Upcoming Exhibit

Please join me Friday October 14th from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. for my exhibit reception at Jonathan Dickinson State Park. Please see attachment. Sincerely, Kevin Boldenow

A Short Video of the Abandoned Cemetery in Hobe Sound, Florida.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_BWceH5kNk&feature_youtu.be

Fracking and the Environment Around Us.

Over 24 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico will be auctioned off to oil and gas companies for drilling and fracking. This auction is set to take place in the New Orleans Superdome, just an hour’s drive from Louisiana cities and towns that have just been ravaged by unprecedented floods.

Abandoned Cemetery

Everywhere people have lived, people have died, and had their remains cared for. Cemeteries function as outdoor museums, teaching us about the lives before us. Burials contain clues to the human past including settlement, subsistence, trade, and religious belief. The human remains in a burial tell only one part of the story. For all intentional burials, at least one person, if not many,were present to bury the deceased. These special places are a glimpse into the life of the individuals who settled and influenced our communities, and reflect the cultural practices and ways we care for others. Many rural cemeteries are all that remains of once thriving settlements and the hopes and dreams of these pioneers. The African Methodist Episcopal Cemetery in Hobe Sound, Florida, is a small desolate and abandoned burial ground. The area is extremely neglected and overgrown. Once the site of a church that burned down a number of years ago, possibly by vandals, the cemetery is now the depository of unwanted refuse and a playground for neighborhood trail bike riders. The few memorial stones are hard to locate, in poor condition, and some unreadable. Like other historic black cemeteries, headstones are rough cut stone with crude cuttings for the names and dates of the deceased. As is the custom, there are many exposed burial vault lids here.

Coffee Pods

Last month, K-Cup inventor John Sylan made headlines when he said what plenty of environmentally conscious folks were already thinking: He wished he’d never invented the nonrecyclable coffee pods. Although the manufacturer of K-Cups, Keurig Green Mountain, has the goal of making the tiny plastic containers sustainable by 2020, that might be too little, too late. Just the pods sold in 2014 can encircle the globe at least 10.5 times. That astronomical amount of waste will only grow over the next five years as the number of people who roll out of bed thinking about the convenience of single-serve coffee—not plastic piling up in landfills or floating in the ocean—increases.

Supporting Artists

If communities are going to realize the full potential of artists’ power to contribute to positive change, then they need to sustain and support their artists. Artists can only stay and create experiences if there are communities and organizations who recognize that value, and support it financially. In good times and lean, art brings people together, sustains and connects them, and needs to be a part of the consideration. And since art comes from artists, we need to value our artists, in all senses of the word.

Direct Marketing

In many ways, direct marketing on the web is a self-limiting process, because the more that media companies embrace it, the worse it works. This is precisely the opposite of what happened for a generation to branded ads in Vogue and other magazines. Work too hard at getting clicks on the ads you sold, your audience leaves.