New Exhibition at Mars Hill University

 One of the things I do besides create artworks is to show artworks.  I manage the art gallery at Mars Hill University.  We just finished installing the first show of the spring semester.  It's a series of prose and poetry printed in letterpress, along with line etchings, all made with exquisite quality.  I'm not exaggerating: it's some of the best I've ever seen.  And the story that the artist is telling is extremely powerful. 

Click on the image to see a larger version.  Then zoom in on it even more.  Take your time - the more you look, the more you're going to see.

Artist koreloy mcwhirter has created this collection of works titled "redhanded: a songe forre the loste". She doesn't capitalize names or titles, and deliberately uses spelling that evokes olde English.  It's essentially a book of prose, poetry, and imagery, each page of which is individually mounted, framed, and presented.  They're arranged such that you enter the gallery and follow the "book" around the wall, one page at a time, in order.

redhanded is based on her own experiences of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, both as a very young child and continuing into adulthood.  This is not a happy story.  It's not a hopeless story, either, and you'll find humor, love, mourning, forgiveness, anger, and much more.

You'll find it, that is, if you take the time to read the prose and poetry, and to study the prints.  It's not an exhibition that you can pop in, get a quick look, and say you've "seen" it.  But if you take the time, you will be profoundly moved.

Weizenblatt Gallery is in the Moore Fine Art building on the Mars Hill University campus in Mars Hill, North Carolina, about 20 miles north of Asheville.  Hours are 10-4 MWF.  We're having a reception for the artist on Tuesday, Jan 16, from 5-7 pm.  I hear from koreloy that there will be music, singing, and maybe some dancing as well.  

Be there.

Choosing Exhibitions for Universities

In a previous post, I wrote about some of the things I've learned while installing exhibitions in a university art gallery.  Right now, we're going through the process of selecting the final exhibition for the 2019-2020 school year, and I thought it would be a good time to talk about what goes into these selections.

The key driver, for me, is diversity. The art world is made up of art in all media, including many that typically aren't considered art media.  It consists of drawing, painting, printmaking (and all that is just in my own studio), encaustic, graffiti, woodworking, pottery, sculpture, metal, glass, installations, quilts, fabric, found objects, photography, and all the different types of mixed media that you can possibly imagine and more.  And that's just in media.  In concept and execution, there are many more.  Painting alone has representational, photorealism, abstract, impressionist, expressionist, drip, and various movements within and combining those types.  So there are a ton of different types of art.  And many students in a university have never been in an art gallery (I've heard that several times just this past fall), so our job is to expose them to a wide variety of different art forms.

The exhibitions this year are doing just that.  We've had a faculty show, an exhibition of works that combine 2D imagery with 3D furniture, and a set of raw paintings followed by a very precise exhibition of 125 instant photographs.  The students seem to have gotten a lot out of the variety that has been presented.

As a painter, it's easy for me to name a dozen other painters who would be great to have in our gallery.  But that doesn't do right by the students, faculty, staff, and local residents who are our "customers", if you will use that term.  So I've been reaching out beyond my norms to identify other types of exhibitions.

So over the next 18 months, we're going to have quite a variety.  One show will be by convicts in a prison's art therapy program.  We're having a show of art by Madison County public school students.  We'll have a very energetic abstract painter, followed by a classically-trained painter whose subject matter ties in with the University's Bascom Lamar Lunsford festival of Appalachian music.  There's a photographer who creates edgy, large-scale works.  We'll have a group show of potters working here in the county.  There will be an exhibition of sculptures by several individuals who will be teaching workshops on campus.  And we'll wind up the season with an exhibition of student work, followed by an exhibition of work by our seniors.

Commercial galleries find their own unique niche and then fill it with art that they believe they can sell.  That's a great thing for artists, but it doesn't answer all of a community's needs.  A university isn't worried about selling, its mission is to educate, and it does that with variety.  And meeting that mission is forcing THIS painter out of his comfort zone!

Creating an Art Exhibition

Last fall, I added a new job to my hodge-podge collection of activities.  I became the Director for the Weizenblatt Art Gallery at Mars Hill University.  "Director" is a kinda grandiose title, but the duties entail making sure the exhibits are put up, taken down, and advertised in various media, and that the receptions happen on schedule.  It's not rocket science.  It has provided quite a bit of insight into all the little things that make an exhibit a success, as well as how schools choose their shows.

The first exhibit this past fall was the biannual Faculty Exhibit.  Trying to corral a group of artists into delivering their work to a specific place by a specific time can be challenging.  Fortunately, this group of faculty members were pretty good about it.  Even better, they left the layout and installation of their works to me, the new guy, that some of them hadn't even met yet.  Now I'm of the opinion that the installation of a show is an artwork in itself.  You want each piece to have some breathing room around it, you want each to show itself to its best, and you want it to flow well from one piece, and one artist, to the next.  And that's whether the viewers are moving right to left or left to right.

(Note: you can click on the images to enlarge them).

I decided to group each artist's pieces together, first and foremost.  Then they were positioned so that there was some kind of a connection to the adjacent artist's work: similar colors, similar subject matter, similar size, whatever was "similar".  I spent quite a bit of time leaning stuff up against all the walls and then adjusting their order and spacing.  Once it felt right, I hung them.  For the pottery, I hauled out a bunch of pedestals and put them all together in the center of one of the two rooms.  This created a kinda free-form sculpture to hold all the pieces, helping to focus attention on them and allow the eye to move from one to the next.  It also provided a bit of protection: when pedestals are scattered around the room, people can/will bump into them and knock them over.  In the photo above, there are figurative photos on the left, leading to my figurative charcoal/pastel pieces, along with the "pottery island" in the center of the room.

The next show was very different.  We had Randy Shull, who has been a professional artist for a few decades now and is very experienced in showing his work.  As I said before, I think the installation is an artwork itself, and nobody knows the work better than the artist.  So I let them decide what goes where, while my role is to provide tools and other assistance to help them build the show they want.  Randy was super easy to work with: very easygoing, very professional, and well prepared.  His show was a mix of combined painting/furniture/sculpture pieces (yes, all three aspects in one work) as well as mixed-media pieces.  Here's how the opening looked:

You can kinda see here how Randy followed the same concepts: the colors in the small orange piece on the left were reflected in the large wall hanging/floor-furniture piece next to it, whose blues were picked up in the three small pieces to its right, and so on around the room.

The third show was very different.  David Hopes is a very intuitive painter, building his paintings organically.  He's also a poet, playwright, actor, and singer - an all-around Renaissance man.  David brought his intuitive sense to his installation: "if it feels right, do it".  So there was none of the careful measuring and adherence to gallery norms in this installation.  For example, most galleries will hang paintings using a 60" standard, meaning the center of the work is usually placed at a height of 60 inches.  Not David.  Some works were placed close together, some hung in places we've never hung a work before (for example, on the 6" wide end of the dividing wall), and there was one 15-ft wall that had nothing on it.  It was very free-form.  But for all that, the feeling of the installation seemed to match the feeling from the paintings.  I had some reservations, but decided to hold off until I saw how it looked.  It definitely provoked some discussion, but in all, I think letting David hang his own paintings without interference was the right call.

This week, we hung a new show.  Jay Kranyik is a photographer working with Polaroid and Fuji "instant" cameras and film.  These are small images, very intimate, with a unique sense of color.  Jay's subject is primarily urban landscapes: geometric arrangements in primary colors.  All of his 125 images were mounted on 8"x8" mats.  Jay was extremely careful about accurate positioning of every one of his images, down to the half inch.  It was the polar opposite of working with David, but then, Jay's photos are the polar opposite of David's paintings.  We had a bit of a conundrum in deciding how to hang the works on the walls, since there were no wires on the backs.  Our first thought was to use L-pins to clip them to the walls, but we couldn't find 500 pins in time.  (Yes, with 125 artworks and 4 pins/artwork, that's a lotta pins).  In the end, we went unconventional: we used roofing nails.  These nails have wide heads that overlap the artworks to pin them to the wall.  They're also a helluva lot cheaper than the L-pins.  We then set up a pedestal to show visitors his old Polaroid camera and newer Fuji camera.  For college kids, this may be the first time they've seen something other than digital!

So those are some of my experiences in managing a university art gallery.  There are a lot more aspects to it, like getting to talk with the college students, running receptions, planning exhibitions for the coming year, and handling publicity.  I'll get to some of those in future posts.

A New Job

I just started a new part-time position as the director of Weizenblatt Gallery for Mars Hill University. MHU is a private college right here in the town I live in, about 15 miles or so north of Asheville.  The gallery hosts about ten shows a year.  Last week, I spent a lot of time hanging my first show there: the biennial Faculty Show.  It took way too long, of course, because I'm still learning the ropes, where the tools are, what they expect to see in the gallery, what to do with the student work-study people, who to talk to about publicity, and so on.  Tomorrow, I have to put together the plan for the reception on Wednesday.  Once the reception is over, I gotta do the planning for the next show so that thing go smoother.

Some people wonder why I agreed to do this.  After all, in addition to my studio activities, I still work  as a proposal writer for small firms trying to get federal contracts.  And I'm on the board of a small Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) focused on the Kurdish region of Iraq.  And I've been working with the Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE), which is a volunteer organization that mentors small businesses that are trying to get started, or grow, or whatever.  At the same time, I have a lot of "life" stuff to do: chores, walk the dog, mow the yard, fix this or that, you know the drill - lots of things that just eat up time.  I needed one more activity like I needed a hole in the head.

But this gives me an opportunity to work with the Art Department students.  I really enjoy working with the young ones just starting out: build their capabilities some, give them confidence that they can do it, show that there's a helluva lot more to art than they can comprehend right now, and help them learn how to find their voice.  I love seeing the flash of sudden insight, especially when it's something that I know will stay with them and not be forgotten in two weeks.

So to make time for the gallery, I'm cutting back on my SCORE functions and one of the tasks associated with proposal writing.  My focus is going to be more on art and art-related functions going forward.  I'm still figuring out what that means.

Studio Developments

I've got quite a few things going on in the studio these days.  Unfortunately, I don't have enough time in the studio to get 'em all done!  I'm making progress, though.

My "Faces of Afghanistan" drawings are on exhibit in Mars Hill University's Weizenblatt Gallery through Dec 11.  It's a nice, intimate gallery.  We had a good opening reception and I gave a talk to an art history class about Afghanistan and art in a combat zone.

This past week, I finished a commissioned painting.  It turned out pretty well.  I can't post a picture of it here because it's a Christmas present.  Maybe in another month ...

Beyond that, I have several paintings in progress or in the queue.  One is a portrait that I just can't get to work.  It's a good painting, just not of that specific individual!  I'll keep trying for a bit, but might have to start fresh.

There's a landscape painting that's been staring at me for about two months now, telling me to finish it up.  I kinda like it so far, but maybe not enough to dive back into it.  Doing a good job with this painting means that I have to get my head back into the same place it was when I had the initial vision and started slinging paint.  I might have moved on.  If so, then I'll slap some oil gesso over it and have a clean panel for something else.

Ten years ago, I did a series of political satire paintings.  Almost all have been on the shelf since then.  Political paintings are very much tied to a specific time period, and most of them are no longer applicable.  Recently, though, the subject matter of one of them has come back to the fore.  So I've pulled it off the shelf and am re-working it to make it current and to make it a better painting.  Political satire, though, is not a pleasant topic for me.  I have to get really pissed off about something to come up with the satirical angle, and I don't like being pissed off all the time, which is one of the reasons I quit doing it ten years ago.

This fall, I've been doing open life painting sessions.  We're having a mix of models: male, female, clothed, and nude.  Here's one of the most recent results.  These are fun sessions - we've got a good group of artists who come and work, and all the models have been interesting to work with.  I need to get one of them to come back soon.  I changed a few things after the session and need to finish it up, and I have an idea for another painting.

Lastly, I will be mentoring a young high school student over the next few months.  She's got the talent and, apparently, the drive to be a good artist.  My mission will be to help her find her way.  I love doing this sort of thing - working with young art students really charges my batteries.

So that's what's going on in the studio.  Except none of it is happening today - this is Thanksgiving, so I'm hanging out around the house with Janis.  We're having a great time doing not much of anything.  I hope you and yours are having a great Thanksgiving today as well!