February 2000 Issue
Green Hill Center in Greensboro, NC, Features Two New Exhibitions
The Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art in Greensboro, NC, will feature two exhibitions through Mar. 5. The Vestige Series by Beatrice Schall is a traveling exhibition with a special premiere of selected new works from Song To The Earth Series. Also on view is the Artists' Hang-Up Award Exhibition featuring works by 13 North Carolina artists.
Tom Braswell, former VisualArts Director, Arts Council of Wilson says The Vestige Series by Beatrice Schall is "a rich and evocative exhibit that crosses boundaries in its use of materials and aesthetics, autobiography and cultural history."
"Dried figs, cardamom, the scent of the staircase at 476 Broadway," ... Amy Cappellazzo describes Vestige XIII, Life and Time and My Mother from Schall's Vestige Series in the opening essay to the catalogue, and speaks of the "journey" involved in viewing and experiencing these mixed media works and their many layers. Although remains, by definition, of what once existed, the "vestiges" in fact, serve as symbols, personal and often archetypal, of what is enduring and eternal.
Schall invites us to engage our own "personal experiences and memories" in bringing meaning to the objects. The viewer's own connection to the objects is important to the artist as well as her own personal relationship. The artist relates the cycles in nature with the cycles of human life, exploring rites of passage and ritual. She integrates objects from daily life (family, nature) into her work, making order out of the "chaos" in materials and life, creating a dialogue about man's relationship with nature. Schall's mixture of subject and materials is rich in symbolism, technique, and presentation. Through painting, drawing, assemblage, and collage, she creates art from the environment, and vestiges from family and her religious heritage.
Cappellazzo states, "Beatrice's works sweat clean. The references are totally honest and free of neurotic processing - the weight of family traditions and Jewish history looming mid-range above a secular, modern life." In describing Vestige XXVI, she says, "Schall's use of hay, mud, and twigs conveys to us that we are never too far from our earthly ties, that we come from it and return to it no matter where our ladders may take us."
Schall also introduces a new series, premiering at Green Hill, Song to the Earth. Evolved from The Vestige Series, she says this new work is a "continuation of the exploration of cycles of life and nature, but personal vestiges of family have been removed. The focus is the continued exploration and collaboration with elements of nature ... leaves, soil, twigs, flower petals, ... in the ultimate goal of creating harmony between man and nature."
A resident of Greensboro, Beatrice Schall has a Master's degree of College Teaching/Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She resided, with her family, and was active in the arts in Chapel Hill prior to moving to Greensboro in the mid eighties. She has taught as a visiting instructor at UNC-Chapel Hill and Guilford College and conducted numerous workshops. Schall has exhibited nationally; her work is included in many private and public collections. Among her professional appointments, she is a past Southeastern Vice President of the Women's Caucus for Art.
The Vestige Series was organized by the Arts Council of Wilson in 1998 and supported by a grant from the North Carolina Arts Council. Traveling from the Hammond Gallery of the Edna Boykin Cultural Center in Wilson, NC, the exhibit will tour venues in 2000 including Green Hill Center; the Hiddenite Center in Hiddenite, NC; the Baum Gallery at the University of Arkansas; and the Rathbone Gallery in Albany, NY. The exhibition includes a catalogue designed by Harriet F. Barnes with an essay by Amy Cappellazzo.
Also on exhibit at the Green Hill Center through Mar. 5 is Artists Hang-Up Award Exhibition.
During last year's Hang-Up Exhibition (an open, popular exhibition held each year at Green Hill,) gallery owner Lee Hansley of Raleigh presented a program and chose thirteen participants from the '99 exhibit to take part in an Award Exhibition which opened on Feb. 5 and will continue through Mar. 5. Hansley asked that each artist exhibit work of the same media and very close in style and presentation to the work exhibited in last year's Hang-Up Show.
The artists included in this exhibit are: Mary Beth Boone (Greensboro, NC / mixed media); L. H. Coffey (Graham, NC / painting); Martha Dunigan (Winston-Salem, NC / sculpture); Ronald Franklin (Hillsborough, NC / clay); Roger Halligan (Asheboro, NC / sculpture); Bill Klingensmith (Collinsville, IL / digital prints and mixed media); Gretchen Lothrop (Pittsboro, NC / sculpture); Gail Niles (Greensboro, NC / photography); Robert Pesek (Durham, NC / photography); Ruth Pinnell (Durham, NC / photography); John Sagartz (Winston-Salem, NC / pastel); Avery Shaffer (Greensboro, NC / painting); and Katherine Schlessinger (Chapel Hill, NC / mixed media).
For further information check our NC Institutional
Gallery listings or call the center at 336/333-2610 or check their
website at (http://www.greenhillcenter.org).
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