January 2014

Asheville Art Museum in Asheville, NC, Offers Exhibition Focused on Geographic Frameworks

The Asheville Art Museum in Asheville, NC, will present Social Geographies: Interpreting Space and Place, curated by Dr. Leisa Rundquist, on view from Jan. 25 through May 18, 2014. A reception will be held on Jan. 26, from 2-5pm and Dr. Rundquist will speak at 3pm.

The art world operates within geographic frameworks. Spatial divisions between “inside” and “outside” impact how the art world describes, identifies and validates artists featured within the exhibition. Whether deemed “outsider” – Henry Darger, Martín Ramírez, George Widener – or “self-taught” – Thornton Dial, Sr., Minnie Evans, Lonnie Holley – these artists bear categorical markers that organize their art but do not adequately speak of their art’s unique qualities and circumstances.

In response to such prescriptive terms, Social Geographies asks viewers to experience artwork regarded as different, differently. Rather than presenting artists and their work through notions of marginality, the exhibition generates discussions of subjective and shared experiences told through concepts of space and place. To this end, the exhibition engages artistic agency on multiple levels. The exhibition features 40 mostly large-scale works by American artists that represent space and place informed by their experiences of industrial encroachment, displacement, social exclusion, institutionalization and inequality. Consequently, the show investigates visual ways of mapping such experiences through layered material objects, panoramic formats, cartographic views, chronographic vistas, and visionary and vast worlds.

Social Geographies: Interpreting Space and Place was organized by the Asheville Art Museum and guest curated by Dr. Leisa Rundquist.

For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Museum at 828/253-3227 or visit (www.ashevilleart.org).

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