2025 Open House
April 26, 2025, 12-5pm
At the Hambidge Center, 105 Hambidge Court, Rabun Gap GA 30568
FREE Admission with registration. Note: There is a small charge on site for food & drink and U-Do-Raku.
This annual event provides a free opportunity to visit, tour, and enjoy the Hambidge campus. Festivities will include open studios, art-making, food, musical performances, art sales, and more. Don’t miss this once-a-year opportunity to enjoy our historic private sanctuary for a fun filled day of arts, pottery, music, food and the great outdoors.
Visit with the current artists-in-residence in their studios, including Josh Aronson, D. Pierre Baulos, Marina DeMarco, Maryam Kashani, Katrina DeMarcus Santiago. These dynamic artists-in-residence include writers, photographers, filmmakers, and multidisciplinary artists from California, Washington, Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, and Canada.
Join in art-making activities like printmaking and U-Do-Raku (glaze your own pot and watch it be fired), corn gelee printmaking, a botanical illustration scavenger hunt, and more. The Weave Shed Gallery will once again offer pottery for sale.
Enjoy live music by The Cornbread Ted Dynamite Duo performing a variety of high energy, old timey, vernacular musical styles and ivywav providing earthy and mild-tempered sounds with Neo-Soul, R&B and jazz influences. We will also have a one-act show by Rabun County artist Charlie Dingler.
Come see our Barker’s Creek Grist Mill in action grinding grits and cornmeal. Enter our inaugural Cornbread Contest and see how your recipe measures up. We will be selling homemade Chili (meat and veggie) and grits with all the toppings from our GREAT GRITS TRUCK. For for Cornbread Cookoff details and registration visit our guidelines.
Learn more about our artists and musical guests below!
SPECIAL RECOGNITION
This year, we are honoring acclaimed artist and poet Laurence Holden, a longtime friend of Hambidge, for his dedicated service of over 40 years. A true renaissance man, his craft and wisdom seem to know no limits and includes serving as lead miller at Hambidge’s Barkers’ Creek Grist Mill. A special exhibition of work created by Laurence while in residence will be on display in the Antinori Village and Hambidge stone ground grits and cornmeal will be celebrated in a wide variety of ways.
Laurence Holden working in the Hambidge Grist Mill
EVENT SCHEDULE
10:30am – (Hosts & Sponsors Only) Drinks and light refreshments around the fire pit at Bunnen Commons of the Antinori Village.
11am - Noon – Hosts and Sponsors will gather outside the Bunnen Commons for Porch Stories, led by Hambidge Leadership, for storytelling, shared creative experiences, insights, and inspiration.
Noon - 5pm – The Open House opens to the public with activities across the Hambidge Campus, offering a range of engaging art experiences for folks to explore and enjoy.
VOLUNTEERS
The success of this festive event is bolstered by our team of volunteers each year. We need volunteers to help with the welcome table, parking, our pottery sale, answer questions about our lovely facilities, and more. We have open slots from 10 am until 7 pm. If you’re willing to help us out and be a part of this fun day, please sign-up with this LINK.
Sponsors
Raku Sponsor
Lynn Pollard + Melissa Bunnen Jernigan & James Jernigan
Village Sponsor
LDG Accounting Services + Barb & Thom Williams
Hosts
Suzanne Arpin + Margaret & Dallas Denny + Brooks Franklin & Lisa Ezzard + Ann Johnson + Temme Barkin-Leeds & Steve Leeds + Bari & Russell Love + Helen Meadors & Craig Burkhalter + Peggy McBride + Junco S. Pollack + Karin Schaller + Nancy Shaidnagle & Gene Luckey + Suzanne Shaw & Daniel Biddy + Kathy & David Williams + Woodie & Steve Wisebram
Gifts made in honor of Laurence Holden:
Sharon & Jim Alonso + Karin Schaller
We invite you to support Hambidge by being a Host or Sponsor of the Open House! Hosts and Sponsors help underwrite the cost of opening the campus to the public for FREE to discover the artists, studios, historic buildings and natural wonders of Hambidge. Click HERE to join as a Host or Sponsor.
More about our Performers and Artists...
Live Music Performers
The Cornbread Ted Dynamite Duo
The Cornbread Ted Dynamite Duo performs a variety of high energy, old timey, vernacular musical styles that includes old time banjo tunes, ragtime, country blues, and jug band songs. The Duo performs their unique brand of music across the mountain region of North Georgia and Western North Carolina.
“Cornbread Ted” aka Ted Whisenhunt- vocals, banjo, mandolin, guitar, blues harp, kazoo
Ted Whisenhunt has been performing old time roots music across the Southeast for over 25 years with a variety of bands including (Wolfcat Jones Trio, Kudzu String Band, Georgia Hellbenders, and Cornbread Ted & the Butterbeans.) Off stage, Ted is an Artist, and Professor of Art and Design, at Young Harris College. Ted’s artwork is often inspired by Appalachia and connects to the style of music that he performs.
“Dead Eye Dick” aka Richard Knepp- guitar, resonator slide guitar, vocals
Dr. Richard Knepp is classically trained musician and guitar teacher, who can be found teaching students, young and old, from across the North Georgia. He regularly performs classical guitar recitals at colleges, universities, and other venues across the Southeast. Knepp is also an Instructor of Music at Young Harris College where he teaches guitar, music theory, and the very popular course “The History of Rock N Roll.”
ivywav
From Atlanta, Georgia by way of the Garden State, ivywav draws her influences from many places and is one of three in The Gard3n trio. Keeping true to the elements, ivywav’s sound is earthy and mild-tempered. Citing Neo-Soul, R&B and jazz as her genre influences, she creates new wave soul and jazz fusion with strong personal lyricism. Continuing to grow in artistry and The Gard3n, it won’t be long before ivy blooms.
Performance
In perfect alignment with this year’s theme, we will be hosting Charlie Dingler, a Rabun County artist. He created Dinglerfest three years ago to showcase folk art. He will be performing, “Gritszilla",” a one act play spoofing 1950s monster movies. It is an ongoing series based on a monster created from Grits.
Residents
Our current artists-in-residence will be their studios 1:00-3:00pm for the Studio Tour.
Josh Aronson
@jda.usa
Josh Aronson is a Canadian-American photographer based in Miami, Florida. Born in Toronto in 1994, he grew up in Florida and earned a BA in Philosophy from Northwestern University, where he developed the conceptual foundation for his artistic practice.
His photography explores identity, masculinity, and the Southern landscape, often through staged narrative tableaux. His ongoing project, Florida Boys, reimagines Southern male identity, challenging stereotypes and capturing moments of intimacy and reflection.
His work has been featured in Vogue Italia, Dazed, and the British Journal of Photography, with commissions from brands like Adidas, Chanel, and A24. In 2021, he was named “Best Photographer” by Miami New Times, and his book Tropicana is in the collections of The Met and the Library of Congress. Currently, he is completing Florida Boys and was recently part of the Peyton Evans Artist Residency at The Studios of Key West.
@douglas_baulos
Douglas Pierre Baulos is an artist, educator, and writer whose work explores themes of queer identity, love, death, and hope through drawing, installation, and book arts. Born in Springfield, Illinois, they earned an MFA from the University of New Orleans and currently serve as an Associate Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Their work has been exhibited internationally and is held in collections at MoMA, the Getty Museum, and the Birmingham Museum of Art. Passionate about the intersections of art and science, Baulos specializes in visual ecology, bookbinding, and papermaking.
In addition to their visual work, Baulos writes poetry and has authored Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard (2021) and Alabama: Midnight Full of Stars (2024). Their practice focuses on creating spaces for healing, agency, and creative exploration.
@marinarosedemarco
Marina DeMarco is a violinist and composer blending folk traditions with experimental soundscapes. Her music is deeply rooted in a sense of place, drawing inspiration from seasonal cycles, landscapes, and the concept of home.
She grew up in Big Bear, California, playing in orchestras and chamber ensembles before touring Italy and performing at Carnegie Hall with the MountainTop Strings Camerata. In 2018, she moved to Seattle to study at Cornish College of the Arts, where she expanded her practice to include improvisation, composition, and contemporary chamber music.
As an educator, she has been teaching private violin lessons since 2015 and recently began leading group classes, including fiddle workshops for kids. She also performs with the Pacific Northwest indie-folk trio The Friendship Quilt. Her recent studies include Norwegian hardingfele music, supported by the Hardanger Fiddle Association of America’s instrument loan program (2022-2024).
@myrmuring
Maryam Kashani is a Chicago-based filmmaker and writer from San Francisco. Her work is engaged with the relationships between physical landscapes and the material and spiritual histories and forces that emerge with and against them. Her practice extends across image, sound, performance, and text towards building relations and power. Her films and video installations have exhibited internationally, including at the Sharjah Biennial, MoMA, Hammer Museum, and the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive.
Her book Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival (Duke University Press, 2023) is an ethnocinematic examination of how multiracial Muslim communities in the San Francisco Bay Area survive within and against racial capitalist, carceral, and imperial logics.
Kashani labors as an associate professor in Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is an affiliate with Anthropology, Media and Cinema Studies, and the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Kashani is also in the leadership collective of Believers Bail Out, a community-led effort to bailout Muslims in pretrial and immigration incarceration towards abolition.
@biggirlbabyartist
Katrina DeMarcus Santiago is a multidisciplinary fine artist based in Atlanta, Georgia. Raised in a disciplined household, she was encouraged to be both creative and focused. At sixteen, she spent a year in Puerto Rico, an experience that profoundly influenced her artistic practice.
She earned a BFA in Communications Design from the Pratt Institute in 2018, where she developed a visual language that reinterprets figures from her coming-of-age memories, such as the vejigante. Her textile máscaras, hand-knit and crocheted, soften this iconic cultural symbol, while her ceramics feature marbled vessels inspired by organic forms.
Santiago’s work has been recognized with the John Klammer 3-D Award and inclusion in the Society of Illustrators. She has exhibited in the “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure” ADVISRY show (2022) and completed an artist residency at Mudfire Studio and Gallery. Her experience also includes an internship at Adult Swim from 2018-2019.