This year marks the 30th anniversary of the North Carolina Arts Council's Artist Fellowship program, and it seems appropriate that the Artist Fellowship Exhibition returns to Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art in Greensboro, the site of the first show in 1981.
The exhibition, which opens Friday, June 4, features the work of 18 of the state's best craft, film and visual artists, the winners of the 2008-09 Artist Fellowship awards.
The exhibition highlights more than 115 works including sculpture, photography, film, multimedia installations and drawings. Works range from Cary graphic artist Michael Klauke's exquisitely rendered drawings utilizing letters from established texts as the basis for figurative images to Chapel Hill mixed media artist Jan-Ru Wan's large fiber installation composed of 24 ghostly garments with pockets filled with rice and pepper. The show ends Sunday, Aug. 22.
Many pieces in the exhibition are a departure from the work submitted by the artists in their fellowship applications. The $10,000 award enables artists to learn new techniques, buy needed tools and spend time developing existing bodies of work more deeply and experiment with new forms and ideas.
"This award is vital to our state's artists by both recognizing their achievements and as a means for them to continue to produce and evolve in their artistic practices," says Mary B. Regan, executive director of the N.C. Arts Council.
"Over the last 30 years, the fellowship award has provided key support to individual artists at pivotal points in their careers giving them both recognition for their accomplishments and a certain freedom to venture down artistic paths they may not have given themselves permission to explore otherwise," says Jeff Pettus, visual arts director for the N.C. Arts Council.
Clayton fiber artist Valarie Jean Bailey was able to discover new terrain to explore through her work. Her theme is normally women, but she is now "making things more personal" by telling her story, mining her past.
Her piece AINTJAMAMA Goddess of Mythical Mammies delves into her opinions and feelings about these black women servants. The multi-media piece incorporates a book made out of a pancake box along with a doll and quilt. Bailey drew from her childhood, remembering as a little girl seeing a grocery store promotion of the big black woman making pancakes, "I couldn't explain it as a child, I just knew that there was a fear of returning to a captive past, not being able to participate fully in the American dream because I was colored."
The piece started as a rebuttal to a story about the Hatch collection featuring 150 black cloth dolls including mammies and butlers that was on display at Harvard Historical Society in 2007. Bailey was outraged that these dolls "were so loved and made in the image of the mammy in the house, yet the dolls have no names and no stories." Bailey wanted to know: "Who were these women? These were women who had children taken away from them. They were relegated to service. You didn't love them enough to remember their names. I wanted the narrative."
She asked, "If you loved me, why did you hang me? I didn't want to be someone's toy," she says. The fellowship gave her the courage to ask these questions and offer some answers in her art work.
Charlotte photographer Raymond Grubb went from making platinum palladium prints to photogravure, a process where a negative image is etched into the surface of a copper plate then inked and printed on paper. His interests and subject matter remained the same but his technique changed. In his new series Paris Jour et Noir, Grubb juxtaposes two images that create their own unique narrative such as night and day, meditation and activity, and a single person versus a crowd. For example, an image of a young woman seated alone at a café table in the afternoon is placed next to that of pedestrians hurrying on a rainy night before the portal of the Louvre.
Grubb spent some of his fellowship award buying tools and literally scratching the surface of the laborious photogravure process. Why go to all the trouble? He explains what distinguishes photogravures is the velvety ink tones, the tactile surface and the embossed mark the plate makes when the print is done. These qualities are what makes all the bother turn into an addictive pursuit. And it is a print, not a photograph. Each print is the result of hand-inking the plate and running it through a press; each print is different from others produced from the same plate.
"Thanks to the fellowship, I was able to go to New York several times and work with master gravurist Lothar Osterburg, a recent Guggenheim Fellow... It is a laborious, time-consuming, intense process, and therefore expensive; but it produces such a rich, expressive image," Grubb said. The results, limited edition photogravures, can be seen in the Artist Fellowship Exhibition alongside platinum palladium landscapes of the Catawba River.
Waxhaw photographer Linda Foard Roberts pushed herself to a new level. "The transition of working in a darkroom for more than 30 years to working in an environmentally friendly light room was laden with hesitation until I received the fellowship. I worked with old 5" x 7" field cameras for most of my work. I like the imperfections of old lenses and the history that is untold within them. I had started the transition by having my large negatives drum scanned and then printed on fine art watercolor paper."
"The fellowship allowed me to buy the equipment to make these prints," Roberts says. "I am now able to experiment with different papers and toning without the pressures of recouping my expenses though gallery sales. With my new workspace, I am so much more in control of the creative process."
She explains her new project is about transitions. "I have always cared deeply for the notion of family, the caregivers of whom we are born into. I see my image reflected back to me in photographs of people I never knew, old stained sepia colored images of my family's past. How much resides in us, how much do we bring forward with us, how much is borrowed from them? These transparent, intangible connections that reside within all of us and to the world around are something that I am trying to convey in a new body of work."
These are some of the untold stories of these artists and what the fellowships allowed them to do. Come and see the other artists at Green Hill Center, a visual arts center that devotes itself to displaying the work of the best contemporary N.C. artists.
"The fellowships made a difference in the work," said Edie Carpenter, director of artistic and curatorial programs at Green Hill Center and the show's curator. "These are real, concrete advances."
Other artists featured in the exhibition include:
Ramin Bahrani, filmmaker (Winston-Salem, Forsyth County)
Kevin Balling, filmmaker (Todd, Ashe County)
Malena Bergmann, multidisciplinary visual artist (Charlotte, Mecklenburg County)
Nikki Blair, clay artist (Greensboro, Guilford County)
John W. Ford, interdisciplinary visual artist (Charlotte, Mecklenburg County)
Joe W. Grant, III, glass artist (Nebo, McDowell County)
Kate Kretz, multidisciplinary visual artist (Burlington, Alamance County)
Billy Lee, visual artist (Greensboro, Guilford County)
John Rosenthal, photographer (Chapel Hill, Orange County)
Sylvie Rosenthal, craft artist (Asheville, Buncombe County)
David Simonton, photographer (Raleigh, Wake County)
Pablo Soto, glass artist (Penland, Mitchell County)
David M. Spear, photographer (Madison, Rockingham County)
