Dayton City Paper Print editorial
Creating stories about Midwest arts & culture
CLIENT
Dayton City Paper
The Dayton City Paper was a free arts and culture newsweekly distributed at hundreds of locations throughout the metro Dayton, Ohio region from 2003 through 2018.
ROLE
Associate and visuals editor
DELIVERABLES
Research, editorial planning, interviews, editing, copyediting, fact-checking, image curation, freelance writer management, storytelling
PROJECT OVERVIEW
As associate and visuals editor, I was responsible for connecting with the arts community in Dayton. We were able to expand our network throughout Greater Dayton and the Miami Valley, connecting with and covering regional artists in-depth and with a humanist angle.
OUTCOME
“As my associate editor, Morgan helped heighten the quality of editorial to an unprecedented level. As visual arts editor, she expanded and deepened local arts coverage, raising our volume not only as arts reporters but as critics and artists ourselves.” —Amanda Dee, editor-in-chief of Dayton City Paper
SELECTED STORIES
COVER STORY
Through the looking glass
STRONG’s Surrealist Ball
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Narrative-based storytelling for STRONG’s Surrealist Ball fundraiser. STRONG is a nonprofit organization in Dayton that provides classes and events for the emotional wellbeing of adults and children.
FROM THE STORY
It’s a cold winter night in France. You’re dressed to the nines in formal wear, a sky-blue invitation dotted with white clouds tucked inside your coat. The invitation reads, “black tie, long dresses, surrealist headpiece.” You’re going to a party and the only thing missing is your antlers.
STORY
Mitosis Is…
Multiverse exhibit divides and conquers at UD’s Radial Gallery
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An overview of University of Dayton’s Radial Gallery exhibit Multiverse.
FROM THE STORY
There’s something alien about Julie Abijanac’s “Poumon Noir.” The dark, amorphous mass juts out intrusively from the left wall of the Radial Gallery, a black hole lying in wait, startling you from the periphery of your vision as you walk through the doors of Radial Gallery’s Multiverse exhibit.
STORY
Film, photograph, or memory?
Julie Renee Jones ‘UMBRA’ casts a shadow at Blue House Gallery
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An overview of Julie’s exhibition at Dayton’s Blue House Gallery
FROM THE STORY
“UMBRA” (a shadow cast by a form of light in space) is titled in homage to “Solaris.” Like planet Solaris, Jones’ photographs create a shadow world, a parallel reality recreated from memory and filled with doppelgangers who aren’t quite the real thing. The trick is, though we know the people are only fakes or replicas of someone we knew long ago, we fall in love with them anyway.
STORY
Beach noir
Katie Lee Mansfield dives into ‘Summer Break’ at The Blue House Gallery
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An interview with Katie, who tells me about her provocative “Summer Break” installation and residency at the artist-run Blue House Gallery in Dayton
FROM THE STORY
When I speak with performance and installation artist Katie Lee Mansfield, she tells me a gun will arrive on her doorstep the very next day. “A tattoo gun,” she insists, giving credence to the rumors circulating around her appearance at Blue House Gallery on May 27.
STORY
An eye for existentialism
Darren Haper’s Almost There looks inward at Rosewood Arts Centre
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An overview of Darren’s playful Almost There exhibition at Dayton’s Rosewood Arts Centre
FROM THE STORY
“Ooh, look! Isn’t this fun?” coos a woman in a red shirt, pointing to a distressed cartoon character caught in an ominous-looking funnel. The cartoon, a yellow cyclops, raises his skinny arms above his head in a desperate bid to escape whatever’s waiting on the other end of the funnel. His one eye frantically searches the crowd for help, but the gallery-goers at Rosewood Arts Centre just point at him and say, “Isn’t this fun?”
STORY
Realism isn’t dead
Peter Clive’s Narrative Figure Paintings color TEJAS Gallery
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An overview of Peter’s moody figure paintings at Dayton’s TEJAS Gallery
FROM THE STORY
“I have no use for Jeff Koons, for probably obvious reasons,” Peter Clive tells me. The New Hampshire-based painter—whose Narrative Figure Paintings is on display at TEJAS Gallery through the month of March—is telling me about the landscape of contemporary art; it’s inevitable that the patron saint of moneyed art investors and gigantic metallic balloon dogs would come barreling to the surface of our conversation sooner or later. It’s telling that Clive uses the word “obviously” when he mentions his dislike for Koons, like it’s inevitable, something to be sighed over and then forgotten quickly for less distasteful subject matter.
COVER STORY
A 20 x 20 vision
Pecha Kucha takes back big ideas from the internet
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Pecha Kucha is a simple, fast-paced, multiple speakers event intended to be a grassroots platform for connecting ideas and people.
FROM THE STORY
If you’re nervous about pronunciation, you can just
say PK,” Shayna McConville says. I’m sitting in a nearly empty room in the recesses of a local coffee house, facing three coordinators from the Dayton area Pecha Kucha.
McConville, Jill Davis, and Matt Sauer sit opposite me at a large round table shoved into a corner of the room. Between sips of what is probably lukewarm coffee, they’re teaching me, with limited success, how to pronounce the Japanese phrase for “chit-chat.”
STORY
Recurring nightmares
DCP writers and staffers revisit 2016’s darkest moments
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DCP writers and staffers wrote about their least favorite moments in 2016 for our annual “Worst” edition.
FROM THE STORY
We here at DCP heard a lot about the Matrix—the philosophical construct and the movie—this past year. It seemed as if, in the wake of the election, everyone was suddenly questioning the nature of their reality, via that overcooked Keanu Reeves vehicle from the ’90s. But what if the truth were less sexy than that? What if the apocalypse already happened, but no one save Reeves noticed? There was no explosion, no biblical flood, no alien invasion or murderous cyborg revolt. It didn’t start “with an earthquake” as Michael Stipe suggested in 1987 or end with sinners left behind, as, um, “Left Behind” predicted. OK, in the most literal sense, no, the world hasn’t ended. Clearly, we’re all still well enough to discuss red pill/blue pill implications. Our current cultural obsession with dystopian fiction (“The Hunger Games,” “The Road,” Children of Men”) seems to imply the end of the world will be precluded by a cataclysmic event, a single definitive occurrence that will wipe us from the face of the Earth. But the most realistic scenario might be the one posited in H.G. Wells’ early 20th century works: a slow, insidious decline, where the general populace is subjugated, day and night, to tedious, never-ending work. Sound familiar? Maybe being part of the future means accepting that we’ve arrived at the most mundane of all possible endings: sitting in a cubicle, waiting in vain for someone to take a bat to that goddamn office printer.
