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Focus in art was on change and persistent problems
Photo Courtesy of Erwin Olaf
Hope Portrait #5 by Erwin Olaf is part of an exhibit at SECCA, which is getting ready to close for repairs.
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Published: December 28, 2008
For the second consecutive year, the Piedmont Triad's biggest visual-art news has focused on big changes and persistent problems at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. SECCA's shift from an independent, nonprofit arts center to a branch of Raleigh's N.C. Museum of Art was a predominant issue in 2007 and 2008, as was the pressing need for costly repairs to SECCA's gallery and theater wings.
The saga continues. SECCA's new director Mark Leach has been on the job for almost one year. Its new exhibitions curator Steven Matijcio -- the former curator at the Plug In Institute in Winnipeg, Canada -- started work in August, and other new staffers have also been hired, so the state takeover has been completed. Now the repair issue moves to the front burner, as the arts center gets ready to close
for a year while crews replace its 46,400-square-foot roof and climate-control system, at an estimated combined cost of $1.8 million.
Next Sunday will be the public's last chance to visit the center until its post-repair reopening, although SECCA has committed to presenting off-site exhibitions and programs at other locations in and around Winston-Salem while the building is closed.
It will be interesting to see whether the structural improvements are completed as scheduled by early 2010 and within the allocated budget. And to see if SECCA's continuing private fundraising efforts are hampered by having its galleries closed for a prolonged interval during what is shaping up to be a particularly rough economic time.
As a byproduct of SECCA's top-to-bottom transition, the exhibitions presented there in 2008 were hastily scheduled, drawing heavily on the state art museum's resources, Leach's former curatorial experience at Charlotte's Mint Museums and, in the last few months, Matijcio's more immediate curatorial contacts. The shows have been respectable, with heavy emphases on photography and craft, but not outstanding enough to qualify as highlights among the year's best Triad arts exhibitions.
Overall, in fact, the Triad saw considerably fewer really-good art shows than usual this year. During most years it's fairly easy to come up with a top-10 list, but this year I could only come up with a top five. Two of those noteworthy few were group shows consisting entirely of works by North Carolina artists, both at Greensboro's Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art. For "PRINTED: Contemporary Prints & Books by North Carolina Artists," on view early in the year, guest curator Bill Fick -- a printmaking book artist and visiting assistant professor at Duke University -- gathered an impressively lively, varied selection of more than 300 works by 43 artists at the center. "Allegorical Realism," on view there in the fall, brought together generous selections of recent work by Virginia Derryberry, Jack Ketner, Mark Kingsley and Henryk Fantazos, all of whom traffic in narrative imagery that invites symbolic readings. The combination made for a metaphorically rich, psychologically intense viewing experience.
Another outstanding show in Greensboro this year cast a far wider curatorial net, with provocative results. Hot-button socio-political issues specifically relevant to Latin Americans in this country and elsewhere in the world were among the subjects providing rich thematic fodder for "TRANSactions: Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art," which came to the Weatherspoon Art Museum in the summer. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and curated by Stephanie Hanor, it brought together visually compelling, intellectually challenging works by more than 40 contemporary artists living in this country, Mexico, five other Latin American countries and Belgium.
The Triad's other American art museum, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, was responsible for bringing in two other particularly substantial traveling shows -- a group exhibit by black American folk artists and a posthumous solo show by an important American painter who created his best work 100 years ago. "Ancestry & Innovation: African American Art from the American Folk Art Museum" consisted of about 40 works by 18 self-taught artists active since World War II. On view early in the year, the show was organized by the American Folk Art Museum's senior curator Stacy Hollander and Brooke Davis Anderson, director and curator of its Contemporary Center (and former director of Diggs Art Gallery). Augmenting its most powerful works -- sculptures by Bessie Harvey and Kevin Sampson, drawings by Nellie Mae Rowe -- were classic pieces by David Butler, Thornton Dial and Sam Doyle, along with other irresistibly engaging paintings, sculptures and patchwork quilts.
Reynolda House's other outstanding show, "Seeing the City: Sloan's New York," is still on view, but only through next Sunday. John Sloan and a few of his artistically rebellious New York contemporaries were immortalized a century ago as the Ashcan school. Sloan portrayed aspects of New York life in many sharply observed, distinctively rendered paintings and works on paper that helped visually define the city while laying the groundwork for a new American art centered on the daily experience of ordinary people. The show brings together 85 of Sloan's best New York paintings and graphic works to provide a multi-faceted portrait of the city at a key point in its history.
Finally, on a somber note, milestones to be noted in the Triad during 2008 included the deaths last summer of two pillars of Winston-Salem's artistic community, Adele Watkins Roberts (locally known as Della) and Ed Shewmake.
Roberts, who died on June 30 at 79, was an accomplished, commercially successful oil painter known for her floral still-life paintings, and an active participant in Winston-Salem's art community for more than 50 years. She was named Winston-Salem's "Artist of the Year" by the Sawtooth Center for Visual Art in 1986, the first year in which the center conferred the award.
Shewmake, who died on Sept. 17 at 87, was a painter, sculptor and printmaker who taught art at Salem College for more than 30 years and helped found three of the city's enduring visual-art organizations -- Associated Artists of Winston-Salem, the Winston-Salem Gallery of Fine Arts (which became SECCA) and Artworks. He and his wife Mitzi Shewmake, also an artist, were jointly awarded the Sawtooth Center's "Artist of the Year" award in 2001.
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