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August Issue 2006
Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, NC, Offers Several Exhibits for the Summer Season
The new Fine Art Museum at the Fine & Performing Arts Center, at Western Carolina University will feature several new exhibitions throughout the summer. Located in Cullowhee, NC, in the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains, just 50 minutes west of Asheville, NC, and 2 plus hours from Atlanta, GA, and Knoxville, TN, the Fine Art Museum presents a full spectrum of creativity to reveal the underlying parallels and differences among wide-ranging forms of expression in the visual arts.
The inaugural year exhibit WORLDVIEWS: Selections from the Permanent Collection and New Acquisitions will continue through Sept. 2, 2006, to highlight the finest contemporary fine art and craft by emerging and noted local, regional, national, and international artists. Gallery visitors will see for the first time prize works of art from Westerns' growing permanent collection that have been in storage during the new art museum's construction phase. New gifts to the collection will also be featured.
Kicking off the Fine Art Museum summer exhibit season is Lasting Impressions, published by University of Arizona Foundation and School of Art, under the direction of master printer Jack Lemon, founder of renowned Landfall Press print workshop in Chicago. Lasting Impressions, continuing through Sept. 2, 2006, is a print portfolio of nine lithographs and one wood cut purchased for the new museum's permanent collection made possible by a grant from the Cherokee Preservation Foundation. The exhibit features 10 distinguished Native American artists that includes: Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne/Arapaho), Joe Fedderson (Colville), G. Peter Jemison (Cattaraugus Seneca), Truman Lowe (Ho-Chunk), Duane Slick (Ho Chunk/Mesquakie), Mario Martinez (Yaqui), Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Flathead), Kay Walkingstick (Cherokee), Emmi Whitehorse (Navajo) and Melanie Yazzie (Navajo).
All artists in the exhibition are widely recognized for their innovative and challenging work, both within the Native American cultural community and in the larger art world. The University of Arizona School of Art brought these acclaimed artists together in a collaborative effort to showcases the strengths of the individual artists, and represents in some visual depth the state of vanguard Native American artistic consciousness at this period in time.
The Fine Art Museum will also present the exhibition New Perspectives: The Four Horseman, recent paintings by WCU alumni artists from the region to include: Chris Burnette, T.J. Holland, Drew Kirkpatrick, and Jeff Marley. The alumni exhibit runs Aug. 10 through Sept. 2, 2006.
Organized by and on temporary loan from the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center, the exhibition, Hazel Larsen Archer: Black Mountain College Photographer, will begin Aug. 22 and continue through Sept. 23, 2006.
Archer has been called the archetypal Black Mountain College photographer. More than any other single photographer associated with the experimental cross disciplinary college, Archer created a strikingly beautiful and historically important collection of images based on the place itself and the people who lived in the BMC community during the late 1940s and early 1950s. This long overdue exhibition will give an in-depth look at Archer's photographs from her nine years at the college both as a student and a teacher. A 92 page fully illustrated book accompanies the exhibition and will be available for sale.
Archer died in 2001 after a productive life spent primarily as a photographer and teacher in North Carolina and then Arizona. She first attended Black Mountain College in 1944 after hearing an enthusiastic report from another student at Milwaukee State Teachers' College. She stayed at BMC for nine years, first as a student, then as a teacher of photography. Later describing her acceptance to the college, she said, "Unbeknownst to me, a blessed star fell on my head."
This exhibition and book have been made possible through the generous support of the following: Asheville Savings Bank, John Cram, Joe and Cynthia Kimmel, Jocelyn W. Hill, North Carolina Arts Council, Western Carolina University Fine Art Museum, Rob Pulleyn, Mary Holden Thompson, F/32 Photo Group, and Jack and Helga Beam.
A $30 million, 122,000-square-foot showcase for the arts, the new Fine and Performing Arts Center at Western features over 10,000 square feet of gallery and atrium exhibition space to showcase a growing permanent collection and changing exhibition program of modern and contemporary art and fine art craft in all its varied forms and processes. Related educational programs, lectures, symposia, and visiting artists-in-residence series, and outdoor sculpture program will enhance the collecting focus.
The Fine Arts academic wing of the new Arts Center includes state-of-the art classroom studio spaces for undergraduate and graduate students in visual arts to include painting and drawing, ceramics, photography, sculpture, printmaking and book arts, graphic design, art history, art education, arts administration, and experimental work in new media and digital technology. A new comprehensive studio visual arts Master of Fine Arts degree program is now being offered with nationally noted visiting faculty launching the program concurrent with the opening of the new studio arts wing.
Designed by the Gund Partnership, celebrated American architects from Cambridge, MA, the new Arts Center was inspired by the architectural firm's profound experience of Western North Carolinas diverse and complex regional history, culture, and vernacular architecture moved Gund firm principals to create the monumental design. Situated in Western North Carolinas lush and temperate Cullowhee Valley, the site of several principal early Cherokee settlements, the Fine & Performing Arts Center is in large part a tribute to the Eastern Band of the Cherokee and features numerous Cherokee inspired design elements such as a main atrium tile floor design of a seven pointed star representing the seven Cherokee clans. Also featured is prominent bilingual signage throughout the facility using English and the Cherokee syllabary, the unique alphabet invented in 1809 by Sequoyah, noted Cherokee historical figure.
For more information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Museum at 828/227-3591 or at (www.wcu.edu/fapac).
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