NCMA : view

Turning Away

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.

Collector's Panel Discussion, Friday, May 20

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.

Nat’s Back

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

Loretta Lux, Isabella and Study of a Boy 2

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

Charging the air

“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.)

Introducing In Focus and the NCMA blog

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.

About Authors

Jennifer Bahus is the communications officer at the North Carolina Museum of Art. She holds a B.A. in English and art history from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. Jennifer also holds a M.A. degree in art history (with concentrations in Italian Renaissance art and modern art) from the University of Virginia. She has assisted in teaching various art history classes, including history of photography courses. Prior to joining the staff at the North Carolina Museum of Art Jennifer held a fellowship in the curatorial department at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Fl., where she worked on various exhibitions and publications related to European and Asian art.

Kristine Door
Kristine Door is Coordinator of Docent and Adult Programs at the North Carolina Museum of Art. She received her PhD from Ohio University and her MA and BS from The University of Minnesota. Her dissertation on Seventeen-Century Dutch Still life Painting was assisted by a Fulbright Fellowship to the Netherlands. Previously she was a Professor of Art History at The University of North Dakota.

Linda Johnson Dougherty is curator of contemporary art at the North Carolina Museum of Art, where she is currently organizing exhibitions and developing artists’ projects for the new Museum Park. Prior to joining the staff at the North Carolina Museum of Art, she was an independent curator and critic, co-director of the public art program for the North Carolina Arts Council, and a curator at The Phillips Collection, a research associate at the National Gallery of Art, and a research assistant at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, DC. She has a BA in Art History from Wesleyan University and an MA in Art History from Williams College.

Daniel P. Gottlieb
Daniel P Gottlieb is deputy director for Museum Planning and design, directing the development of the 164 acres Museum Park and the proposed building expansion. In the course of his research for the Museum Park, he visited 18 related open-air sculpture projects in the United States, Europe and Japan, and was awarded a Goethe Travel Fellowship for the research. He now directs several collaborative design teams of artists, architects and landscape architects to help make the NCMA new kind of museum campus. His degrees are in fine art and design and he has a Masters in Art Administration degree.

Huston Paschal
Huston Paschal earned a B.A. from Harvard University and then worked on the Black Mountain College Research Project. Artists for whom she has organized NCMA exhibitions and written catalogues include Romare Bearden, Louise Bourgeois, Richard C., Ray Johnson, Elizabeth Matheson, and Tom Phillips. She recently was co-curator of Defying Gravity: Contemporary Art and Flight and is now co-curator of Crosscurrents: Contemporary Art, Craft, and Design in North Carolina. Paschal served as editor of The Store of Joys: Writers Celebrate the North Carolina Museum of Art’s Fiftieth Anniversary and the Museum’s Bulletin devoted to German Expressionism.

Emily Rosen
Emily S. Rosen is the deputy director for marketing and operations at the North Carolina Museum of Art. She received her M.F.A. in fine art photography and printing technology from Rochester Institute of Technology (NY) and her B.F.A. from Antioch College (Ohio). Prior to joining the NCMA staff, Emily spent 13 years working at the Cleveland Museum of Art in various positions involving marketing, publishing, business and product development. For her, photographs and reproductions thereof are the ultimate mediums for creative and powerful expression.

Lauren Harry Ryan
Lauren Ryan is assistant curator of exhibitions at the North Carolina Museum of Art. She received a M.A. in museum studies with a concentration in modern and contemporary art from The George Washington University and received a B.A. from North Carolina State University. Prior to joining the staff at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Lauren served as the assistant to the chief curator at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC where she worked on exhibitions and publications related to contemporary art. Lauren is the co-curator of In Focus: Contemporary Photography from the Allen G. Thomas Jr. Collection.

David H. Steel, Jr.
David H. Steel, Jr. is the curator of European Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art. He received a Ph.D in the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. His dissertation was entitled, The Mural Decoration of the "Chiostro dei Carracci" at San Michele in Bosco, Bologna. Steel has curated most of NCMA’s blockbuster exhibitions, including A Gift to America: Masterpieces of European Painting from the Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1994; co-organized exhibition; co-authored catalogue; Rodin: Sculpture from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Collection and additional works from public and private collections, April 15-August 13, 2000; Matisse Picasso and the School of Paris: Masterpieces from The Baltimore Museum of Art, 2004-5.

Ashley Weinard
Ashley Weinard received her B.A. in art history and Italian studies from Vassar College. She earned a Master's degree from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University, with a concentration in Italian Renaissance Art. She served as Educational Liaison for The Frick Collection, New York and Coordinator of Teacher Programs at the Art Institute of Chicago before settling in Raleigh. She currently manages school and adult programs at the North Carolina Museum of Art where she launched a new on-line educational resource, www.artnc.org. This interdisciplinary resource includes lesson plans and printable resources for teachers. The initiative won the prestigious 2005 MUSE award from the American Association of Museums.

Chad Alan Weinard
Chad Alan Weinard is the GlaxoSmithKline Curatorial Fellow at the North Carolina Museum of Art. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where he earned his M.A. in the History of Art. He received his B.A. from Duke University, with majors in Art History and Studio Art. Prior to joining the museum, Chad worked as a painter, writer and critic, and his current research interests include 1950's American painting and contemporary art & technology. His dissertation, entitled Robert Rauschenberg and the Aesthetic of Memory, is forthcoming. Chad was instrumental in launching a weblog for the Museum.

Dennis P. Weller
Dennis P. Weller is chief curator and curator of northern European art at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. He is adjunct professor of art history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A specialist in seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1992, where he completed his dissertation on Jan Miense Molenaer. The recipient of a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship in The Netherlands, and an Andrew Mellon post-doctoral fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, he also was the first Friends of the Mauritshuis scholar in The Hague. Dr. Weller has lectured and written extensively on the art of the Low Countries. His exhibitions include Sinners and Saints, Darkness and Light: Caravaggio and His Dutch and Flemish Followers; Like Father, Like Son: Paintings by Frans Hals and Jan Hals; and most recently, Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age. He also co-curator In Focus with Lauren Harry Ryan.