| For more information about this article or gallery, please call the gallery phone number listed in the last line of the article, "For more info..." |
May Issue 2005
Hickory Museum of Art in Hickory, NC, Offers a Look at the Huffman Collection
The Hickory Museum of Art in Hickory, NC, is presenting the Huffman Collection, curated by Tom Patterson, on view through July 24, 2005.
Over the last 25 years, Hickory residents Allen and Barry Huffman have amassed one of the South's most important collections of contemporary folk art and outsider art, consisting of about 1,000 pieces, most of which were made in the southern United States. The artists who made these works generally share several traits in common, including the fact that they've had no formal art training. Most of them are from rural or small-town backgrounds, and most make art that reflects aspects of their everyday lives, in some cases including their dreams, visions and more whimsical or imaginative thoughts.
"We are happy to be working with the Hickory Museum of Art. The addition of contemporary Southern folk art to the Museum's very fine collection of 20th century American art will permit the Museum to develop new ways to interest our community in the visual arts. The folk art is an excellent introduction to the pleasure art can bring to us all," says Allen Huffman.
The exhibition was organized by guest curator Tom Patterson, a writer, independent curator, and authority on contemporary folk and outsider art, who has known the Huffmans and admired their collection for twenty years. It will showcase more than 150 of the most distinctive works from the Huffmans' collection and reflect the range of their collecting activities. Included in it will be paintings, sculpture, drawings and functionally related pieces, such as canes and vessels.
"For more than a decade the
Huffman's collection has been widely recognized as one of the
most important of its kind in the country, and they've loaned
works from it to a number of important exhibitions in larger cities.
Now the Hickory Museum of Art has invited them, and they've agreed,
to share it with a hometown audience and viewers from the surrounding
region in this special exhibition," says Patterson.
For more info check our NC Institutional Gallery listings,
call the museum at 828/327-8576 or at (www.HickoryMuseumofArt.org).
Carolina Arts is published monthly by Shoestring Publishing Company, a subsidiary of PSMG, Inc. Copyright© 2004 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© 2004 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.