The Charleston Gazette

The Gazz

November 16, 2006

Exhibit captures Cabin Creek

by Julie Robinson

for the Gazette

Three years ago, 15 women began taking photos and writing their thoughts about life on Cabin Creek.

The women wanted to document the community’s strengths, history and challenges. Working through Cabin Creek Health Center, they received roughly $2,000 from the Greater Kanawha Valley Foundation to get started. They also received money from the Canaan Valley Institute, which had leftover money when its leaders shut down rather than put on another summer cultural festival.

The women, who ranged in age from 14 to 69, took photos for a year, shooting trees, woods and scenic landscapes. They shot their churches. They shot a family gathered at the dinner table. They shot an abandoned coal-loading building, crumbling roads and an old water tower half-obscured by vines and trees.

The best of those photos were exhibited briefly in 2004 at the Sharon Church of God in Dry Branch. Now Showcase West Virginia, at 906 Quarrier St., has chosen to bring back the exhibit for its first show in its new Open-Ended Gallery.

The gallery is upstairs from Showcase West Virginia’s street-level retail crafts shop in a space that Showcase West Virginia already had under rent. An opening reception will take place from 5 to 8 p.m. today.

Like a lot of communities in West Virginia, Cabin Creek has lost much of its industrial base, which was coal, and many of its young people, who have gone where they could find jobs, said Marilyn Harrell, a spokeswoman for Showcase West Virginia.

Kathy Stout left Cabin Creek as a newlywed and came back in 1997 when her husband, Owen, retired as a probation officer in Michigan, where they raised three children and she worked as a bookkeeper.

She learned that Cabin Creek had beautiful places and good people, said Stout, now 57 and married 37 years.

“This made us delve deeper into ourselves to find out what we wanted to say,” Stout said. “We learned we were better women than we thought we were. We all came away knowing we could do things we didn’t think we could do before.”

Showcase West Virginia is an arm of the nonprofit Center for Economic Options, which owns and operates the store as a social-purpose enterprise, Harrell said. The gallery will be another social-purpose enterprise.

“The photovoice project made them more articulate. Instead of saying the road is falling in, they were able to take a photograph and take it to the state road people.”

Images will be on sale at prices ranging from $7 for a 4-by-6-inch print to $58 for one 30 by 40 inches.

Photos with explanatory words are available at prices ranging from $8 to $45.

Showcase West Virginia and the Open-Ended Gallery are open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday to Friday and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. During the holiday shopping period from Nov. 24 to Dec. 23, hours expand from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday to Friday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday. Call 342-8527.

To contact staff writer Bob Schwarz, use e-mail or call 348-1249.