If These Walls Could Talk Brings Site-Specific Murals to SECCA
OPENING RECEPTION THURSDAY 5–8PM

Join us this Thursday, September 21 from 5–8pm as SECCA’s Potter Gallery comes to life with If These Walls Could Talk, an exhibition of site-specific mural installations by William Downs, Neka King, and Raj Bunnag, on view September 21 through December 31 in SECCA’s Potter Gallery. The opening reception is free and open to the public, with remarks at 6:45pm and a Q&A with the artists and curator Maya Brooks at 7pm.

For centuries, murals served as visual representations of complex social and political commentary in accessible spaces. Creatives placed their work on public structures, in civic centers, among other prominent areas, to communicate relevant critiques of everyday life. This documentation of contemporary issues connected individual experiences across race, gender, and religion, providing a tangible record of shared existence.

If These Walls Could Talk upholds the relationship between mural art and public institutions with site-specific works by Durham, NC–based artist Raj Bunnag and Atlanta, GA–based artists William Downs and Neka King. Each of these artists engages graphic techniques that range from line drawing to printmaking, paralleling traditional mural applications that require affixing materials directly onto a wall. Ultimately, their stylized depictions of people and landscapes envelop viewers in an illustrative social analysis of present and sometimes future concepts.

If These Walls Could Talk also marks the Winston-Salem curatorial debut of Maya Brooks, the assistant curator of contemporary art serving both SECCA and the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. “I am most excited about this exhibition because it builds upon a long-standing human tradition of sharing ideas and building communities through public expression,” said Brooks. “Although distinctly contemporary in style and focus, this exhibition feels timeless because of the artists’ ability to reference the different layers of history that have altered our present and, possibly, our future experiences.”

UPDATE: Read about the show in this article from The Local Reporter

La Eterna Injusticia

BASEMENT ART SPACE
605 Caswll Rd. Chapel Hill NC

Sep 09 to Sep 30 2023
Opening Reception: Sep 09, 6-8pm
With Artist Talk at 7pm

Open Saturdays and Sundays 2-5 pm

The department of art and art history is pleased to welcome Annette Lawrence as its new chair and the Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Studio Art. Professor Lawrence comes to UNC-Chapel Hill from the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas (UNT), and brings with her a great deal of experience and many accomplishments as an artist, teacher, and administrator.

As an artist, Professor Lawrence creates complex, visually striking paintings, drawings, and installations that thoughtfully engage with her environment and events taking place around her. Her artistic practice and leadership share a commitment to, in her words, “rigorously consider what counts, how it is counted, and who is counting. This process of questioning and analyzing also informs my approach to leadership. I’m committed to facilitating the experience of making and unmaking, looking and waiting, and finding or recognizing what is in front of us by paying attention.” Over 24 years at UNT, Professor Lawrence became a trusted leader among her peers, culminating in serving as chair of the Department of Studio Art for four years. As a voice for the department within the college and the university, she successfully advocated for enhanced facilities and staffing, among other accomplishments.

In her teaching, Professor Lawrence is committed to facilitating students’ explorations of their own sensibilities and guiding them to develop the skills they need to achieve their visions. She earned her BFA in sculpture from the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford, and her MFA in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art.

Professor Lawrence’s work has been widely exhibited, including in solo shows at the Dallas Museum of Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and group exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, as well as in the Whitney Biennial. She received a MacDowell Fellowship in 2018, and has been honored with residencies at Skowhegan, the Core Residency Program, and the Bag Factory in Johannesburg, among other honors.

Professor Lawrence’s arrival at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a homecoming of sorts, as she has deep familial connections with the state. Her maternal grandparents were from North Carolina, and moved to Queens, New York, during the Great Migration of the 1930s. Professor Lawrence was born there, and spent summers as a child visiting aunts, uncles, and cousins in Oxford, Mt. Olive, Dudley, and Raleigh, North Carolina—places where some of her relatives still live today. She looks forward to building new connections and community far beyond the department of art and art history and the UNC-Chapel Hill campus.

Congratulations to Peter Hoffman (MFA 2019) on being named a Knight/Wallace Fellow by the University of Michigan Wallace House! From the announcement:

The Wallace House Center for Journalists and the University of Michigan are pleased to announce the 2023-2024 class of Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellows. This cohort of 19 accomplished journalists marks the 50th class of Fellows in the program’s history.

Representing nine countries and a broad cross-section of the U.S., the Fellows will pursue ambitious journalism projects, audit courses at the university and participate in weekly seminars with journalism leaders, renowned scholars, media innovators and social change agents. Most seminars will take place at Wallace House, a gift from the late newsman Mike Wallace and his wife, Mary, and the program’s home base.

“These journalists and their compelling range of projects reflect the breadth of challenges journalists must understand – from the far-reaching societal impacts of climate change, to the rise of social media-fueled disinformation, to the unique challenges of reporting from countries ensnared in media crackdowns, wars or rampant violence,” said Lynette Clemetson, Director of Wallace House. “Now more than ever, the work of these and all journalists is essential to protecting and expanding democratic values. We are honored to support them.”

After a three-year pause on international news tours caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Wallace House plans to travel with this year’s cohort to South Korea in February 2024 to learn more about the country’s changing media environment and engage with its political and social landscape.

The fellowship started in 1973 with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This class will be joined by alumni from several decades in September 2023 for a weekend reunion honoring the history of the fellowship and the hundreds of journalists from around the world with ties to the program.

Wallace House’s Knight-Wallace Fellowship program is funded through endowment gifts from foundations, news organizations, individuals, and ongoing contributions from funders committed to journalism’s role in fostering an informed and engaged public.

Peter Hoffman is an independent documentary photographer who has reported on environmental and climate issues for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Bloomberg Businessweek and others. He will combine photography and narrative storytelling to explore the challenges of stewarding southeast Michigan watersheds– the primary, and often compromised, source of drinking water for numerous communities.

Congratulations to Assistant Professor of Art History Kathryn Desplanque, whose digital humanities project has received a UNC Data Science Seed Grant.

In June 2023, the UNC School of Data Science and Society announced the award recipients of its first round of seed grants designed to jump-start collaborations around interdisciplinary research in data science. All proposals submitted were required to have researchers from different departments, schools, or centers and institutes and were reviewed by the school’s Research Advisory Council (RAC).

“Data science is everywhere on campus. We’re excited to fund six strong proposals, which are both bringing forth beneficial applications and examining data science’s consequences on society,” said Dean Stan Ahalt. “We’re also seeing our university’s research community’s strength in many areas of scholarship which use data science.”

In this first request for proposals, the school received over 40 proposals submitted from 27 departments, eight schools, and two centers and institutes. During the next academic year, awardees will contribute to the broader Carolina community by offering new shared resources — for example, workshops, teaching modules, research-ready datasets, or models of interest — and could potentially shape a larger-scale project designed to attract extramural funding or lead to commercial translation.

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Kathryn’s project:

“Art image analysis (ArtIA): Bringing new tools and expanded ontologies to the curation, analysis, and sharing of images in the digital humanities,” Kathryn Desplanque, department of art and art history with co-PIs Chris Bizon, RENCI; Amanda Henley, University Libraries; and Corbin Jones, department of biology and School of Medicine, department of genetics

Using a large corpus of curated images of political cartoons from 1750-1850 France, the team will illustrate effective data sharing, in the digital humanities, using findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability (FAIR) principles, with a public database.

By flood or fire, the land will take what it is owed

Public sculpture & one-day installation public event
By artists in ARTS 490: Art As Social Action
Hanes Art Center Sculpture Garden
May 5, 2-6pm

By flood or fire, the land will take what it is owed is a public sculpture as well as a one-day installation and public event centered around calling attention to and supporting the Stop Cop City movement, as well as broader themes of policing, abolition, and protecting the environment. The sculpture consists of a garden housed within a cop-car structure created using locally scavenged car parts, recycled materials, and thrifted items, constructed to look like a demolished police car. The garden is planted with native plants to North Carolina which will thrive year round. The one-day event includes a “Living Room” installation, a space and title that refers to the living space created and tended by activists who defended and occupied Weelaunee Forest. The program will include workshops, a letter-writing campaign, live music, and banner-making.

This project was conceptually inspired by the Stop Cop City Movement in the Weelaunee People’s Forest, envisioning a future in which Cop City does not exist, or has been reclaimed by nature. Native plants growing in the cop car symbolize nature’s resilience in the face of destruction. The work’s use of a police car not only suggests a destabilization of human dominance over the natural environment but asserts a critique of entrenched institutions of power through which the natural environment is subjugated for oppressive ends. The project’s status as a work of life, rather than just a work of art, through its entanglement with living plants, posits the existence of a reality where life is protected and enabled to thrive, rather than targeted and perpetually dismantled.

When we speak of abolition we refer to the dismantling of the carceral system in the U.S. and the construction of new systems, practices, and values that resist our present carceral logic. With abolition, we want to build a new world where we can rely on our community to protect and care for us. As abolitionists Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Naomi Murakawa once said, “abolition is about abolishing the conditions under which prison became the solution to problems, rather than abolishing the buildings we call prisons.”

With By flood or fire, the land will take what it is owed, we hope to create solidarity with the forest defenders of the Stop Cop City Movement in Atlanta, showing that the impact of Cop City will be felt beyond Atlanta. We want to remind everyone that the resistance to and destruction of our existing systems is necessary to our growth, much like how the plants are able to grow out of our destroyed police car.

By flood or fire, the land will take what it is owed is a class project created by students in ARTS 490 (Art as Social Action), an upper-level undergraduate studio art course focused on socially-engaged practices. Experientially in this class, students collaboratively discussed and created work that blurred the boundary between life and art, revealing an inherent political connection. Projects ranged from performance to sculpture.

Artists:
Timothy Anderson, Deja Boone, Alexis Breitenfeld, Marin Carr-Quimet, A Cook, Jacqueline Doyle, Delilah Eby, Molly English, Lauren Guillemette, Sergia Jimenez, Samuel Martin, Jennifer Nguy, Abby Pallant, Maya Rampel, Nina Scott-Farquharson, Audrey Keelin, Hồng-Ân Trương (faculty)

Background on “Cop City” in the Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta

The Atlanta Police Foundation has plans to build a police militarization facility, known as “Cop City” by protestors and activists, for urban warfare training for police. Cop City is planned to include a mock city for police to practice urban warfare tactics, military-grade training grounds, explosive testing areas, shooting ranges, and a Black Hawk helicopter landing pad, all of which will be built in the Weelaunee Forest. Called the “lungs of Atlanta” by city officials, the Weelaunee Forest is home to wetlands that prevent flooding and filter rainwater, and is also a breeding ground for regional amphibians and a migration site for wading birds. Over 380 acres of the Forest are set to be destroyed to build Cop City, which will deeply impact the health and biodiversity of the surrounding community. The facility is a $90+ million project, $60+ million of which is funded by over 40 corporations, including Coca-Cola and Home Depot, and $30+ million of which is funded using tax-payer dollars.

For further information and resources, please visit the following:
Local Organizations:
Durham Beyond Policing: https://durhambeyondpolicing.org/
Southerners on New Ground Bail Out Black Mamas: https://southernersonnewground.org
Prison Books Collective: https://prisonbooks.info/

Defend Atlanta Forest: https://defendtheatlantaforest.org/
Stop Cop City Solidarity: https://www.stopcopcitysolidarity.org/
Stop Cop City: https://stopcop.city/

Read about the art interventions made by Hong-An Truong’s ARTS 490: Art as Social Action course in Chapelboro’s article “Low-Hanging Fruit: UNC students bring awareness to sexual violence on campus.” Truong and MFA candidate Molly English were interviewed for the piece.

Congratulations to MFA alumna Jessica Dupuis, who has just been promoted to rank of Associate Professor at UNC-Pembroke and also received tenure! Great work Jessica!

A Tell Tale
Date: 14 April- 7 May, 2023
Opening Reception: 14 April, 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Closing Reception & Panel Discussion: 7th of May, 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm

This web we’ve spun is not a trap. Here are the telltale signs: life under highways and in gun clubs and in mountains shedding their names: food and food and food. This web we’ve spun is not a trap—it’s a cocoon. “Pull up the boards and you shall see,” a tell-tale heart beats inside.

A Tell Tale is an exhibition of narrative artworks that speak emergently from our contemporary moment. Spanning a variety of mediums, the work of Mark Anthony Brown Jr, Molly English, Matthew Troyer, and Vera Weinfield seeks to explore, uncover, and interpret a range of experience, telling tales of what transformation is forming just under the surface.

PEEL Gallery
708 W Rosemary ST

MFA candidate Mark Brown received and Incubator Award from UNC Libraries and will be presenting on the work he produced with it at the Incubator Awards Showcase. The event is on Tuesday, April 11, 5-7 pm in the Pleasants Family Assembly Room of Wilson Special Collections Library. You can find more info at https://calendar.lib.unc.edu/event/10270153