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.

Documentary About Local Artist to Show at Full Frame

Beverly McIver is not an average person. Despite her quiet demeanor, unassuming presence and contagious humility, she is a force of nature.

McIver is a Durham-based artist whose work has gained national attention, but her most recent moment in the spotlight is for another reason entirely - she is the subject of a documentary called Raising Renee that will be shown at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. It is about a promise that Beverly made to her mother - one kept unfailingly. The promise was to care for her disabled sister when her mother passed away, and since 2004, Beverly has done so.

At one hour and 25 minutes and the result of six years of filming by two Massachusetts film makers, the work chronicles the changes and choices Beverly has made to accommodate her sister; her need to leave NY as her career was taking off, her move to Arizona to teach, and ultimately back to Durham to take a position as the Suntrust Endowed Professor of Art at North Carolina Central University. It's been quite a journey. 

"It helped me grow as an individual and made me care for someone - that's what the film is about,"  McIver said by phone in her characteristically happy tone.

Her art moved from hobby to profession over the last 25 years - she sold her first piece to a co-worker she met while on a temporary job with whom she is still friends.  At the same time she grew as a person and artist whose works sell for tens of thousands of dollars.

As some would say in proper Southern parlance, Beverly is "good people," though she'd probably not be so self-congratulatory herself.

Look for the film during Full Frame at The Carolina Theatre from April 14th to the 17th.