The Year inVisual Art SECCA news looms large in '07 review

The Triad's big visual-art story this year was the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art's change in status. SECCA went from an independent, nonprofit arts center to a branch of Raleigh's N.C. Museum of Art --a major shift that will likely have significant implications for the future of visual art in the region.

In early April state officials agreed to take over SECCA after its board of directors proposed the arrangement because of their inability to raise several million dollars for badly needed repairs to the building. Early in the summer Vicki Kopf, SECCA's director, retired and the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources appointed Jerry Bolas as SECCA's interim director.

In July, curator David Brown resigned. Since then most of SECCA's remaining staff members have resigned or had their jobs terminated.

On Dec. 13, SECCA became a subsidiary of the state art museum. Lawrence J. Wheeler announced that SECCA's new director is Mark Leach. Since 1990 Leach has been a curator and administrator at Charlotte's Mint Museum of Art and Mint Museum of Craft + Design. He's set to begin Jan. 15. One of his first jobs will be to hire a curator. His more formidable task will be to raise the money that SECCA desperately needs in order to survive and thrive.

In the midst of its unprecedented transition, SECCA had the year's most exciting and provocative art exhibition in the Triad, namely "Black Panther Rank & File," organized by San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. This content-packed show documented and reflected on the history of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, founded in 1966. The show brought related documents and artifacts together with contemporary art about racial identity, institutional racism and other issues that concerned the Black Panthers. SECCA augmented the exhibition with a smaller documentary show celebrating the important role that Winston-Salem's chapter of the Black Panthers played in local history during the late 1960s and early '70s.

Before resigning in July to take a new job in Roanoke, Va., Brown organized one of the Triad's other best group art shows of the year, namely "Homegrown Southeast 2007." It was at SECCA in late winter and spring. A few of its 56 pieces played on recognizable Southern themes, but generally it reflected the wildly diverse range of styles and thematic concerns that characterize current art. Highlights included works by Michael Elliot Broth, Russ Dusseault, Randy Gachet, Mark Hosford, Doug Kennedy, Carol Pruse, Teresa Bramlette Reeves, Barbara Schreiber and artists' collectives respectively known as Guerra de la Paz and Negativland.

A less rambunctious group show worthy of special mention, at Greensboro's Weatherspoon Art Museum in the fall, was "Lewitt x 2." It combined 40 works by influential minimalist sculptor Sol LeWitt--who died this year--with 100 of the pieces he collected that were done by his contemporaries, including Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Dan Graham, Arlan Huang, Eva Hesse, Robert Mangold, Andrea Robbins and Hiroshi Sugimoto. It was organized by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art in Madison, Wis.

One other memorable group art exhibition was "Art-o-facts," Urban Artware's summer show celebrating the 10th anniversary of Art-o-mat, local artist Clark Whittington's enterprise that dispenses affordably priced, pocket-sized art from converted cigarette-vending machines. There are now about 90 machines in art venues across the United States and abroad, dispensing art by about 400 artists. This informative and innovatively installed show of Art-o-mat art and related materials was a lot of fun and did a great job of putting Whittington's ambitious project in perspective.

One of the year's best and most unusual art exhibitions, at Wake Forest University's Hanes Art Gallery in the winter, was "The Projectionist." Photographer Kendall Messick's highly engaging show was about a man who built and operated an elaborate, old-fashioned movie theater in the basement of his home in Middletown, Del. Gordon Brinckle, now in his early 90s, started building his intimately scaled version of an early-20th-century "movie palace" in 1959, equipping it with projectors, an electric organ, nine theater seats, four curtains, a marquee and a ticket office. Messick removed the theater from Brinckle's basement and reassembled it in the gallery as the centerpiece of this show that also included 40 of Messick's large-format photographs and his 25-minute film about Brinckle.

Another visual-art highlight of 2007 was the traveling show "Grandma Moses: Grandmother to the Nation," which Reynolda House had early in the year. It brought together 31 of the straightforward paintings of rural and small-town scenes made by Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860-1861), the self-taught artist popularly known as Grandma Moses. Organized by the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., the show celebrated Moses' artistic achievements, unlikely career success and simple lifestyle.

Two solo exhibitions by North Carolina artists also merit special mention on my list of the Triad's best art shows of the year. One of these was "Max rada dada's Sideshow Banners, Polaroids & Objects," at Greensboro's Green Hill Center for N.C. Art. Centering on large-format Polaroid photos documenting rada dada's performances of "Unexceptional Tricks," it also included an extensive sampling of his efforts as a sculptor, painter and collagist, including his big self-portraits in the form of circus-sideshow banners and a sampling of works by several guest artists. Thought-provoking and intentionally overwhelming, it was definitely the year's most entertaining art show.

The other solo show to mention is local artist William Fields' "Cosmogenesis," at 5ive & 40rty in the fall. A superb draftsman and an amazing colorist, Fields is also a visionary in the literal sense. His work is inspired by visionary states of consciousness that he has trained himself to voluntarily enter. His show included 12 of his large, labor-intensive pastel and color-pencil drawings of spiritual entities in vividly rendered, fantastic landscapes that also feature portentous celestial phenomena. The imagery is complex and mysteriously compelling, and the richly varied color combinations are deeply seductive.

Finally, the year witnessed the loss of two individuals who were significant, longtime contributors to Winston-Salem's visual-art scene. A.C. Dollar, a retired pharmacist who tirelessly supported visual artists in the state by collecting their work on a steady basis, died at 79 in June. And Armand T. de Navarre, a versatile journeyman painter who was a fixture on the local art scene for 25 years, died in late August near Denver, Colo., where he had moved five years ago. He was in his early 80s.