« April 2005 | Main

The body is the common denominator in art and, therefore, ever present in the art museum. (If you look around the NCMA, you see examples ranging from the ideal woman to an upside-down man.) Artists represent or react to the world around them and they have never failed from pre-historic times to present day to include the body-that thing that is most ubiquitous and most controversial. The body has been and still is the criterion by which we judge most artists. Can he accurately draw or paint or sculpt that incredible form in which we all live, breath, and think? Is she skilled enough to convincingly depict that amazing range of emotions we exhibit either in our private and public lives? We, as viewers, unknowingly use the body as a way to determine an artist's worth and uniqueness.

However, sometimes artists scare us with their honesty about our bodies and ourselves. We become fearful, angry, disgusted, or dismayed that so much of what is real has been observed and mirrored back at us in a work of art. Carrie Levy's photographs remind me that the body can be an uncomfortable thing for all of us to view. In my role as a museum educator, I have observed that people's responses to nudity in art are individual and yet, at the same time, strangely universal. Each of us averts our eyes from it at some time or another, in the same way that Levy's subjects turn from the eye of the camera. However, the work that repulses one of us might be beautiful or intriguing to the other person in the gallery. Our personal backgrounds, age, mood, and any number of other variables determine how we respond to works of art. These differences in reaction enliven works of art and make the museum a dynamic and ever changing place where (human) nature is displayed, observed, and deliberated.

For suggestions on how to discuss nudity in art with school children in the museum gallery or classroom, download this PDF from the Art Institute of Chicago.

Posted by Ashley Weinard, Associate Director of Education at 11:18 AM | Comments (3)

The Collector’s Panel
North Carolina Museum of Art
Friday, May 20, 2005 7:30 in the auditorium

Please join us this Friday evening for a special Collector's Panel at the NCMA. Director, Larry Wheeler will pose questions about collecting contemporary art to three important North Carolina collectors; Allen Thomas, whose collection of contemporary photographs encompasses the current In Focus exhibition; Francine Pilloff, who is one of three collectors of contemporary glass in the current Fusion: Contemporary Glass Art from North Carolina Collections and Tom Newby, whose contemporary art collection was exhibited at the NCMA in Boldly Stated during the fall of 1999.

Allen G. Thomas Jr., Wilson
Allen Thomas is a native of Wilson and works as the manager of his family law firm, Thomas and Farris. He attended Appalachian State University and earned a B.A. in Political Science from The University of North Carolina at Wilmington in 1988. He is Chairman of the Wilson Technical Community College Paralegal Tech Board, a member of the Governor’s Western Residence Board, The Volunteer Action Committee Board, and the North Carolina Museum of Art Board of Trustees where he serves on the Works of Art Committee. Allen began collecting contemporary photography over ten years ago and has amassed a collection of more than 300 photographs.

Francine Pilloff, Chapel Hill
Francine Pilloff was the Founding President of the Ohio Contemporary Glass Alliance. She is a past president of the international organization, The Art Alliance of Contemporary Glass. At the Cleveland Museum of Art, she chaired the glass exhibition, Glass Today. She and her husband are the generous founders of "The Francine and Benson Pilloff Camp for Performing Arts.” Presently she serves on the NCMA Art Society Board, Verb Ballets and The Forever Children's Home Boards. Francine has a Master’s Degree in Counseling. She writes, “I have been collecting art all my life. In 1975, we had a horrific fire and lost everything we owned. For a long time, I did not want to collect anything again. However, I have learned to ‘never say never.’"

Tom Newby, Chapel Hill
Tom Newby is an angel investor and advisor to small companies in the Triangle, and is a member of the executive committee of three venture funds. Prior to coming to the Triangle, he spent over twenty-five years in marketing and general management building consumer packaged goods businesses for Proctor & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark. A native Virginian, Tom is a graduate of Duke University and the University of Virginia Graduate School of Business Administration. He currently is a Trustee of the North Carolina Museum of Art and also a member of its Foundation Board of Directors. Tom lives in Chapel Hill with his wife and two college-age daughters.

Posted by Lauren Ryan, Assistant Curator at 09:27 AM | Comments (0)

When the Museum Director asked about my favorite work in In Focus I responded Nat’s Back without hesitating. Interesting was all he said. Made me wonder why I mentioned that work only after a quick perusal of the exhibition. Thinking about the photograph reminded me of my friend Phil, the only air guitar playing-divinity student I’ve known. He thought mornings were a time of celebration, a new day, a fresh start, blaa, blaa, blaa. Jack Pierson’s work on first glance with the fused morning light filtering in through window shades is intimate and refreshing. The pose of the sexy Nat, stretching, cat-like touching his toes on his disheveled sheets is a tribute to the power of intimacy. On deeper reflection the works fills me with sadness. Grief long buried. Intimacy lost. After all, don’t we respond to some flash of memory, some past experience when responding to art? On the most basic level aren’t we projecting our own emotional landscape on the artists work? Nat’s Back is not a celebration of the new day, but a reflection of embedded grief and loneliness, a memory of a lover killed by a drunk driver months before finishing divinity school.

Rebecca Moore

Posted by at 04:25 PM | Comments (1)

I am fascinated by Loretta Lux’s images of children and amazed that such small images can resonate with such force. The children she depicts look otherworldly, almost ethereal but not angelic—more like from another planet or another realm—some kind of creature or changeling that is just temporarily inhabiting a child’s body. They are a very unsettling combination of artifice and innocence—fascinating but creepy—like a fairy tale gone bad. Strangely beautiful and almost too perfect, the children look as if they are in a trance—mesmerized, hypnotized—and seem to radiate with a pale, unearthly light. Because they are displaced—presented in front of a backdrop constructed by the artist, in a dream-like environment—there is no real context to place them in, no clues to understand the story. The images are stark and lonely and strangely compelling. Because of their small size, they force an intimacy between viewer and image, drawing you in closer and closer for a better look. I, for one, cannot look away—I am totally captivated.

Linda Dougherty, Curator of Contemporary Art

Posted by at 10:49 AM | Comments (5)

“As an artist I have always felt that my task is not to create meaning but only to charge the air so that meaning can occur.” –Todd Hido, from an interview with Peter Smith in Oz Journal.

What caught my eye in Todd Hido’s #2423a (at left) was the light. A golden glow spills from the house windows; a cool white spills in from the left and mingles with the natural light of the night sky. The chunky snow in the foreground even reflects a luminous blue, coming from behind us (and yet no shadow of Mr. Hido?) Each light has a corona, charging the surrounding air like neon with subtly different colors. It reminds me of the city seen from a late-night flight—streetlights all look the same from the ground, but from the air, avenues and parking lots become a sea of color, with pools of yellow (incandescent) alongside amber (sodium) and an icy blue (mercury vapor). (As long as we’re on this tangent, can we talk about Dan Flavin? Or, where the artificial glow from the house meets the twilight sky, how about James Turrell?) In #2424a, violet and lavender flare in the distance, while the streetlight in the foreground stands dark and lifeless, as a counterpoint.

Part of what makes the luminous scenes compelling, though, is that they are “found” lights. They are ubiquitous, all around us. Hido tells us that he drove around suburban neighborhoods for hours after dark, looking, and finding, then capturing, in long, 10 min. exposures. Many find the photos frightening, even horrific (horror filmic?); perhaps that belies an acquaintance with slasher movies rather than a familiarity with the suburbs. A loneliness and psychological distance do permeate the scenes, I think, but that is the human condition. An evocative play of light can be found where we choose to look—even in the ‘burbs.

(Kudos to Lauren and Dennis for including the quote on the exhibition label.)

Posted by Chad Alan Weinard, Curatorial Fellow at 08:53 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

I have never blogged before. But I am fascinated by reading other people’s blogs, especially the art-related blogs (see Tyler Green’s Modern Art Notes.)

For the blogger it’s opening your immediate and, at times, highly personal thoughts on subjects that clearly matter to the writer (why else would they take time to do it?), while, for the reader, it is an opportunity to be the ultimate anonymous voyeur. It’s passive entertainment, with the option to participate. It’s both a personal diary and a global conversation that’s immediate, unrefined, and, at times, downright nasty. All of this is not unlike contemporary photography, the raison d’être for me to sit here and write this. The North Carolina Museum of Art has mounted an exhibition of 54 contemporary photographs from the collection of Allen G. Thomas Jr., a native of Wilson, NC. All but two of the photographs have been made within the past ten years. Like bloggers, many of the photo artists included in the exhibition open their private worlds to strangers. It’s highly personal and raw and, like bloggers, these artists want strangers to participate in their world; they want them to find it fascinating, or disgusting, or whatever—anything to get people to look—and then look again—at the world and at art in a new way. In fact their very careers depend on it. This is the aim for all artists, but few are successful. The images we chose for the show we felt succeed in many ways; namely for their ability to push us to the edge of the medium by expanding its definition. Ryan McGinley’s Dan Dusted is a snapshot of a friend in New York. His body is covered in obscene comments, remnants of the night before. This guy was not found, McGinley was there with him, participating in the world he documents. I hope the same can be said of this blog.

Posted by Lauren Ryan, Assistant Curator at 02:50 PM | Comments (21) | TrackBack