February 2011

Black Mountain Center for the Arts in Black Mountain, NC, Features Works by Robert Tynes and Megan Wolfe

Each February, the Black Mountain Center for the Arts in Black Mountain, NC, focuses its gallery exhibit on art from nearby college and university art departments. Beginning with a reception on Sunday, Feb. 5, from 3-4pm, the Center will present in the Upper Gallery an exhibit by two members of the UNC-Asheville Art Department faculty, Robert Tynes and Megan Wolfe. The exhibit will continue during regular hours through Feb. 29, 2012.

Tynes, UNCA Professor of Art, is most well known for his contemporary Trompe l’oeil paintings. Translated as “trick of the eye” or “fool the eye,” this technique is employed to paint realistically, using the artist’s skill of perspective, to create the illusion of a three-dimensional work. In Tynes’ works the paintings appear to have objects attached to the canvas similar to a collage or assemblage, when in reality they are painted so realistically it is difficult to tell the difference. Whether a hard object such as a chair or a branch, or a soft object, such as a piece of fruit or fabric, these articles seem to float in front of an abstract background and off the canvas.

A resident of Black Mountain, Tynes has been a part of the Black Mountain Center for the Arts since its inception. He and his wife, Warren Wilson College art professor Bette Bates, each have served on the Board of Directors, and Tynes has also served as the initial Chair of the Board of the Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center in Asheville, NC, and on the board for the Asheville Area Arts Council. His paintings have been part of BMCA’s Art in Bloom exhibit for each of the past five years. Besides his tenure of more than two decades at UNCA, he has taught at the University of Hawaii, California’s Humboldt State University, and East Carolina University. Tynes graduated from Rhodes College in Tennessee and received an MFA from East Carolina University.

Megan Wolfe, UNCA Associate Professor of Art since 2007, is a ceramist who works in both sculptural and functional areas with clay. An MFA graduate of one of the preeminent ceramics programs in the United States, Alfred University in New York, she also received the University President’s award for Outstanding Graduate Student in the University of South Carolina’s Master of Arts in Teaching. Her education includes an undergraduate degree in graphic design as well. Wolfe teaches all levels of Ceramics, as well as Applied Media. She served as an advisor to the planning committee for the Black Mountain Center for the Arts Clay Studio.

In addition to her teaching, Wolfe lectures and exhibits at various museums and galleries. In the past few years she has been in shows in Greenville, Anderson, Belton, Clemson, and Pickens, SC, in Miami and Coral Gables, FL, and in Hendersonville and Asheville, NC. Previously she taught at the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design in Hendersonville, NC.

For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Center at 828/669-0930 or visit (www.blackmountainarts.org).

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