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February Issue 2006
Green Hill Center For North Carolina Art in Greensboro, NC, Features Works by Artists Influenced by Gregory D. Ivy
Green Hill Center For North Carolina Art in Greensboro, NC, is presenting the exhibition, A Modernist Influence: Eight Artists After Ivy, on view through Mar. 26, 2006. Artists included in the exhibit are: McDonald Bane, Walter Barker, Warren Brandt, Maud Gatewood, Lee Hall, Anne Hill, Anne Kesler Shields, and Anne Wall Thomas.
Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art opens the 2006 exhibition season with A Modernist Influence: Eight Artists After Ivy with works by eight artists who studied at Woman's College (now University of North Carolina - Greensboro) during the 1930's-50's under mid-century modernist, teacher, and visionary, Gregory D. Ivy.
Guest curator, June Lambla chose works by these distinct individuals whose "passion, inquisitiveness, and courage" show evidence of Ivy's teaching and modernist ideals. Their art (spanning from the 1940's to 2004) says Lambla, "demonstrate the range of influences in mid-twentieth century art education in Greensboro, NC."
These artists exemplify in their careers and art . . . principles and practical work ethics learned from their experience and education at Woman's College. Their artistic talent and professional accomplishments reflect the essence of modern art education and its ideals. Within lessons of the formal relationships that are the basis of art - i.e. line, form texture - the ideas of freedom, change, and expression were omnipresent. Modern art education challenged students to seek out the essence that connected "technique and spirit," while encouraging experimentation.
Green Hill's exhibition credits the conversations, counseling, and teaching of Gregory Ivy as well as the faculty and guest artists during Ivy's tenure from 1935-1961. The curriculum and programming at UNCG offered extraordinary opportunities to study with faculty from Black Mountain College and renowned visiting artists, such as Franz Kline, Philip Guston, John Cage, and Bauhaus founder, Walter Gropius.
Participating artist, Anne Wall Thomas, the first person to receive a master's degree from UNCG's art department, says she realizes now more than ever - after years of teaching and traveling - how much of her art education at Woman's College "came straight out of the Bauhaus."
Anne Hill, a life-long friend of both Ivy and his wife, recalls Ivy's commitment to teaching and says, "Spontaneity was one of the things he liked to see in students . . . He wanted us to think on our own." (Hill has worked as a librarian and an artist throughout the US and was included in the first exhibition at Green Hill in 1974.)
McDonald Bane says Ivy brought in exhibitions of work by the NY abstract expressionist painters and Associated American Artists, which sparked inspiration and dialogue among the students.
The participating artists have works in collections and museums throughout North Carolina and nationwide. They have made significant contributions through their art and each within her/his careers. Many of the works in Green Hill's exhibition are on loan from private and museum collections, and include paintings, prints, drawings, constructions, collage, and watercolors. Five artworks by Gregory Ivy are also presented in the exhibition.
For further information
check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Center at
336/333-7460 or at (www.greenhillcenter.org).
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