Congratulations to this year’s departmental recipients of Chancellor’s Awards: Carolyn Bucknall received the Undergraduate Prize in Art History and Caroline Allen the Alexander Julian Prize. You can read their personal statements here: https://chancellorsawards.unc.edu/2020-recipients/
A nice photo essay about the course “Art and Science: Merging Printmaking and Biology” led by art professor Beth Grabowski and biology professor Bob Goldstein can be read in Endeavors here: https://endeavors.unc.edu/through-a-different-lens/
From his obituary in the NY Times:
He was a leading member of the generation that sought to recast abstraction in cooler, more analytic terms after the turmoil of Abstract Expressionism.
Jack Youngerman, a French-trained American artist whose profuse invention of abstract shapes in two and three dimensions opened up a new aesthetic vocabulary in the period immediately after Abstract Expressionism, died on Wednesday in Stony Brook, N.Y. He was 93.
Janet Goleas, his studio manager and archivist, said the cause was complications of a fall.
Mr. Youngerman, like many American artists in the late 1940s, studied in Paris on the G.I. Bill. Unlike them, he remained there, developing a distinctive style of abstraction based on organic shapes, drawing inspiration from the woodblock prints of Jean Arp and Wassily Kandinsky and, perhaps most decisively, the ink drawings of Henri Matisse.
Mr. Youngerman’s fluid, emblem-like shapes embraced flatness and frontal views, leaping forward to meet the viewer with bold primary colors. The shapes, vaguely floral or leafy, flirted with representation but remained aloof, floating like mysterious essences in a timeless spirit world.
As he wrote in Art in America in 1968: “We are immersed in the powerful and autonomous effigies of the world before these forms are possessed and diminished by names and uses, the name pre-empting the form. Painting involves the restoring of the image to that original primacy.”
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Encouraged by Betty Parsons, New York’s premier dealer in American avant-garde art at the time, Mr. Youngerman returned to the United States in 1956. He soon emerged as a leading exponent of post-painterly abstraction, a catchall term describing the impulse of the generation seeking to recast abstraction in cooler, more analytic terms after the Sturm und Drang of Abstract Expressionism. . . .
Congratulations to undergraduate studio art major De’Ivyion Drew and MFA candidate Sally Ann McKinsey on receiving UNC Chapel Hill LIbraries’ Arts Incubator Awards!
Jerry Jameel Wilson, Cortland Gilliam and De’Ivyion Drew are collaborating on a visual arts project that examines representations of blackness within the UNC-Chapel Hill community, and explores the experiences of black students at Carolina from 1955 to the present, with an eye toward the future. The project consists of two complementary components—sculpture and short film that broaden and deepen conversations about the importance of symbols, the impact of art in the public sphere and the meaning of equal access to the benefits of citizenship. The artist hopes to display the sculptures and the short film together in a multimedia exhibit that challenges our understanding of place, time and progress.
Sally Ann McKinsey’s “The Coffin Is A Table” investigates cultural responses to illness and death in medical and memorial customs in the American South, particularly those that involve corporate labor in giving both medical care and gifts of cards, food and handmade objects to those experiencing illness or loss. Through sculptural installation and printed matter, the project is concerned with medical and social practices that attempt to keep the dying alive, to manage chaos or to control mortality, and the material practices that reveal large, unanswered questions of living, dying and losing. The project explores fiber materials as metaphors for systems of support, examining artistic labor in traditional folk crafts like crochet, embroidery and quilting using medical textiles like operating room sheets and hospital gowns.
More information about other Arts Incubator awardees can be found at https://library.unc.edu/2020/01/announcing-the-2019-2020-incubator-award-recipients/
Congratulations to our 2019 Undergraduate Art Awards Competition Winners! Give them a well-deserved thumbs up for all of their hard work!
Alexander Julian Prize Winner:
Caroline Allen, $1000
George Kachergis Studio Art Scholarship Winners:
Barron Northrup, $1000
Anabelle Quarles, $1000
Adrianne Huang, $1000
Mingxuan Shen, $1000
Anderson Undergraduate Studio Award Winner:
Peri Law, $800
Johnathan E Sharpe Scholarship Winners:
Pax Rudenko, $800
Carolyn Bucknall, $800
Tristan Brown, $800
Eleanor Burcham, $800
Elizabeth Trefney, $800
Livian Kennedy, $800
Cynthia Carcamo, $800
Ella Kiley, $800
Luke “Blue Boy” Collins, $800
Madeline Chandler, $400
Nitara Kittles, $400
Penland Scholarship for Diversity Winner:
Peri Law
Penland Partners Scholarship Winner:
Barron Northrup
Sculpture Garden Phase I Design Honorariums:
Caroline Allen, $500
Peri Law, $500
Pax Rudenko, $500
Medeline Chandler, $500
Nitara Kittles, $500
De’lvyion Drew, $500
Fulfilling Chancellor Folt’s expansive vision for the arts, and in partnership with our wonderful colleagues in Arts Everywhere and Carolina Housing, we hatched our pilot “intramural” arts studio last week. Thank you so much for the various ways you have supported the Morrison Art Studio so far. We have heard incredible excitement from the UNC community regarding the 24/7 access and the no-cost supplies, and only anticipate those numbers to continue growing.
Over the course of the past week alone, we:
Approximately half of those who have been oriented live in Morrison dorm, with additional usage by students living in most South Campus dorms.
Thanks again to Assistant Professor Lien Truong and Department Chair Carol Magee in Art and Art History, to Allan Blattner and his entire team in Carolina Housing, and to UNC facilities for their leadership, efforts, and enthusiasm. The Morrison Art Studio is the perfect example of strategic partnership at work.
Please feel free to stop by. We are continuing the studio’s “open door” policy over the next week. The studio will be during the staffed hours below either by our Artist-in-Residence, first-year MFA studio art student Natalie Strait or two work-study students hired by the Art and Art History department who will be serving as Assistant Studio Managers. Their names are Eden Teichman and Meghan Mcguire, sophomore and first-year students respectively who are already doing a wonderful job of giving orientations and learning the ropes of studio management!
Monday 4 – 9 pm
Tuesday 5:30 – 10 pm
Wednesday 5:30 – 10 pm
Thursday 5:30 – 10 pm
Huge thanks to Haley Smyser who singlehandedly managed the launch event with grace and skill!
How does a studio artists’ work involve science and research? Read about Annie Simpson’s summer photography project in Endeavors: https://endeavors.unc.edu/annie-simpson/
