October Issue 2000
Green Hill Center in Greensboro, NC, Hosts Two Solo Exhibitions
The Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art in Greensboro, NC, presents two major solo exhibitions, featuring glass artist, Rick Beck and commentator and photographer, John Rosenthal. The exhibits will be on view through Nov. 5.
The solo exhibition by photographer and public radio commentator John Rosenthal will be highlighting Rosenthal's continuing fascination with the urban landscape.
"...I love his work. His pictures are metaphors full of strong story and pleasure. John makes me think and feel differently about my world. He has the blessed ability to pull a person up out of despair. His work demands the widest possible viewership. He is a master." says author Kaye Gibbons of Rosenthal's work.
"...His photographs of crowded streets are spacious with loneliness as well as possibility, just as his solitary views of squares or parks insinuate both the persistence and displacement of a kind of pastoral dream within the urban world," says Alan Shapiro in John Rosenthal's Regarding Manhattan.
Rosenthal received a BA from Wake Forest University (1964) and an MA in English from Columbia University (1966). He taught English at UNC-Greensboro (1965-68) and at UNC-Chapel Hill (1968-71). In 1972, after living abroad for a year, mostly in Greece, Rosenthal left teaching to become a free-lance photographer. His work has been exhibited throughout NC and the Southeast. His one-person shows include exhibits at Chapel Hill, Duke, Wake Forest, Salem College, Hollins College, the Asheville Museum of Art, the School of Design at North Carolina State University, the NIH in Bethesda, MD, and the National Humanities Center in the Research Triangle; additionally, Rosenthal's work has been displayed in numerous group shows, including those at the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art, SECCA, the Somerhill Gallery, and the Gilliam & Peden Art Gallery in Raleigh, the Wolfe Street Gallery of Alexandria, VA and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC.
As a guest-lecturer Rosenthal has spoken a number of times at the North Carolina Museum of Art, and served as a visiting lecturer for five years at Duke University's Institute of the Arts. Rosenthal has written photography criticism for the Spectator magazine of Raleigh, The Independent, the Arts Journal as well as many essays published in the The Sun and Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art. His play, Stories. Sermons, and the Grace of Women was produced by WUNC-radio and presented at the Playmaker's Theater of Chapel Hill in 1988. Rosenthal's commentary on photography and related matters can be heard on WUNC-radio, an affiliate of National Public Radio, and since March 1990 he has been a commentator on NPRs All Things Considered. In 1998 a collection of Rosenthal's photographs, Regarding Manhattan, was published by Safe Harbor Books. Paperback copies of Regarding Manhattan will be on sale in Green Hill's sales gallery.
A major traveling exhibition, Rick Beck: Sculpture, is also on view at Green Hill Center. Organized by Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art, this exhibition features 23 new large scale works in cast and fabricated glass. Although Beck has had solo exhibitions with prestigious commercial galleries, the upcoming exhibition at Green Hill will be his first major one-person showing in a museum.
The exhibition will travel to the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Alabama and to the Glasmuseum in Ebeltoft, Denmark. A hardcover color catalogue with essays by Mark Sloan, Director of the Halsey Gallery at the School of the Arts in Charleston, SC, and Rob Williams, Director of W.D.O. Gallery in Charlotte, NC, accompanies the exhibition.
Mark Sloan in Markers of a Moment states, "Rick Beck's primary artistic obsession over the last several years has been to create cast glass using the lexicon of industrial tools as a metaphor for the human condition." Inspired from various sources: industrial tool design, conceptual art, sculpture, installation, dance, music, and the stark Nebraska skyline, his work is expressive and charged with energy. Beck's sculptures involve relationships and feelings, engaging the parts and space around them, explains Rob Williams in Containers Made of Glass.
Beck is part of the "studio glass movement." begun under the direction of glass artists Harvey Littleton and Dominic Labino, now in its third generation. He has taught at Pilchuck Glass School, assisting artists Curt Brock and Jan Mares. He has had an ongoing relationship with Penland School of Craft in North Carolina since 1988.
Beck is a full-time studio artist in Spruce Pine, NC. He began working in glass at Hastings College, NE, where he received his BA. He received an MFA from Southern Illinois University. In 1994, he was awarded a Visual Arts Fellowship by the North Carolina Arts Council, followed by a NEA Regional Visual Arts Fellowship from the Southern Arts Federation in 1995.
Collections include: The Glasmuseum, Ebeltoft, Denmark; The Mint Museum. Charlotte, NC; Wustum Museum of Fine Arts, Racine, WI; and McDonald's Corporation; as well as many private collections. His work has been featured in Glass, American Craft, and New Glass Review.
For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings or call the Center at 336/333-7460.
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