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July Issue 2008
Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro,
NC, Features Works by Dawoud Bey and Latin American and Latino
Art
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro is presenting two exhibitions at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC, including: Class Pictures: Photographs by Dawoud Bey, on view through Sept. 7, 2008, TRANSactions: Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art, on view through Sept. 28, 2008; and Peter Takal Drawings, on view from July 6 through Oct. 19, 2008.
For the past fifteen years, Dawoud Bey has made striking, large-scale color portraits of students at high schools across the United States. Depicting teenagers from a wide economic, social, and ethnic spectrum, Bey creates compelling portraits of contemporary youth that transcend stereotypes. The forty photographs included in this exhibition are accompanied by personal statements that are alternately touching, humorous, and harrowing. Together the words and images in the exhibit deepen our appreciation for young adults and the challenges they face in the twenty-first century.
It is Bey's hope to create a "portrait of American youth in its various social and human dimensions. I believe that such a group of photographs - with the attendant texts - will constitute a significant record and examination of our timeRather than viewing young people through a lens of social problematics that generalizes the individual, I intend to make a rich and complex description of these subjects."
Bey (born 1953, New York) earned his MFA from Yale University School of Art and is professor of photography at Columbia College in Chicago. He has been featured in numerous exhibitions - including a mid-career survey at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 1995 - and has received several awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago and Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston.
Class Pictures: Photographs by Dawoud Bey was organized by Aperture, a not-for-profit organization devoted to photography and the visual arts.
TRANSactions: Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art is the most extensive and significant exhibition of this material ever presented in North Carolina. It is also the first to look closely at the connections between Latinos working in the United States and artists from Latin America. The exhibition features the work of more than forty highly acclaimed artists working over the last two decades; they hail from the US, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Guatemala, and Cuba. Their artwork, like the term "Latin American," is far from homogenous: It moves across and beyond borders that are geographical, social, cultural, and aesthetic.
Diversity and hybridity are the defining characteristics of the art and artists included in TRANSactions. For example, María Fernanda Cardoso's installation of artificial flowers pays homage to those who have "disappeared" in her native Colombia. James Luna, who is part Mexican and part Native American, asks us to consider how his dual heritage combines in a complex but still singular identity. Perry Vasquez translates the 1970s icon, Mr. Natural, into a stereotyped Mexican figure in his multimedia work, Keep on Crossin. As exhibition curator Stephanie Hanor writes in an introduction to the exhibition catalogue, "Contemporary art from Latin America now forms an intrinsic part of the international art arena. While engaged in a global dialogue, these artists explore and parody cultural locations and identities even as they uphold and transgress them."
This nationally traveling exhibition has been organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, which has one of the finest collections of Latino and Latin American art in this country. A bilingual, fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition. Educational and outreach programs at the Weatherspoon Art Museum will include a film series, lectures, bilingual labels, and Family Day.
Peter Takal (1905-1995) was born in Romania, educated in Berlin in the 1920s, lived and worked in Paris in the 1930s and became a US citizen in 1944. He is internationally known as a printmaker and a prolific draftsman. His subjects range from Parisian street scenes to linear fantasies of plant life and landscapes with surrealist overtones that evolved after he acquired a farm in eastern Pennsylvania in 1945.
Townsend Wolfe, former director of the Arkansas
Arts Center, wrote: "Perhaps not since Jean-Auguste Dominique
Ingres has there been an artist who was so focused
on drawing as a means of expression as Peter Takal. Both artists
were dedicated to the ultimate use of line to clarify and state
their observations and inner spirit."
The Weatherspoon Art Museum is pleased to present Peter Takal Drawings, an exhibition comprised of works on paper from both the Weatherspoon's permanent collection and that of the Arkansas Arts Center, which is the home of over 2,000 pieces by the artist.
For further information check our NC Institutional
Gallery listings, call the Museum at 336/334-5770 or visit (www.weatherspoon.uncg.edu).
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