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February Issue
2008
Joie Lassiter Gallery in Charlotte, NC, Features Works by Willie Little, Radcliffe Bailey, and Etiye Dimma Poulsen
The Joie Lassiter Gallery in Charlotte, NC, will present an exhibition of works by Willie Little, Radcliffe Bailey, and Etiye Dimma Poulsen, on view from Feb. 1 through Mar. 29, 2008. Each artist explores themes that resonate in a culture struggling to breach the historical divide between black and white in the particularly fraught American south.
Willie Little relates himself to a wise African storyteller passing on history and often-untold stories of the southern African-American. His work incorporates earthy, raw, organic, and distressed elements that express a beauty only revealed with age. These elements form a rural aesthetic recalling bits of the past such as the shack that housed Little's father's illegal liquor operation. His work manages to simultaneously describe decay and restoration.
Little received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant awarded to artists of unquestionable merit and longevity in 2006 to fund the multimedia installation In Mixed Company at Levine Museum of the New South. That installation is occurring at the same time as his show at Joie Lassiter Gallery.
Radcliffe Bailey presents an urban view of southern African-American folk culture. He makes vital connections between art and life, people and the land, and ancestors and their descendants while telling the story of his own heritage. His work evokes a mystic environment with rich, expressive color and painterly gesture against antique photographs of African-Americans. Bailey's work resides in numerous permanent collections including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institute.
A self-taught artist from Ethiopia, Etiye Dimma Poulsen's work balances between the traditional and the modern. The work explores new aesthetic territory derived from her international travels while staying true to cultural connections of her medium, painted ceramic. She creates enlongated, totemic figures formed partially from chance during the firing process. What results are "primordial figures, humans in their most naked, primitive being." Poulsen's work has been exhibited in individual and group exhibitions in Africa, Europe and the US.
For further information check our NC Commercial
Gallery listings, call the gallery at 704/373-1464 or visit (www.lassitergallery.com).
Carolina Arts is published monthly by Shoestring Publishing Company, a subsidiary of PSMG, Inc. Copyright© 2008 by PSMG, Inc., which published Charleston Arts from July 1987 - Dec. 1994 and South Carolina Arts from Jan. 1995 - Dec. 1996. It also publishes Carolina Arts Online, Copyright© 2008 by PSMG, Inc. All rights reserved by PSMG, Inc. or by the authors of articles. Reproduction or use without written permission is strictly prohibited. Carolina Arts is available throughout North & South Carolina.