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A Guiding Light Goes Out
Journal File Photo
Artist Ed Shewmake, who died Sept. 17, taught art at Salem College from 1953 to 1985, during which time e took part in most the major visual-art initiatives in the city.
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Published: September 28, 2008
Updated: 09/27/2008 08:25 pm
Winston-Salem lost a ground-floor veteran of its visual-art community this month with the death of artist Ed Shewmake, who taught art at Salem College for more than 30 years and helped found three of the city's enduring visual-art organizations. He died of cancer on Sept. 17, about three months before what would have been his 88th birthday.
"He was a leader in the visual arts community for so many years and initiated so much of what is now happening in this community," said Milton Rhodes, the executive director of the Arts Council of Winston-Salem/Forsyth County. "Ed had a great vision of what could happen, and with others he put it together for the long haul. It's a shame he could not get to see what's happening now as the city of the arts blossoms."
Shewmake was born and grew up in Davidson, where his father was a professor of English at Davidson College. After finishing high school, he enrolled at Davidson and majored in economics, even though it was a subject he "always hated but never understood," as he said in an interview in 2001. He would have preferred to study art, he said, but Davidson had no art department at the time, so he learned what he could by studying a how-to-draw manual and drawing cartoons for the college's humor magazine.
After his graduation from Davidson he spent a year studying sociology at UNC Chapel Hill, then joined the army and served as a weather
observer in the South Pacific while the country was engaged in World War II. Discharged from the army after the war, he enrolled at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington.
In a sculpture class at the Corcoran in 1947 he met another student, Mitzi Byrd, who lived in nearby Alexandria, Va. On completing their studies at the Corcoran in 1948, the two moved to Cleveland to study at the Cleveland Art Institute. To earn an income Ed sold brushes door to door, and Mitzi worked as a librarian at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
They were married in Cleveland in 1949 and moved to Chapel Hill so that Ed could pursue graduate studies at UNC, where he received a master of fine arts degree in 1950. He moved with Mitzi to Winston-Salem in 1953 to teach studio art at Salem College, where he headed the art department until he retired in 1985. He and Mitzi also raised two daughters, Tenley and Tiffin, during those years.
In the late 1950s Shewmake was instrumental in founding Associated Artists of Winston-Salem, of which he was the first president, and the Winston-Salem Gallery of Fine Arts, which later became the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. In 1984 the Shewmakes and daughter Tenley were among the founders of Artworks, the artists' cooperative that pioneered what has since become the downtown Arts District. The co-op continues to maintain its gallery at Sixth and Trade streets in the heart of the district, and Ed remained an exhibiting member until his death. His other accomplishments included serving on the board of the arts council and teaching classes at what is now the Sawtooth School for Visual Art. For their contributions to the school and to Winston-Salem's art community, he and Mitzi were jointly awarded the Sawtooth's "Artist of the Year" award in 2001.
Ed worked confidently in many mediums, including painting, drawing, ceramic sculpture, assemblage, printmaking, photography and filmmaking. He tended to favor expressionistic imagery, and cartoons remained an ever-present influence on his work, much of which reflects a deadpan sense of the absurd.
A retrospective selection of his art was combined with recent works by about 20 of his former students in the 2004 exhibition "Ed and Company," at Salem College. Kim Varnadoe, who curated that exhibition, is an associate professor of art at Salem and knew Shewmake for the last 10 years of his life.
"Ed was a soft-spoken man," Varnadoe said, "but the impact he had on this community was absolutely amazing in terms of his contributions to the arts. He was also a fine teacher."
As evidence of his influence in the latter respect, Varnadoe said that she has a file folder thick with letters she received from his former students while she was working on the 2004 exhibition, all expressing appreciation for what he taught them.
A memorial exhibition of Shewmake's art will be held at Artworks Gallery in February. Mitzi Shewmake has said that all proceeds from the memorial show will go to support Artworks. I'm sure Ed would approve.
Ocean debris as subject and material
Artist Pam Longobardi's continuing project titled "Drifters" -- also the title of her exhibition at Wake Forest University's Hanes Gallery through Oct. 12 -- takes a critical look at the extent to which we've fouled the ocean with discarded plastic products and other industrially manufactured debris. In the show she highlights the latter problem with two related series of large-format color photographs and three sculptural pieces geographically focused on the South Point of Hawaii. Ocean currents regularly carry debris from along the Pacific coasts of Asia and the Americas to this locale and temporarily deposit it onshore.
Five of Longobardi's photographs document evidence of this process and its impact on the area's coastal landscape. They show beaches and volcanic rock outcrops densely littered with tangled nylon fishing nets and chaotic arrays of plastic containers, toy parts, flip-flops and other less-easily-identifiable objects and materials. In each of six other photographs Longobardi has isolated individual plastic objects found on this region's beaches, setting them off against white backgrounds and enlarging them as if they were rare archeological artifacts. Three are detached body parts from plastic dolls, the other three aren't readily identifiable, and all six have been battered and discolored by the ocean.
Longobardi's two circular wall reliefs and a central, web-like installation have been painstakingly assembled from plastic objects and other man-made beach debris. The show's most pointed message is the word "DEAD" constructed from distressed pocket combs and other small, black plastic objects across the center of one of the circular wall reliefs. It's an effective word of warning as to what will happen if we continue to pollute the oceans on a scale such as we've done in recent decades.
Also on view in the Hanes Gallery is "Perpetual Art Machine," an interactive presentation from an international archive of more than 1,000 videos by more than 700 artists, compiled and organized over the past three years by four New York artists. A pair of computer-controlled touch screens allows viewers to choose videos from hundreds of subject categories and project them in a large scale on a wall of the gallery.
■ Pam Longobardi's exhibition "Drifters" and the "Perpetual Art Machine" archive are on view through Oct. 12 at the Hanes Art Gallery in Wake Forest University's Scales Fine Arts Center, near the campus's Reynolda Road entrance. For more information, call 336-758-5585.
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