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Perspectives on Portraits: Work by North Carolina painters, photographers and sculptors spotlighted in Green Hill Center's 'Facing South' exhibition
Photos Courtesy of Ken Rumble
Beverly McIver's Cardew I (left) and Shaun Richards' Alter #6 (right).
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Published: May 25, 2008
GREENSBORO -- Portraiture is a universal art tradition practiced for thousands of years and still thriving in virtually all corners of the world. Having a portrait painted or sculpted used to be a luxury reserved for people of high social and/or political status. But the advent of photography and numerous local portrait artists have democratized the tradition since the late 19th century.
The Green Hill Center for N.C. Art is celebrating portraiture's endurance as a fine-art genre with an exhibition, "Facing South: Portraits by North Carolina Artists." On view through next Sunday, it fills the center's galleries with contemporary portraits in an array of mediums by 32 North Carolina artists, including some of the state's best and most innovative current exponents of the genre.
Given the weight of the tradition and its domination by commissioned works, it's no surprise that the selection of more than 200 is mostly traditional portrait paintings and drawings. Among the show's particularly skillful, individually nuanced works in this vein are Timothy Ford's acrylic and oil portraits and Rebecca Fagg's more photorealistic oil paintings of pensive-looking children.
Shaun Richards employs a traditionally naturalistic approach to figuration, but an unconventionally close-up perspective, in his three almost monochromatic oil paintings of a woman's face framed by her windblown-looking black hair. They're somewhat photographic-looking, as if they were made with an ill-focused camera. A variation on the latter effect also characterizes Diane Feissel's tightly framed, straight-on views of young men's heads and dual portraits of embracing male-female couples.
The 21 intimately scaled, subtly revealing oil portraits that make up Anne Kesler Shields' Samaritan Guests all employ traditional straight-on poses. What makes them unusual is that their subjects are people without social status -- the homeless of Winston-Salem's streets. Also unconventional is the multi-portrait installation's format -- a grid of corrugated-cardboard boxes, one for each portrait, referencing the widespread practice of the homeless using cardboard boxes as temporary shelters.
Eric Lawing has appropriated what appear to be cliche head-shot photos of mid-20th-century movie stars or wannabe stars and used them as traced templates in his six, mixed-media drawings. The approach is reminiscent of Andy Warhol's celebrity portraits, but a notably drab, gray-brown palette, multiple layers of densely expressionistic markings and anonymous subjects all serve to set Lawing's portraits apart from Warhol's.
An entire gallery is taken up by Beverly McIver's 15 oil portraits, which employ her signature brand of painterly naturalism. About half of them are self-portraits in which she uses various wigs and face-paint colors to assume different identities and comment on race- and gender-related issues. Her other contributions are portraits of family members, friends and fellow artists, including choreographer Chuck Davis and painter Philip Pearlstein, posed rather expressionlessly alongside a dangling string-puppet.
Also making effective use of self-portraiture -- in her case evidently as a means of psychological self-inquiry -- is Katie Claiborne. Some of her close-up drawings and oil paintings of herself and a young man identified only as Robert are sharply detailed; others are more muddily rendered. They reflect the influences of British figure painters Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon.
Noteworthy among the show's sculptural portraits are James Barnhill's monochromatic ceramic busts portraying the four N.C. A&T State University students who famously protested racial segregation with their sit-in demonstration at a public lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. Other sculptural contributions include variations on traditional clay face jugs by Kevin Brown and Sandy Cole.
Representing photographic portraiture in the show are strong images by Artie Dixon, Pamela Crist, Linda Foard Roberts, David Spear, Caroline Vaughan and Carolyn DeMeritt.
Least conventional among the show's portraits are works by Vita Plume, Louis St. Lewis and Leo Morrissey. Plume based her handwoven cotton pieces on old photo-illustrated identification papers issued to foreign workers in Europe.
St. Lewis combines the mediums of painting, photography and assemblage in his flamboyant relief portraits, one of which aggressively references contemporary terrorism by incorporating a realistic-looking gun pointed directly at the viewer. Morrissey's cleverly self-effacing conceptualist self-portraits consist of empty mineral-water bottles and dried baguettes aligned on a low pedestal. The lengths of the rows are roughly equal to Morrissey's height -- about 5 feet.
■ "Facing South: Portraits by North Carolina Artists" is on view through next Sunday at the Green Hill Center for N.C. Art, Greensboro Cultural Center, 200 N. Davie St., Greensboro. For more information, phone 336-333-7460.
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