The John Erickson Museum of Art, known as JEMA, is pleased to announce a web-based film and photo-based site-specific piece by Scott Betz, titled NC2MI&MI2NC. Betz's site-specific project utilizes JEMA's location variability to create a traveling exhibition that comments on its route through the United States. NC2MI&MI2NC traces the events of 1926, 1958, and 2005 from the artist's home state of North Carolina to Michigan (JEMA will be traveling Betz's
exhibition to Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, UICA in Grand Rapids).

In NC2MI&MI2NC, Betz reveals three "births" in 1926 that connect North Carolina and Michigan history. In 1926, John Coltrane was born near Winston-Salem. In the same year Jessie Hays sent Pete Sadler from Winston-Salem to Detroit to buy a bus. This purchase became the genesis for the first African-American owned transportation company in the U.S., the Safe Bus Company (later developed into the Winston-Salem Transit Authority).
1926 is also the year that the Union Train Station was built. This station still stands and is located across the street from Winston-Salem State University where Betz is employed. Betz fuses these histories and facts and poetically loads them into JEMA's space and website for travel and consideration.

As Betz explores the terrain and significance of these histories he also "mines" the music of John Coltrane. For his film and installation Betz uses "Blue Trane" (10:42) and "Shifting Down" (10:41) both recorded in Detroit in 1958. His project "draws" connections and changes from 1926 to the present. Significantly, the film "NC2MI&MI2NC ends with footage of Betz's recent trip by air to Michigan and back. Previously Betz has used travel as metaphor for learning and life in the past with exhibitions such as 40/40- an examination of his commute each day to and from work crossing the historical line of segregated Winston-Salem- HWY 52.

"It is Betz's compulsion to unmask and document layers of truth...Betz (explores) the degrees of truth surrounding any historic event, explicating this idea by presenting levels of visual information which serve to heighten awareness of the perceptual difference between fact and truth."

"NC2MI&MI2NC"

This video is 26 minutes long.