Exhibition Here We Are Painting Sculpting the Human Form Weatherspoon Art Museum June 30
Acquisition News
SHERRILL ROLAND
The Weatherspoon is thrilled to denote the conquering of an of import series of drawings by artist and UNC Greensboro alum Sherrill Roland '09, MFA '16. Just before his final year at the University, Roland was wrongfully bedevilled of a offense and sent to prison. Though he was eventually exonerated, his feel lives on in his series, titled Artforus: November 2013–Summer 2014 Issues. Made from the art magazines that Roland received while in prison, the works reverberate on his devastating months behind bars. After saving bits from each of the magazine covers, he ground the pages into a pulp from which he made new sheets of paper that he then covered in texts and images drawn from the mail service he received in jail, the Bible passages he read in the prison chapel, and pages from his journals. The compositions offering a record of vulnerability and resilience—both Roland's and his customs's. As he points out, prison changes the lives of both those incarcerated and those who love them.
As part of concluding fall'southward Art on Newspaper exhibition, these artworks were carefully studied on multiple visits by students in the Residential College Global Engagement and Intercultural Learning Seminar and ultimately served every bit inspiration for the course'south terminal projection. The Weatherspoon is honored that this work will remain at UNC Greensboro as role of the museum's collection and a resource for future students and community members.
Images: Sherrill Roland, Artforus: February 2014 Issue, 2018. ArtForum International Magazine (February 2014), toilet paper, primer paint, Kool-Aid, Sharpie marker, ink, and steel, 28 x 24 in. Weatherspoon Fine art Museum, UNC Greensboro. Purchase with funds from the Weatherspoon Art Museum Acquisition Endowment for the Dillard Collection, 2021.eight.4. © Sherrill Roland
Sherrill Roland, Artforus: April 2014 Issue, 2018. ArtForum International Magazine (Apr 2014), toilet paper, legal paper pad, primer paint, Kool-Help, Sharpie mark, ink, and steel, 26 x 24 in. Weatherspoon Art Museum, UNC Greensboro. Purchase with funds from the Weatherspoon Fine art Museum Acquisition Endowment for the Dillard Collection, 2021.8.six. © Sherrill Roland
Students enrolled in the Residential College Global Engagement and Intercultural Learning Seminar taught by Sarah Colonna, Associate Faculty Chair, Grogan College, in front of Artforus by Sherrill Roland, August 2021.
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NATE LEWIS
The Weatherspoon is excited to announce its conquering of a newly commissioned work by artist Nate Lewis, whose do brings together interests in art, scientific discipline, and history. Lewis worked for years as an intensive intendance nurse. That experience of physically attending to the human body and agreement its complexities through medical imagery is critical to his work. Layering patterns and textures into altered photographs, he challenges us to look securely from multiple perspectives—to see in a style like to how doctors use scans, tests, and samples to collectively understand an illness.
The work Lewis elected to brand for the Weatherspoon is i of many he has based on photographs of Southern monuments, here a statue of Charles Aycock, long known as North Carolina'southward "Education Governor." While Aycock did advocate for public school reforms, his nickname recalls only part of his biography. Aycock was also a White supremacist who campaigned for the disenfranchisement of Black citizens and agitated for a coup that decimated the Black community of Wilmington in 1898. Cut through a photograph of the stone statue and combining it with depictions of internal organs, Lewis dissects our epitome of Aycock—reminding us that history is rarely as straightforward every bit monuments suggest.
Nate Lewis, Probing the Land 9 (Charles Aycock, later on the burn down), 2021. Paw-sculpted inkjet print, ink, frottage, and graphite; 70 x 32 in. Weatherspoon Art Museum, UNC Greensboro. Museum purchase with funds from the Weatherspoon Art Museum Conquering Endowment for the Dillard Collection, 2021.10. © Nate Lewis
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FAITH RINGGOLD
Religion Ringgold (born 1930) is perhaps one the well-nigh intergenerationally recognized and revered artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. A civil rights activist, painter, sculptor, printmaker, performance creative person, and author, Ringgold created paintings and prints in the 1960s and 70s that fence as loudly now as always confronting oppression and institutional racism. Ringgold is peradventure best known, even so, for her painted story quilts that weave personal and collective histories to tell a new story of living in America.
Coming to Jones Road Print #2: Nether a Blood Red Sky is the first work by Ringgold to enter the Weatherspoon's collection. The work is silkscreened on #12 cotton wool duck and its pieced border is commercially printed fabric that was then tie-dyed, hand-dyed, and manus quilted. The words are manus written by Ringgold with a Sharpie permanent marking. This piece of work was completed on Feb nineteen, 2001.
This quilt is part of Ringgold's Coming to Jones Road serial that she began creating in 1999 based on Coming to Jones Route, a story of welcome and credence. Told over several quilts, information technology follows the northward journey in 1792 of 28 slaves who left the cotton fiber fields of a Southern plantation for freedom and a supportive community. Ringgold has written the entire story on the quilt in black lettering. The central prototype depicts the individuals—both adults and children—as they brand progress over many nights, their "way lit just by a chalk-white moon in a claret red sky."
Jones Road is besides the street in New Jersey that the artist and her married man moved to in 1992. Born Faith Will Jones in Harlem, New York, Ringgold initially imagined that this move to a street sharing her given name might feel like "coming home." However, she experienced prejudice from and rejection past its residents. The artist'south weaving together of personal and historically derived narratives challenges the popular history of the Hugger-mugger Railroad every bit being a linear story of "from" slavery "to" freedom, and points up the racially-motivated obstacles that continue to persist at the end of a journey and alongside a new starting time.
Coming to Jones Road Print #2: Nether a Blood Red Sky by Faith Ringgold is the kickoff work at the Weatherspoon that directly addresses the history of the Hole-and-corner Railroad. Works in the collection that information technology thematically complements include a series of lithographs by Glenn Ligon titled Runaways (2002), a series of prints titled Ghosts (2009) by Juan Logan, and a fabric past Sanford Biggers titled Paket (2016). While Logan and Biggers work in the linguistic communication of abstraction, Ringgold joins Ligon in bringing together text and image to complicate existing narratives and write new ones. Images of all these works can be found on our searchable collections database, available through the museum's website.
Acquiring this work by a Blackness woman artist adds a new voice to the conversation in Greensboro, a city known for its participation in the Underground Railroad. We are looking forward to exhibiting the quilt in our public galleries, and having it studied by UNC Greensboro and K–12 students in the future.
Thank y'all to the many Weatherspoon supporters for making this acquisition possible and to UNC Greensboro senior and 2020–21 Weatherspoon student employee Najah Young Farrington who assisted in researching this work.
JULIETTE BIANCO
Anne and Ben Cone Memorial Endowed Manager
Faith Ringgold, Coming to Jones Route Impress #2: Under a Blood Reddish Sky, 2001. Silkscreen on sheet quilt, 41 10 47 in. Edition four/xx. Weatherspoon Art Museum, UNC Greensboro. Benefactors Pick Purchase in honour of the Weatherspoon Art Museum Benefactors, 2002–2021; 2021.seven. © 2021 Faith Ringgold / Artists Rights Lodge (ARS), New York, Courtesy ACA Galleries, New York
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JASON MITCHAM
The Weatherspoon is excited to announce the acquisition of 2 drawings and terminate-motility videos by artist and Greensboro native Jason Mitcham. Roadway Horizon #4 and Battleground come from the artist's poignant series Destiny Manifested. Mitcham describes the projection as an test of the American landscape focused on better understanding how our synthetic environments "divide usa, corral u.s.a., and ensure a ability structure equally nosotros become a office of them, and they become a part of us."
Read an interview with the artist and view both works Here.
Jason Mitcham, Battlefield, 2020. India ink on paper, 22 x thirty in. Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of Northward Carolina at Greensboro. Museum purchase with funds from the Weatherspoon Art Museum Acquisition Endowment, 2021.1a. © Jason Mitcham Studio LLC. All rights reserved
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JOYCE J. SCOTT
Repent is role of a series of six prints by Joyce J. Scott entitled Soul Erased that delicately addresses the theme of bad behavior. The six ethereal images tell the story of a mischievous Black boy who gets into trouble in his community. His wayward conduct leads an angel to warn him that unless he stops misbehaving, he will be taken away. When no change transpires, ii angels remove him and hang him upside downwardly and then that he can be reborn again and given another chance. Repent illustrates the moment in the story when the dancing, carefree boy encounters and is cautioned nearly misbehaving by the flaming ruby-red affections. This print exemplifies Scott'south lifelong spirituality, and the series is one of her most ambitious forays into printmaking to engagement.
Best known for her exuberant jewelry and figurative sculptures made of blown drinking glass and beads, two of which are also part of the Weatherspoon'south drove, Scott is a cobweb creative person, printmaker, performer, vocalist, installation practitioner, lecturer, and educator. In 2016 she received a MacArthur "Genius" Award and in 2019 was named a Smithsonian Constitute Visionary Artist. Scott creates intriguing objects rife with sharp social commentary and fatigued from her African American heritage, including such themes as cultural stereotypes, violence, racism, classism, and sexism.
Joyce J. Scott, Repent, 1999, from the serial Soul Erased. Lithograph, screenprint, and embossing on paper, 30 x 22 in. Edition III/ X, plus xx numbered proofs. Weatherspoon Fine art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Gift of Amy Eva Raehse and David Tomasko, 2020.12.ii. © Joyce J. Scott and Goya Contemporary Gallery, Baltimore
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JAMES CASTLE
Eight works on newspaper past self-taught creative person James Castle recently were donated to the Weatherspoon by the artist's annal. Museum visitors may recall seeing Castle's soot drawings in the exhibition, Within the Outside: Artists from the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation in 2016. Although various in theme—from landscape and figures to cultural products and advertising—each drawing illustrates the artist'south involvement in line, shape, and tonal smudges.
Castle lived in isolation his entire life due to location and status. Deaf and mute, he resided on remote family ranches in Idaho, far abroad from whatsoever art communities. Castle's parents were rural postmasters whose home also served as a general store. The family's businesses inspired the artist, who used paper from mail catalogues and advertisements for groceries as art materials. Castle likewise repurposed the packaging, twine, heavy fabric, and leather that were a part of the family unit businesses as inspiration and creative materials. In addition, he created his own inks and graphite from soot collected from the wood-burning stove and other crushed materials mixed with his saliva. The Weatherspoon is pleased to add together these striking drawings to its renowned collection of works on paper.
James Castle, Untitled (Distant Farmscape), non dated. Soot on butcher's paper, 6 ane/4 x eight ane/ii in. Weatherspoon Fine art Museum. Souvenir of James Castle Collection and Archive LP in honour of William Louis-Dreyfus and Nancy Doll, 2020.8.1. © James Castle Collection and Archive LP
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GINA ADAMS
Thanks to a generous gift from Seymour and Ballad Cole Levin, the Weatherspoon is honored to add to its collection two artworks by Gina Adams, both of which are currently featured in To the Hoop: Basketball and Contemporary Fine art. Acknowledging both her Native and colonial ancestry, Adams mines histories of cultural preservation and forced assimilation. In that context, basketball holds mixed connotations for her. She acknowledges that many Native Americans run into the game equally a path to both higher educational activity and acceptance into pop culture. But, she as well notes that basketball's history in Native communities goes dorsum to early twentieth-century boarding schools that forced ethnic students to assimilate to White civilization. Covered with her own hybrid vocabulary of designs inspired by those found in Native arts, Adams'southward ceramic basketball and enlarged archival photograph bear witness to these alien associations.
Gina Adams, Honoring Modern Unidentified 27, Spirit That Remains, 2015. Oil and encaustic on ceramic, 9 in. diameter. Weatherspoon Art Museum. Purchased with funds from the Carol and Seymour Levin Acquisition Endowment, 2020.v.1. © Gina Adams, photograph by Aaron Paden, courtesy of the creative person and Accola Griefen Art, Brooklyn
Gina Adams, Girls Native American Indian Basketball Team I, 2016. Photo, oil, and encaustic, 30 x xxx in. Weatherspoon Art Museum. Purchased with funds from the Carol and Seymour Levin Acquisition Endowment, 2020.5.2. © Gina Adams, photo by Aaron Paden, courtesy of the artist and Accola Griefen Art, Brooklyn
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WILLIAM CHRISTENBERRY
William Christenberry is known for his elegiac photographs fabricated largely in Hale Canton, a small rural expanse in key Alabama. His images memorialize the South and speak without nostalgia of the passage of fourth dimension and how the by is embedded in our feel of the present.
At the start of his career, Christenberry used a Kodak Brownie camera he'd been gifted as a child to photograph images every bit studies for the content of paintings. His get-go photographs were black and white portraits of ramshackled buildings, as here. Soon thereafter he began to utilise color moving-picture show in an attempt to capture a sense of the presence of the original structures within the surrounding landscape of rural Alabama. The Weatherspoon owns one of these afterwards images every bit well.
Near Stewart Alabama illustrates Christenberry's relationship with Walker Evans, an earlier American photographer who had visited Hale Canton, Alabama, on assignment for the Farm Service Assistants then again in 1936 for Fortune Magazine forth with the writer James Agee, gathering cloth that formed the footing of their 1941 book Let Usa Now Praise Famous Men. The book had a profound influence on Christenberry; in plow, when Evans met the younger artist in the early on 1960s, he called Christenberry'southward Credibility photographs "perfect little poems."
William Christenberry, Near Stewart, Alabama, 1960 (detail, printed later). Gelatin argent impress, Brownie negative, iv 1/4 x vi 1/2 in. Weatherspoon Art Museum. Purchased with funds from the Burlington Industries Endowment, 2020.7. © The Estate of William Christenberry / Hemphill Artworks LLC
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ELIZABETH TALFORD SCOTT
Elizabeth Talford Scott'southward title for this artwork cites the traditional arts and crafts techniques used in its creation and evokes its narrative theme. As is typical of Scott's quilts and wall works, the piece is equanimous of everyday materials–here simply cotton fiber and thread–and features intense colors. Scott often utilized techniques based on African craft traditions, such every bit stripping, piecing, and appliqué, and included symbols of (or actual elements from) the natural world–from rocks and buttons to stars and insects–as both personal spiritual references and every bit a means to elicit emotions in the viewer. Through such abstraction, she drew upon retentivity to chronicle her ain family's life experiences and, by extension, that of the broader African-American customs, offer joy, respite, and celebration while engaging the by.
During her lifetime Scott exhibited in New York at the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Museum of American Folk Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art. In 1998, the Maryland Institute Higher of Art mounted a retrospective exhibition titled Eyewinkers, Tumbleturds, and Candlebugs: The Art of Elizabeth Talford Scott, which featured Knots and Snakes.
Elizabeth Talford Scott, Knots and Snakes, 1982 (particular). Stitched quilt and cobweb media, 25 x 21 in. Weatherspoon Art Museum. Souvenir of Ballad Cole Levin in retention of Betty Beatrice Person, 2019.30. © Joyce J. Scott and Goya Gimmicky Gallery
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ROGER MINICK
What motivates people, at great expense of time, money, and effort, to visit famous sites of wonder and marvel? In the early 1980s, Roger Minick sought to discover out. Minick is widely known for his series of photographs chosen Sightseer that documented tourists visiting national parks across the The states. Woman with Scarf at Inspiration Indicate, Yosemite National Park, California belongs to this serial and is Minick's nigh famous epitome.
Unlike earlier landscape photographers who primarily were attracted to nature's grandeur, such as Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, and Ansel Adamsouth, Minick was more interested in capturing the cross-section of sightseers who visited these historic sites. Created simply as he started using color film, the series conveys the irony and humour he saw in the vivid colors and illuminating styles of the sightseers' wearable, especially when juxtaposed against the surrounding landscape. This prototype shows a woman with her back to the photographer admiring the breath-taking view—i that happens to be printed on her headscarf that she probable purchased from Yosemite's gift store. Her position posed betwixt 2 crevices too mimics that of the waterfall printed on the scarf. Minick's epitome succinctly transmits the awe of encountering something of iconic dazzler, the tradition of taking the obligatory snapshot to prove that yous witnessed it, and the acquisition of a gift to commemorate the experience.
Roger Minick, Woman with Scarf at Inspiration Bespeak, Yosemite National Park, California, 1980 (detail), from the series Sightseer. Chromogenic paint impress, 16 x twenty in. Edition seven/fifty. Weatherspoon Art Museum. Souvenir of Charles Weinraub and Emily Kass, in award of Nancy Doll, 2019.24.11
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