June 2013

NC Wesleyan College in Rock Mount, NC, Features View of Its Collection

NC Wesleyan College in Rock Mount, NC, is presenting New Acquisitions and Leroy Person [1907 1985]: Selections from the Permanent Collection, on view in the Four Sisters Gallery through Oct. 21, 2013.

The Four Sisters Gallery of Self-Taught Visionary Art is in its twenty-sixth year as a unique venture for North Carolina Wesleyan College. From its origins with the late Enfield, NC, collector Robert Lynch to the present, the collection has evolved and grown to three hundred and thirty pieces of art from the greater Coastal Plain, Richmond, VA, to Charleston, SC, and west to the Piedmont.

Our acquisitions are carefully selected to represent the best, most inventive, and imaginative art made by the unschooled and self-taught artists found in the folk culture and fringes of this extended community. Visionary implies the art transcends and defies the ordinary in some way, maybe by personal circumstance, overcoming disability, poverty, or driven by obsessive creative need.

Self-taught visionary art is largely unmediated by mainstream trends in art and culture. In fact many of the Four Sisters artists never declared themselves to be artists; such status was conferred to them by others and the curatorial concerns of the gallery. For some artists their productivity is a life commitment, for some it may be a creative phase in an other-directed life; there is no set pattern. What they have made with their hands is testament to who they are in a world that more often than not fails to recognize them as commentators of their time.

We are grateful to the support and generosity of the College, Gallery Friends, private donors, artists and their families. Such support gives acknowledgement to these artists and often overlooked individuals in our community. Several years ago the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, Wesleyan and the National Endowment for the Arts financed a comprehensive catalogue of the collection. This catalogue tells the full story of the collection and gives biographical detail on each artist; it is free for the taking and will give gallery visitors a better understanding of self-taught visionary art and its significance in the Coastal Plain.

For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings or call the gallery at 252/985-5268.

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