Beats All I Ever Saw
and Annual Easter Egg Dye-o-Rama
If These Walls Could Talk Performance
April 10, 2020 | 12:00 PM – 4:00 PM CST | Free Event
The Performance
Join the Neill-Cochran House Museum for its annual family-friendly Easter egg event. In addition to egg dying for children, this year’s festivities will include a Red Velvet Cake competition with a celebrity judge and audience taste-testing and vote. Jennifer Cumberbatch’s Beats All I Ever Saw will feature music and dance to communicate the historic significance of the cakewalk. The performance and Red Velvet Cake Competition also serve to honor the significance to the Adams Family, who started the Adams Extract and Food Coloring business.
The performance is inspired by Ginger Geyer’s sculpture of a Sunbeam mixer covered in red velvet cake batter, titled Beats All I Ever Saw. The performance also serves as a recognition of Mary Cochran Bohl’s intense admiration of her Grandma Rose’s cake baking skills.
The Eggs
Each year, the Neill-Cochran House Museum opens its doors to feature free, hands-on Easter egg dyeing, scavenger hunts, self-paced tours, and (weather permitting) lawn games with space to picnic in the shade.
Though the museum will be open for free, the suggested donation for each egg is $2 with all proceeds benefiting ongoing programming at the Neill-Cochran House Museum.
The museum will provide blown (emptied) eggs, dyes, wax resists, tables, chairs, and volunteers to offer help with the process. Visitors are also welcome to bring their own boiled or blown eggs. While the eggs dry, visitors are invited indoors to visit the ongoing If These Walls Could Talk and Reckoning with the Past: Slavery, Segregation, and Gentrification in Austin exhibits.
Meet the Artist
Jennifer Rousseau Cumberbatch
Jennifer Rousseau Cumberbatch is a pastor, counselor, actress and playwright from Austin, the owner and founder of JR Cumberbatch Productions, and Cumberbatch Confections. Jennifer is sent out from Agape Christian Ministries, where she was an associate pastor, to found and establish Full Measure Ministries. She has written, starred in, staged and produced several productions, in Austin and throughout Texas. She has starred in her one woman show “R3: Real Life, Real Women, Real Stories”, “and performed as “Sadie” Delany in “Having our Say, the Delany Sisters First 100 Years”, and Sally Burditt in “The Bluebellies in Austin: Readings from the Travis Country Slave Narratives”. Jennifer worked with and was directed by the late and venerable Boyd Vance, founder and artistic director of the now defunct Pro Arts Collective. The Boyd Vance Theater at Austin’s Carver museum is named after this great artist and visionary and is the inspiration for Jennifer’s Production Company and passion to tell the stories of African Americans, Black people and all peoples with authenticity and depth in the context of the American landscape. A graduate of Brown University and Austin’s Seminary of the Southwest, Jennifer also preaches, teaches, leads retreats, and is a vocalist and published writer.
Ginger Geyer
Austin artist Ginger Geyer grew up in Springdale, Arkansas, attended the University of Arkansas and earned BFA and MFA degrees in painting and art history from SMU. She also has a lay degree from the Seminary of the Southwest in pastoral ministry. Formerly an art museum professional (Dallas Museum of Art and Kimbell Art Museum), she occasionally consults on collection management and architecture. For 15 years she directed artist workshops and curated the gallery for the H.E. Butt Foundation retreat center, Laity Lodge. All of this, plus being a mother of two and grandmother of one have informed her avid studio practice. Writing, serving as adjunct professor at both Seminary of the Southwest and Concordia University, and making art with homeless people have also influenced her art. For thirty years, porcelain sculpture has been the primary medium for combining her quests into art history, museology, spirituality, and culture. A large body of “not quite trompe l’oeil” works are accompanied by ever-changing narratives. A retrospective of her work in early 2020 at the Neill-Cochran House Museum in Austin takes it beyond the gallery scene into an immersive experience throughout the historic house and its slave dependency. “If These Walls Could Talk” is a collaborative with a performing artist to explore both the privileged and the enslaved who graced these grounds. More information can be found at www.gingergeyer.com, Instagram and Valley House Gallery & Sculpture Garden in Dallas.