Monday, January 30, 2012

Durham Artist Featured in Documentary


Raising Renee, an award-winning documentary featuring Durham artist Beverly McIver by Jeanne Jordan and Steven Ascher, will be screened at North Carolina Central University on Feb. 9 at 6 p.m. in the H.M. Michaux Jr. School of Education Auditorium.

The film chronicles McIver's, now the SunTrust Endowed Professor of Art at NCCU, struggle to provide care for her mentally disabled sister Renee after their mother died.

Jordan and Ascher met McIver in 2003 when she was an Arizona State University art professor at Harvard University on a fellowship. The initial plan was for a film about a rising star, an artist whose years of hard work were starting to pay off. But then McIver’s mother, Ethel, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The disease progressed quickly and Ethel McIver died in March 2004 — and the filmmakers had a very different story to tell.

Years before, McIver had casually promised her mother that she would take care of Renee when Ethel died — an event that seemed far off and unlikely to intrude on her life and career. Raising Renee is the story of a family’s remarkable response to an unexpected crisis.  It explores themes of family, race, class, and disability through the interplay of painting, cinema, and everyday life.

McIver, a 1987 graduate of NCCU and Durham resident, returned to the university as a full professor in 2008. The SunTrust endowment, designed for working artists, allows McIver to teach just one semester a year, leaving time for her to devote to her career as an artist. Her paintings are now in a major exhibition, “Reflections: Portraits by Beverly McIver,” at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, which runs through June.

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