In Myth & Memory, five artists interrogate practices of history-making and history-keeping at the individual, institutional, and systemic level. Beginning with personal narrative, each artist engages a vocabulary of fantasy to make visible that which has been forgotten, obscured, or erased by white heteropatriarchal modes of dominance. Through intimate gestures and acts of subversion, they reframe the lens through which memory is archived to tell new stories from a restructured past. Their work imagines potential futures in which marginalized bodies are not under siege.

Participating artists are the five UNC-Chapel Hill Class of 2022 Master of Fine Arts in studio art candidates: Raj Bunnag, Charlie Dupee, Hugo Ljungbäck, Phượng Duyên Hải Nguyễn, and Stella Rosalie Rosen. Myth & Memory is curated by Laura Ritchie ’10 (BFA), a curator, arts administrator, and cultural worker in Durham; she is a founder and former executive director of The Carrack.

This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of Maryanna & Will Johnson and The Seymour & Carol Levin Foundation.

EXHIBITION-RELATED PUBLIC PROGRAMS

Thursday, April 21, 7-8:30 p.m.
Opening Reception for Myth & Memory
Free and open to the public.

Saturday, April 23, 10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m.
Animation Workshop with Stella Rosalie Rosen
Free; All Ages.

Saturday, April 23, 1-2 p.m.
Guided Tour of Myth & Memory
Led by all five MFA Candidates, with an Introduction by Exhibition Curator Laura Ritchie
Free.

Friday, May 13, 6-7:30 p.m., during the 2nd Friday ArtWalk
Print-Making Demonstration with Raj Bunnag
Free, All-Ages.

Every year the Ackland presents works by the Master of Fine Arts in Studio Arts candidates in an exhibition selected by changing guest curators. The artists will also be displaying their thesis projects at other locations in the Triangle on the following schedule:

Phượng Duyên Hải Nguyễn and Hugo Ljungbäck at Anchorlight from April 9 to 30, 2022, with an opening reception from 4-7 p.m. on Saturday, April 9, and a gallery talk from 4-5 p.m. on Saturday, April 30.

Raj Bunnag, Charlie Dupee, and Stella Rosalie Rosen at LUMP from April 15 to May 22, 2022, with a gallery talk and screenings on the evening of First Friday, May 6.

Image credit: Phượng Duyên Hải Nguyễn, Vietnamese-American, born 1992, Nowhen, 2022, cotton threads, 64 x 45 inches. Lent by the artist.

PhD candidate Andrea C. Snow has published a new article in Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft. Titled “Distorted, Dismembered, Diffused: Rethinking the Body in Old Norse Material Culture,” it examines the strange and schematized bodies that populate Viking Age art.

Abstract:
From the late-eighth through the early-twelfth centuries, medieval Norse objects represented the human body in varying states of ambiguity. While the Latin West would establish conventions for representing figures that visibly asserted the emotive expressivity of the face and body to circumscribe the beholder’s expected emotional (and spiritual) comportment, the figures represented in medieval Norse art are lacking in physiognomic distinctions such as defined facial features or somatic expressions of emotion. If their anatomical configurations do not appear to convey behavioral codes, then what could they refer to? What cultural factors contributed to their distortion, and how were they read by their intended beholders? This article argues that such enigmatic bodies did not represent human anatomy as it appeared before the eye, but gestured to a broad, flexible, and supernatural corporeality that transgressed the divisions between divine, human, and animal of Latin Western art and thought.

You can read it online now via ProjectMUSE! (link for HTML-ing is here: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/47556)

PhD Candidate Andrea C. Snow has been invited to contribute teaching materials to the innovative new survey textbook, The History of Art: A Global View: Prehistory to the Present (Thames & Hudson, forthcoming). 

A brief window into what this textbook will provide:
The History of Art: A Global View is the first major art history survey textbook — written by a team of expert authors — with a global narrative in mind. A chronological organization and “Seeing Connections” features help readers make cross-cultural comparisons, while brief, modular chapters (with on-page definitions) offer instructors unparalleled flexibility.

Andrea is excited to be supplementing the textbook with overview slides that feature the key concepts and works of art from two of its chapters. 

MFA Candidate Hugo Ljungbäck has received a Maynard Adams Fellowship for the Public Humanities from Carolina Public Humanities to work on his project tentatively titled “From the Pathé Baby to TikTok: 100 Years of Amateur Media Production.” He has also been awarded the HPG/NHC Humanities Futures Fellowship from the Humanities for the Public Good Initiative to work with the National Humanities Center to expand a local UNC undergraduate humanities mentorship program to liberal arts colleges across the nation. He’s delighted to participate in these fellowship programs, to get to know his cohorts over the next year, and to continue his advocacy for the humanities.

Congratulations to MFA Candidate Alena Mehic, who has been chosen as a 2021 Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellow! Each fall, department chairpersons from MFA programs in painting and sculpture across the country are invited to submit candidate nominations. A committee of distinguished artists, curators and critics determines the fellowship. An average of 2-4 MFA fellowships each year are awarded.  Alena will receive funding of $15,000. You can read more about her work on the Dedalus Foundation website here: https://www.dedalusfoundation.org/2021-alena-mehi%C4%87#/

PhD Candidate Andrea C. Snow has published a review of Caroline Walker Bynum’s latest book, Dissimilar Similitudes: Devotional Objects in Late Medieval Europe (Brooklyn: Zone, 2020) in Religion and the Arts. Check it out here: https://brill.com/view/journals/rart/25/1-2/article-p199_11.xml?language=en

The editors have invited Andrea to be a repeat reviewer. She looks forward to working with them in the near future.

Learn more about the work of MFA candidate Charlie Dupee in this great article from the Orange County Arts Commision: https://artsorange.org/human-way-dupee/

Congratulations to MFA candidate Krysta Sa, who has received The Center for European Studies 2021 Jean Monnet Center of Excellence EU Research Award for her project “Ancestral Soak: Sea Bathing in the European Union.”