to migrate into and out of the area, and the choices individuals make to stay, to leave, and to come back. European immigrants recall the ethnic variety that existed in Appalachia during the first coal boom of the 1910s and 1920s. African-Americans whose families left sharecropping in the South to build the railroads and work in the mines talk about the transition to life in the coal camps, and their later dispersal across the country as automation took their jobs.

Eventually, 3.3 million people left the region in search of work. Members of these families, people with deep roots in the mountains, talk about riding the “hillbilly highway” on weekends and holidays and struggle to find a way to move back home and make a living. This film contemplates the past and future of the American economy and the toll capitalism takes on individuals, families, and communities.

1-22-2010
7:00 PM

Sludge
Directed by Robert Salyer, 45 min. (2006)

Shortly after midnight on October 11, 2000, a coal sludge pond in Martin County, Kentucky, broke through an underground mine, propelling 306 million gallons of sludge down two tributaries of the Tug Fork River into the Big Sandy. The Martin County sludge spill killed all aquatic life along 30 miles of river, damaged municipal water systems, and caused millions of dollars in property damage.

Appalshop filmmaker Robert Salyer follows the government agencies and community members through their cleanup efforts and their attempts to understand the causes of a disaster thirty times larger than the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Filmed over four years, the documentary chronicles the aftermath of the disaster, the Mine Safety and Health Administration “whistleblower” case of Jack Spadaro, and the looming threat of coal sludge ponds throughout the Appalachian mountains.

2-19-2010
7:00 PM

Strangers and Kin: A History of the Hillbilly Image
Directed by Herb E. Smith, 60 min. (1984)

Using funny, often poignant examples, Strangers and Kin shows the development and effect of stereotypes as technological change collides with tradition in the Southern mountains. The film traces the evolution of the "hillbilly" image through Hollywood films, network news and entertainment shows, dramatic renderings of popular literature, and interviews with contemporary Appalachians to demonstrate how stereotypes are created, reinforced, and often used to rationalize exploitation. The film suggests how a people can embrace modernity without becoming "strangers to their kin."

3-5-2010
7:00 PM

The Electricity Fairy
Directed by Tom Hansell, 60 min. (2008)

“They reach out and flip the switch and the light comes on.  Well, there’s not a magic electricity fairy.  That electricity comes from a power plant that feeds on coal.”
-  Eugene Mooney, former head of the Kentucky Department for Natural Resources

Coal produces half of America’s electricity, according to the Federal Department of Energy.  The energy policy currently before Congress identifies coal as a key to America’s "energy independence.”  The Electricity Fairy is a documentary that examines America's national addiction to fossil fuels through the lens of electricity.  Appalshop Filmmaker Tom Hansell follows the story of a proposed coal-fired power plant in the mountains of southwest Virginia, connecting the local controversy to the national debate over energy policy. 

4-23-2010
7:00 PM

To Save the Land & the People
Directed by Anne Lewis, 58 min. (1999)

Strip or “surface” mining—where coal is blasted and scraped from the mountain surface—increased dramatically in the Appalachian region in 1961 when the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) signed contracts to buy more than 16 million tons of strip-mined coal. Though cheaper for the buyer than deep mined coal, the damage done by strip mining was far reaching and had immediate impact on coalfield residents.

To Save the Land and People is a history of the early grassroots efforts to stop strip mining in eastern Kentucky, where “broad form” deeds, signed at the beginning of the 20th Century, were used by coal operators to destroy the surface land without permission or compensation of the surface owner. The program focuses on the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People, whose members used every means possible—from legal petitions and local ordinances, to guns and dynamite—to fight strip mining. The documentary makes a powerful statement about the land and how we use it, and how its misuse conflicts with local cultures and values.

The film tells the story of resistance in the voices of people who were directly involved and demonstrates the creativity and energy that indigenous and working class people bring to the environmental justice movement.

5-7-2010
7:00 PM

From Wood to Singing Guitar
Directed by Shawn Lind (2009)

From Wood to Singing Guitar is a documentary film showcasing Wayne C. Henderson, the master musician and master luthier from the small town of Rugby, Virginia, with a population of eight—two more than the number of strings on the guitars made in his red brick rectangle of a workshop. A skilled craftsman & respected musician by his teens, Wayne was taught and encouraged by those around him including the folk hero E.C. Ball and the kind & generous fiddle maker, Albert Hash.