Tag: Art of the State

Art of the State

ART OF THE STATE

Scaling It Down

Hoss Haley, a sculptor known for giant steel pieces, is creating more intimate, personal work

By Liza Roberts

Hoss Haley’s steel sculptures stand like elegant typography on the landscape: giant sans-serif letters, semicolons, exclamation points. Linear, spherical, bold and approachable, many top 6 feet and are meticulously crafted of Corten steel, a weathering steel with a distinct rusted patina. The Spruce Pine artist ships it in from Alabama 10,000 pounds at a time, hauls it into his studio with a bridge crane, then mashes it in presses he made himself out of parts collected from a scrap yard.

That’s the art Haley’s widely known for, large public pieces that form focal points in prominent places like downtown Charlotte, the Charlotte Douglas International Airport, Spruce Pine’s Penland School of Craft and North Carolina State University. He’s in the permanent collections of museums including the Mint Museum, the Asheville Art Museum and the North Carolina Museum of Art, where his striking Union 060719 stands on a rise at the entrance, proudly welcoming all comers.

But Haley’s new work is quieter. More of an homage to nature than to power, he’s making white steel branches and trunks that lie tumbled or stand sawn, no longer alive but reaching, ghostly and elegant. They are a record of nature, he says, not an interpretation.

Making them is also a different process. Instead of pounding the repurposed roofing metal he uses for these works with massive machines, he rivets it together by hand, painstakingly, with thousands of individual rivets. He likens the process to quilting, to his grandmother’s own Depression-era quilts.

“I want to make sure I define the years I have left in the way that I want them,” says Haley, who is in his early 60s. That was true before Hurricane Helene hit his community so hard, before he and everyone around him found themselves without water or power for weeks on end. Before he found himself helping his neighbors, turning a welder into a generator to power his refrigerator, or clearing miles of local roads of fallen trees with his chainsaw.

After that, Haley looked at his tumbled white branches and saw something new. A premonition, perhaps, of what was to come.

Making the Tools

If his process has changed lately, what drives it hasn’t. Haley has always invented his own way of working and made his own tools to create his art. To fabricate his larger works, he had to figure out how to turn 5-foot-square sheets of weathering steel into a malleable artistic medium. He then had to take these rectilinear, 90-degree parallel planes and collide and combine them in unexpected and often sudden curves.

“It’s the tension that I find kind of juicy,” he says. That place — where man meets material, where straight and curved lines abut and diverge — has fascinated Haley since he was a boy. His family’s 3,000-acre wheat and cattle farm in Kansas offered wide-open vistas and a curving horizon, broken by a strict geometry of fencing and property lines. Also on the farm was a sizable metalworking shop, where Haley learned to weld and make things. Including machines; including art.

Today, after about 25 years in North Carolina, his work remains rooted in that past. “It’s an ongoing conversation between myself and the machines and the material and my worldview, and goes all the way back to the fact that I grew up on that farm in Western Kansas,” says Haley. “It’s all in there. It’s part of this big stew.”

The stew is constantly evolving. “I’m transitioning a little bit at my age,” he says. “I’m less interested in the public art scale.” One reason is the extensive time involved in making a massive work; another is the satisfaction he’s taking in creating on his own, without the four or five assistants needed to create his larger-scale pieces. As for a third, “I’m delving deeper into working alone, but also working towards work, instead of working towards deadlines,” he says. “I’ve always had a show or installation coming up. Now I’m trying to respond to what’s driving ideas in the studio, ideas that aren’t being forced by outside pressures. That’s a huge luxury, and one I’m enjoying. But it’s a little scary making work you don’t have a destination for.”

“Scary” doesn’t seem to daunt Haley. He’s doubling down on his fresh direction with the construction of a new studio on his property, a “clean space” for drawing and other less messy forms of art. Among the projects he’s planning there is the creation of a “drawing machine,” which he describes as “a way to take myself out of the equation, a way to bring a random component into the process, and then I’m in dialogue with that.” With a drawing utensil gripped by a mechanical arm, the machine he envisions would take its directions from nature. The weight of a bird on the various perches of a feeder, for instance, would move the pen or pencil up or down, left or right.

Separating himself from the physical act of making art, metaphorically and literally, is something Haley has explored for a long time. He believes the word “craft” is most useful as a verb, and he’s careful to keep it that way, “in service to the idea” rather than the point of it all. “So that if I decide to leave [the mark of] a weld, or take that [mark] away, that decision is based on where I’m trying to go with the work, not that I’m trying to show you some aspect of my ability to make crap,” he says.

It’s been a long time since Haley had to convince anyone of his ability to make art, “crap” or anything else. Some have compared Haley’s work with that of the celebrated, recently deceased Richard Serra, who also made massive, moving works of Corten steel. Haley credits Serra’s work with inspiring him to consider the power of mass and volume in his work. “Serra taught me that sculpture could go beyond the visual experience,” Haley says. “You could actually feel its presence.”

While that’s undoubtedly true in Haley’s large works, it is refined and distilled in his smaller ones. Perhaps that is due in part to the inspiration that’s fueling them. “I’ve found myself back in that place where I can forget to stop for lunch,” he says. “As an artist, there’s a reality: Oftentimes, art is just work. It might be inspired work, but a lot of days, you’ve got to get up, go to the studio, got to make it happen. So this has been fascinating to me, to be in that kind of a fresh place where all of the extraneous stuff has been taken away, and the process lends itself to a kind of meditative state.”

Art of the State

ART OF THE STATE

Earth Is at the Center

Christina Lorena Weisner’s art explores new frontiers

By Liza Roberts

Christina Lorena Weisner’s art emerges from her deep connection to the earth, to its systems and rhythms, its elements and mysteries. She studies the planet like a scientist and discovers it like an explorer, venturing to its far ends to record its extremes in person, to live within its phenomena. She turns her insights into art she hopes will inspire awe for our planet’s grandeur and empathy for its vulnerability.

Her latest fascination is the North Pole, where she spent two weeks immersing herself last spring with an expeditionary art and science residency called The Arctic Circle. “I can only describe it as the most impactful experience of my life,” Weisner says. “I’ve been interested in water for a long time, and I wanted to immerse myself into this landscape of glaciers in order to better understand it.”

The expedition’s ship, which carried 30 fellow resident artists and scientists, took Weisner and others to the Svalbard Archipelago by outboard Zodiacs twice a day, always surrounded by “a triangulation of guards with guns” to protect them against polar bears. While ashore, Weisner planted an orange safety flag in the icescape, making it a recurring motif in her photos. She also used a drone to shoot video from above and collected plastic.

“You’re in a land that you know is changing, you’re looking at a glacier that might not be there in 100 years. You’re looking at history,” she says. That history was evident in other ways, too, like a massive pile of whale bones left behind by 19th century whalers, and the detritus left behind by scientific explorers of that time. “There were many instances where I was thinking of human history as it relates to geological time,” Weisner says.

The trip “was the catalyst for a whole new body of work,” says Weisner, who is headed back next May. That work includes still photography of that mythic frontier, sweeping video and installations that incorporate pieces of plastic she collected in and around Svalbard.

Recently, her work was in Surface and Undercurrents, a group show at Dare Arts in Manteo, and this month she is part of a group exhibit at Emerge Gallery & Art Center in Greenville. Next April she will be featured in a group show at Central Connecticut State University on climate change in the Arctic, and in June her work will be exhibited in a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Arlington, Virginia.

A native of Richmond, Virginia, Weisner says she can trace the beginnings of her work as an artist to a job she had with Nag’s Head Ocean Rescue in her early 20s. When she wasn’t saving swimmers, she stared out at the ocean for 10 hours a day. “I would watch the sun move across the sky and the moon come up,” she says. “I was very aware of these bigger processes — these large-scale movements, like waves coming over from the coast of Africa — that we’re not often aware of.

Other little-seen influences in her work come from her wide-ranging education, which includes an MFA from University of Texas at Austin and separate undergraduate degrees in both world studies and fine arts from Virginia Commonwealth University. The interplay between humans, time and the planet has long been a theme in her work. As a former competitive swimmer and regular runner and biker, she experiences the world in a visceral way, creating art that is informed by the way we live within the world and the way the world lives with us.

From her home in Kitty Hawk (she’s soon to move to Duck, two Outer Banks towns away), Weisner rides a bike or runs along the beach every day to note its transformations. “It’s the same beach, but it’s completely different, the water color, the form of the waves, the temperature of the wind,” she says. Sometimes she finds objects to incorporate into sculpture as she goes.

Waves and wavelengths — audio, seismic and light — all inspire her. A meteorite impact crater in Southern Germany was the subject of sculpture and installation art she created with the Fulbright Grant she was awarded in 2013; she used seismometers to record earthquakes as part of a Mint Museum installation in 2018.

One early morning in March 2022, I had the chance to witness her in action. On the shores of Kitty Hawk Sound, I watched as she zipped up her wetsuit, assembled a series of floating sculptures, and waded with them into the frigid waters. The sun wasn’t fully up, the air was barely 40 degrees and the art she was wrangling was bigger than she was. Weisner took it all in stride. In a matter of minutes, she’d glided 50 yards from shore and her art was floating all around her.

The largest of the three pieces of art with her that morning was one she’d attached to her outrigger kayak and towed 275 miles down parts of the Eno and Neuse Rivers and through the Ocracoke Inlet in 2019, recording audiovisual information and environmental data (including a panther sighting) along the way. Two smaller works included discarded beach chairs from one of her regular oceanside jogs.

Her approach with every subject, Weisner says, is to embrace what she doesn’t know, and to let her new knowledge as well as her material guide her.

“I’m still a process-oriented artist,” she says, one focused on “openness to material and play, not taking my work too seriously . . . and not being too pigeonholed.” She thrives when she can employ all of her senses in the making of her art, especially work that involves nature. And she loves making connections across time and place.

When the polar vortex winds of 2022 washed an old canoe up on the side of the road near her house, for instance, she picked it up and brought it home. “It had beautiful layering on it,” she says. “The water had rotted holes into it. I think it had been submerged in the sound for a couple of years.”

The fact that winds from the Arctic dislodged it and brought it to her North Carolina shore fascinated her, she says, and that canoe has become part of her latest Arctic-inspired installations. “No place is an isolated place,” says Weisner. “Everything we do — everything that happens in one geographic location — impacts other geographic locations.”

2024 Art of the State Department

Art of the State

Gap, 2024 by Frank Campion. 21 x 42 inches, acrylic and rag paper.

Dichotomies & Gaps

Frank Campion’s examinations in paint

By Liza Roberts

Clemmons-based artist Frank Campion brings a cerebral tenacity to his explorations of color and geometry. A series of paintings examining vertical slices of abstracted landscape evolves into another, which juxtaposes rational and random compositional styles, which then gives way to pieces addressing the spaces between those dichotomies. Gap, a recent painting, explores all of that, with the added dimension of a snippet of a view, a depiction of the ways our eyes take in the world before us.

Lately, it’s been hard work. “Sometimes artists have this conceit that everything they touch is going to turn to gold,” he says. “The truth is that it rarely does. So you have to make a lot of messes.” Gap, for instance, is “coming out of the midst of exploring where things might go.”

Campion says 2024 has been a year of just that, of “mucking about, cutting stuff up and putting it back together again. It’s a fun way to work because you can move stuff around without committing to it. It ends up looking like it’s fall in the studio: There’s leaves everywhere, and I’m just sort of blowing them around.”

He made his Dichotomies series by taping off one side of the canvas and painting the other “until it looked interesting.” Then he’d cover that painted side with newspaper and go to work on the blank one. When it was complete, he’d unveil the full canvas to himself. “There are moments when it’s really kind of interesting,” he says. “I have a vague memory of what the other side was like when I peel the tape and the newspaper off, and sometimes it’s good, and sometimes it’s not.”

Gap represents his current interest in “playing around with the idea of gaps and alleys and fissures, looking for a looser way of working. Instead of having two fields to work with, I’m seeing what happens in between them.”

To watch Campion paint is to witness intuitive creativity at work. Once, on a studio visit, he pulled a canvas to the floor and stared at it for a moment before tipping a bucket of paint onto its blank expanse. The paint was gray and viscous. It splashed indiscriminately, like muddy water. He studied it for a moment, then tipped the bucket again and again and again, finally picking up a broom-scaled squeegee to push and pull it back and forth. As starry splotches became ghostly shapes beneath a paler scrim, this respected painter looked for all the world like a pensive janitor, mopping the floor.

Left: Zarrab, 2023 by Frank Campion. 42 x 84 inches.

Right: Kebado, 2023 by Frank Campion. 42 x 84 inches.

The result, weeks later, belied those humble beginnings. Sharp geometry, deep blue, soft orange and acid yellow layered the gray-splashed canvas with subtlety and contrast, dimension and structure. Pieces of gray remained, muddying some of the bright shades, swirling in tendrils on the margins.

“I like color. I like emotion,” Campion says. “I like the collision of chaos and order.” What viewers see in his work includes all of that, but most of all, he says, it’s what they bring to it themselves. “One of the things I like about abstraction is that it’s a kind of mirror. It’s a challenge.”

Campion works in a modernist showpiece of a studio he designed and attached to his house in a residential neighborhood (a contractor likened the space to the spot where Ferris Bueller’s friend Cameron’s father parked his ill-fated Ferrari). It’s a space that challenges him, delightedly so. Miles Davis plays on a continuous loop, art books fill side tables, sunlight pours through a ceiling of skylights; there’s room for giant canvases and places to sit and talk. The floor is a mosaic of speckled paint, and so is he. “He” being “Frank 2.0,” a “re-emerging artist,” as he calls himself (in writing, anyway), the present-day iteration of a Harvard-educated man who came to prominence as a young artist in Boston in the 1980s. Campion had collectors, critically successful solo shows, and was in group shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art and Boston Museum of Fine Arts (where one of his paintings is in the permanent collection). Then he became disillusioned with all of it, walked away from art completely, and immersed himself for more than 30 years in a successful advertising career.

That’s what brought him to Winston-Salem, a top job at ad firm Long, Haymes & Carr where accounts like IBM, Hanes Hosiery and Wachovia Bank and Trust Co. kept things interesting. “It was a great ride,” he says, “very creative.” After that, painting called him back.

From the beginning, color has been a main attraction. So has tension. Campion says he’s constantly intrigued by “the imposition of geometry, with its logical and rational right angles and parallel lines, pitted against a painterly catastrophe.”

His description of such a catastrophe sounds like the musings of a man in love with his work: “It’s random spills and splats, and drippy, sloppy paint. Thick paint, thin paint, rational form against random painterly incident. When I look at all the things I’ve worked on, that’s a consistent theme.” PS

This is an excerpt from Art of the State: Celebrating the Art of North Carolina, published by UNC Press.

2024 Art of the State Department

Art of the State

Wild Clay, Ancient Art

Takuro and Hitomi Shibata shape pots — and their community

By Liza Roberts

Eighteen years ago, when ceramic artists Takuro and Hitomi Shibata moved to Seagrove from the ancient pottery village of Shigaraki, Japan, they had with them nothing but a couple of suitcases, a rescued stray cat and plans for a short adventure.

Today they are pillars of the community. Hitomi is a respected and prolific Seagrove ceramic artist, and Takuro, a fellow potter and the procurer and refiner of most of the area’s local clay, is a community fulcrum. They live with their two American-born sons on Busbee Road in a striking modernist house designed by a protégé of famed architect Frank Harmon, built in part with their own hands. Their wood-fired kilns are a stone’s throw from its front door, and the tiny farmhouse where they first lived on the property now serves as a gallery for their work. Their former garage is now their studio.

The art they make here and sell under the Studio Touya name is distinctly their own. Hitomi’s sculptural pieces have the rounded, organic shapes of abstract feminine nudes. Takuro’s are distinct for their architectural geometry, acute angles and jutting planes. It’s impossible to see the couple’s pieces side by side and not admire the harmony of their yin and yang.

A reverence for local clay is at the heart of the couple’s individual art and their mutual business. They put that shared love and knowledge into Wild Clay: Creating Ceramics and Glazes from Natural and Found Resources, a book they co-wrote and published with Herbert Press in 2022. Its publication took their local story to an international audience, changing their business and their work in the process.

“We have been very busy doing more exhibitions and workshops outside of North Carolina, nationally and internationally,” Hitomi says. “Especially after releasing our book, we were invited to ceramic conferences, meetings and workshops to talk about our clay stories from Shigaraki to North Carolina.” When so much time on the road meant less time for making pots, the couple decided to refine their work. “We tried to improve the quality of our art,” Hitomi says. “Also, using beautiful wild clays and natural materials, which we have been doing for many years, became even more important for our artistic practices.”

Finding Home

The couple credits the Seagrove community and its native clay for nurturing the art they originally learned in Shigaraki. The first time they saw this place, they had a feeling it would be important to them. “We were surprised,” Hitomi recalls. “There were so many pottery studios. We realized Seagrove was the biggest pottery community in the United States.”

They’d come down from a Virginia artist’s residence on a Greyhound bus at the invitation of Nancy Gottovi (now executive director of nearby arts hub Starworks) and her husband, Seagrove potter David Stumpfle, who had visited Shigaraki a few years earlier.

The Shibatas loved what they saw, but their visas were up.

Two years later, Gottovi called again. She was working with Central Park NC, an organization dedicated to preserving the natural and cultural assets of central North Carolina, and offered Takuro, who has an engineering and chemistry degree, an opportunity to establish a clay factory to serve Seagrove’s potters.

The Shibatas jumped at the chance. People in Seagrove, they believed, truly understood the value of pottery. In other places, Hitomi says, “people love art, but they don’t think that pottery is the same thing as art. But here, people are so crazy about pottery. They love the tradition, they have so much appreciation . . . it’s part of the history of the state.”

The Pottery Ecosystem

Today, Starworks Ceramics is an integral part of the Seagrove pottery ecosystem, and it’s growing. “We went through a tough time during the pandemic,” Takuro says, “but now we have more people working, and it’s a great team. Our clay is getting more popular, and potters and artists support not only our clays, but the story of a clay factory.”

The process is laborious: Takuro takes raw clay dug from the earth and turns it into a viable material. The equipment he and his assistants use to refine it is massive and low-tech, the stuff of a fairy-tale giant’s bakery. Some of it is from the 1940s. There’s a shredder, a mixer, a separator and a vibrating screen; there are things called filter presses and pug mills. All of it fills a cavernous warehouse room. Massive buckets of what looks like sticky dirt go in one end; several days of man and machine power later, neat clay cubes come out the other. These cubes are sold in increasing numbers to potters in Seagrove and around the world.

“Using wild clays for pottery in the studio is a growing trend in American ceramic art education and in small pottery businesses,” Takuro says. “It’s good for people to think about sustainability and the environment. However, these methods have been used and improved for thousands of years all over the world. Nothing is new.”

He hopes his clay and the couple’s book inspires more potters around the country to learn about the clay histories in their own regions: “Our clay story is very personal, and our clay experience doesn’t cover all wild clays, but we heard from readers that many places in the world have interesting histories, communities and people who work in clay. We believe clay is universal.”

At the same time, Takuro knows that what makes and sells at Starworks can’t be found just anywhere. “North Carolina clay is special,” he says. “It’s high in silica, it can be fired at high temperatures and it is from this place.” PS

This is an excerpt from Art of the State: Celebrating the Art of North Carolina, published by UNC Press.

2024 Art of the State Department

Art of the State

Gateway to Mysteries

John Beerman deeply sees and paints the natural world

By Liza Roberts

Before John Beerman paints a landscape, he studies the place that’s caught his eye and picks a particular day and time. Maybe it’s a low-lit evening in fall, or maybe it’s a morning hour that only exists over a span of days in spring, when the angle and energy of the sun provides a certain glow. And then he goes there, day after day, at that appointed hour, building his painting bit by bit until the moment is over — the hour has passed, the shape of light has changed, that bit of season is gone.

One spring morning not long ago, he arrived at a field at Chatwood, the Hillsborough estate owned at the time by his close friend, the author Frances Mayes. Beerman arrived well in advance of his chosen hour, because it takes some time to set up his easel. He has a wonky system of clamps and slats to hold boards in place that will serve as a perch for both his canvas and his paint. His paint is of his own making, too: It’s a homemade egg tempera, created with pigment and egg yolk that he keeps in an airtight jar.

To accompany him on one of these plein air excursions is to realize that Beerman doesn’t just look like Monet at Giverny, with his straw hat, wooden easel, linen shirt and leather shoes, but that he sees like Monet: He views the natural world with the same kind of reverence. Beerman studies the landscape as if it had a soul, character and moods. He learns its nuanced beauty out of a deep respect — and only then does he paint what only he can see.

“I have always found the natural world a gateway to the greater mysteries and meanings of life,” Beerman says. At a time when the world faces so many problems, he says, “it’s important to see the beauty in this world. It is a healing source.”

Beerman has often ventured to notably beautiful places around the world to find this gateway. To Tuscany in springtime, coastal Maine in summer, the glowing shores of Normandy or the estuaries of South Carolina. Recently, he is choosing to stay closer to his Hillsborough home. “Sometimes I feel rebellious against going to those beautiful places and painting those beautiful sights,” he says. “My appreciation and love of the North Carolina landscape continues to grow. I feel we are so fortunate to be here.”

This year, so far, he has been painting the views from his studio windows. “I am struck by the idea that every day the sun moves across the sky, the seasons change,” says Beerman. “I’m looking at one house in five different versions throughout the day.”

The particular house on his easel now is a millhouse currently under renovation. He has a bird’s-eye view of the millhouse from his second-story studio, but it constantly evolves with the men working on it and the light that suffuses it. What Beerman is painting, though, isn’t “a house portrait,” but an attempt to capture “the luminosity of that particular light.” Also compelling him is the energy of the project at hand: “The guys working on the house are just as interesting to me,” he says, so he has begun to paint them into the scene, even though figures have rarely appeared in his landscapes.

The ability to revisit the subject of his fascination day after day as he completes a painting is a refreshing change, he says. Typically, he’d paint small oil sketches in the field, then bring them back to the studio to inspire and inform his large oil paintings. Here, he can continue to study parts of the house, the men and the project that elude him; he can “get more information” as he goes.

Left, Middle: White House from Studio Winter Sunny Morning, 2024 15.75 x 17.75 in. Oil and acrylic on canvas

Middle: Winter Dusk from Studio Window, 2024 11.75 x 11.75 in. Oil on linen.

Right, Middle: White House from Studio Winter Morning with Figure, 2024.
15.75 x 17.75 in. Oil on canvas

Right: Rooftop and Trees from Studio, Winter Sunny Morning, 2024 11.75 x 11.75 in. Oil on linen.

But if his proximity to his subject has changed, Beerman’s essential practice has not.

“I’ve always felt a little bit apart from the trend,” he says. “I love history. And one also needs to be in the world of this moment, I understand that. I’m inspired by other artists all the time, old ones and contemporary ones . . . Piero Della Francesca, he’s part of my community. Beverly McIver, she’s part of my community. One of the things I love about my job is that I get to have that conversation with these folks in my studio, and that feeds me.” Beerman’s work keeps company with some of “these folks” and other greats in the permanent collections of some of the nation’s most prestigious museums as well, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and governor’s mansions in New York and North Carolina.

The paintings that have made his name include celebrated landscapes of New York’s Hudson River early in his career (he is a direct descendant of Henry Hudson, something he learned only after 25 years painting the river), of North Carolina in later years and of Tuscany, where he has spent stretches of time. They all share a sense of the sublime, a hyperreal unreality, a fascination with shape and volume, space and light, a restrained emphasis on color and an abiding spirituality.

“Edward Hopper said all he ever wanted to do was paint the sunlight on the side of a house,” Beerman says. “And I so concur with that. It’s as much about the light as it is about the subject.” A painting of the lighthouse at Nags Head includes only a looming fragment of that famous black-and-white tower, but it’s the glow of coastal sun Beerman has depicted on its surface that make it unmistakably what and where it is.

“With some paintings, I know what I want, and I try to achieve that. And other paintings start speaking back to me,” he says. Beerman’s talking about another painting, of a wide rolling ocean and a fisherman on a pier. As he painted it, childhood memories of Pawleys Island, South Carolina, came into play: “In this old rowboat, we’d go over the waves. And in doing this painting, that came in . . . ahh, maybe that’s where I am. Sometimes it bubbles up from memories that are right below the conscious.”

The rhythm of the work he has underway now suits him well, he says: “I’ve traveled a good bit, but I’m a homebody. I like cooking on the weekends, and making big pots of this or that. I love being able to walk to town, or ride my bike to town.”

And he’s eager to stick close to his chosen subject. “I love the long shadows of the winter light,” he says. “I want to capture it before the leaves come back on the trees. I have that incentive: to get in what I can before the leaves come back.”

Whatever he’s painting, Beerman says he’s always trying to evolve: “One hopes you’re getting closer to what is your core thing, right? And I don’t want to get too abstract about it, but to me, that’s an artist’s job, to find their voice. I’m still in search of that. And at this time in my life, I feel more free to express what I want to express, and how I want to express it. I don’t feel too constrained.” PS

This is an excerpt from Art of the State: Celebrating the Art of North Carolina, published by UNC Press.

2024 Art of the State Department

Art of the State

Sculpture in Silk

Kenny Nguyen’s unique medium weaves tradition with ingenuity

By Liza Roberts

“Every time I start a piece, I imagine there’s a body underneath it,” says Quoctrung Kenny Nguyen, a former fashion designer who makes rippling, three-dimensional sculptures out of paint-soaked silk. “Instead, there’s this absence of a body, in sculptural form. I think it’s beautiful like that.”

Torn into strips, dredged in paint and affixed to unstretched canvas, Nguyen’s silk segments fuse to become a malleable but sturdy material that he molds with his hands and pins in place. Every time he hangs a piece, he changes the pin placement — and with it the object’s shape, shadow and energy. Some have a “more architectural feel,” others are more organic.

These works explore and illustrate Nguyen’s experience with reinvention, cultural displacement, isolation and identity. His chosen material — with its direct ties to the cultural history of his native Vietnam, where the fabric is revered and traditional “silk villages” keep ancient production techniques alive — is a key component. “Identity is changing all the time,” he says, “and the work keeps evolving, in a continuous transformation.” It all begins with the fabric in his hands. “Silk is already a transformation: from the silkworm, to the silk thread, to a piece of silk. So it’s holding a metaphor.” More than one: “People see silk as a very delicate thing,” he says, “but actually it’s one of the strongest fibers on earth.”

Right: Encounter Series No.5, 2023, Hand-cut silk fabric, acrylic paint, canvas, mounted on wall, 72 x 120 in.

Nguyen’s work has earned him solo exhibitions and dozens of awards, residencies, grants and fellowships all over the world. It began to take off commercially in a big way during the pandemic, when he began using Instagram to share images of his pieces, and after Los Angeles-based Saatchi Art named him a Rising Star of 2020, one of the 35 “best young artists to collect” under the age of 35 from around the world. He now has art consultants and galleries representing his work all over the country and in Europe, and has had to move his studio out of the garage of his family home and into a former textile mill to keep up with demand. He no longer works alone, with three assistants (all art students from UNC Charlotte) helping him with prep work, photography and studio management. His biggest challenge is no longer finding an audience; it’s managing the business.

Nguyen couldn’t have imagined this kind of success when he immigrated here in 2010 from Ho Chi Minh City with his family. He was 19 and had a BFA in fashion design from the University of Architecture Ho Chi Minh City. But he couldn’t find a job and spoke no English. “It was just a culture shock. You can’t communicate with anybody. You feel so isolated. Homeless, in a way. I was struggling,” he says.

Art called him. Nguyen enrolled at UNC Charlotte to study painting — Davidson artist Elizabeth Bradford was one of his teachers — and found himself yearning for a way to incorporate his own culture and passions into the work. In the end, the way those came together was a happy accident.

During the summer of 2018, three years out of UNCC, Nguyen had just arrived at an artist’s residency in rural Vermont, where he planned to continue painting the “very flat, very traditional” types of canvases he’d been creating until that point. He realized that in his rush to get out the door, he’d left a container with most of his colorful paints and brushes behind. In fact, he realized that he’d managed to bring only three materials with him: a bucket of white paint, skeins of silk and some canvas. “What can you do with that?” he wondered. He began ripping pieces of silk, dredging them in paint, affixing them to canvas, “and you know, it just happened.”

Middle: Encounter Series No.12, 2023, Hand cut silk, acrylic, canvas mounted on wall, (Approx.) 75 x 60 x 5 in.

Right: Encounter Series No.4, 2023, Hand-cut silk fabric, acrylic paint, canvas, mounted on wall, 84 x 65 in.

Quickly, he decided he was on to something: “The material was speaking for itself.” Bits of transparent silk dripped off his canvases, letting light shine through. “I decided I didn’t want the frame anymore. I decided: Let’s sculpt it.”

To get there, though, he knew he’d have to manipulate his silk in new ways. “Silk has such a value in the Vietnamese culture,” he says. “For me, to destroy a piece of silk, to cut it into pieces . . . that’s a big deal for me. I pushed myself to do that.”

He hasn’t stopped. “The work is evolving in such an amazing way,” he said in late December. “I’ve just been in the studio nonstop, producing work.” Nguyen says that kind of work ethic has been crucial to his success. Some of it is rooted in his early years working in fashion while in school, some of it is hard-wired, and a lot of it is simply about his love of the work.

“The more that I work with the materials, the more I realize how it works and the more capacity I have,” he says. He’s experimenting with large-scale work, which can be challenging to mold in lasting sculptural forms, but not impossible. His largest works are now as many as 40 feet long, and he makes them in five or six different segments which he then sews together. “It’s not evolving in a straight line,” he says. “There are a lot of tests, and a lot of failures. Little accidents happen, unexpected things happen, and I pick up on that.”

When he’s not working on commission for collectors with requests for particular dimensions or colors, Nguyen often goes right back to where he started, letting colors and shapes come to him intuitively, sometimes reworking old pieces that didn’t originally come together, pulling out paints he hasn’t used in a while, relying on instinct. His materials never stop inspiring his creativity. “It amazes me,” he says, “that the material, this silk, can hold a sculptural form.” PS

This is an excerpt from Art of the State: Celebrating the Art of North Carolina, published by UNC Press.

2024 Art of the State Department

Art of the State

Earthen Vessels

From Seagrove to the world beyond, Ben Owen III shares his pottery

By Liza Roberts

The work of Ben Owen III is earthen and practical, but also brightly hued and sculptural. It fits in a hand for morning coffee, but it’s also the lofty centerpiece of elegant spaces across the world. From the Sun Valley Resort in Idaho to the Ritz-Carlton in Tokyo to The Umstead Hotel & Spa in Cary, where his sculptural vessels fill spotlit niches and his handmade plates grace every table, Owen’s art provides beauty and function.

Pottery is one of the oldest human inventions, going back to pre-Neolithic times. Earth into clay, clay into pots, pots into fire, vessels out. Also unchanged: all hands on deck to get it done. It takes a team to keep a wood-fired kiln’s flames stoked and blazing 24 hours a day for days on end. Like farmers raising a barn, potters fire a kiln together because they need each other. It’s what they do.

Owen was born to this life, born with Seagrove clay beneath his feet. His father and grandfather, Ben Owen Sr. and Ben Owen Jr., built the foundations for Seagrove’s modern pottery community; before them, as early as the late 1700s, their forefathers arrived from England, making and selling clay vessels to early settlers. Owen III works today on the same site his grandfather did.

“He was a great teacher and a great mentor for me,” Owen says, “showing me the fundamentals, building all those skills.” Starting at the age of 9, Owen went out to his grandfather’s studio every day to make pots. During these sessions, his grandfather taught Owen technique and aesthetics as well as principles: how important it was to challenge oneself, to learn from mistakes, to greet change with enthusiasm, to eschew mediocrity. To “never sell his seconds.”

“I’m continually trying to find ways to refine the technique and my process,” Owen says. “How can I make the piece even better than I did last time?”

That commitment has taken his work not only all over the world but has paved the way for its inclusion in museum collections including the Smithsonian Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Gregg Museum of Art & Design, and in private collections. His work, in its various manifestations, has a timelessness about it, even when glazed in crystalline turquoise or lilypad green.

“I’m always experimenting,” he says. “A lot of people know us for our red glaze, but in recent years, I’ve been making glazes from nature. Recreating things I’ve seen hiking with my son . . . looking at textures, lichen on a stone, moss on a tree. It’s interesting to think, Could I make a glaze that would create that effect?”

Some of Owen’s pieces are finished in electric or gas-fired kilns, others in his wood-fired groundhog kiln. To witness Owen firing this kiln — a gourd-shaped, 30-foot-long structure dug partway down into the earth, hence the name — is to witness a multi-day, group massive effort, only accomplished a few times a year.

One recent morning at his studio in Seagrove, Owen was busy completing a 5-foot-tall, 400-pound, bottle-shaped vessel for the Amanyara resort in Turks & Caicos, one of nine large pieces commissioned by the property. The fire in the kiln had been going for 12 hours, and it would be another 36 before it was done. Owen slid a few slats of wood into a slot in the side of the chamber, turning to laugh at a joke from his friend Stan Simmons, a fellow potter there to help keep the fire going at temperatures reaching 2,350 degrees Fahrenheit. Another potter, Fred Johnston, was also on hand. Both men had pots of their own in the kiln. They waited.

“It’s like a jigsaw puzzle,” he said, gesturing to his kiln, explaining how he fits 400 pots inside. Part of it is tactical: some glazes do well high up, some pots need to be closer to the fire. Some of it is logistical. “Right now,” Owen says, watching flames shoot out of a blowhole-like chimney pipe, “Right now it’s heating up fast. Right now, there’s more fuel than there is oxygen.”

Potters can’t always predict what will emerge from the fire, what that day’s particular combination of clay and heat, minerals and weather will produce. “Colors, or finishes on pots, are almost like sunsets,” Owen says. “Each day, it’s a little different, and depending on what’s present — just as the clouds, or the temperature, the atmosphere all affect the sunset, our glazes can react the same way. We learn to accept that. We try to control these things to the best of our ability, but we have to remind ourselves that our materials are constantly changing. And sometimes it can be a nice surprise.”

A few steps from this kiln, in the late 1990s, Owen built his own studio, right behind the one where his grandfather taught him. The newer spot is spacious, with separate workstations for different kinds of clay. There are pots in various stages of completion, one already 4 feet tall. When it’s complete, this pot will be glazed an earthy blue, weigh about 250 pounds, and stand in the entry of a home in Greensboro.

“In an era of instant gratification, where people can go to the big box stores or a mall for most of their daily needs, we can offer something different,” Owen says. “Especially when they can meet the maker, learn a little bit more about the process, and what makes a potter tick, and their particular style, and why they use that technique. The work becomes part of the fellowship.”

Owen pictures his blue vessel in place, mentions the conversations he’s had with the collectors who’ve commissioned the piece. He welcomes the chance to work closely with the people who collect his work — some of whom were also collectors of his grandfather’s work — and to get to know them, just as he does with visitors to his region and his studio. The role of ambassador is another he embraces.

“When you can find a way to develop a relationship with an individual customer or just people coming out to visit the area,” he says, “that gives us a springboard to tell people more about what the past has done, and what we’ve been able to build on over the last several generations.”

He’s happy to go farther back, too, 280 or 300 million years or so, back to when the region was covered in the volcanic ash that gave birth to the clay he loves, and he’s happy to bring it back home to now, and to his legacy. “I just count my blessings that we’ve been able to support our family through the making of earthen vessels,” he says. “Really, the end product is how it is received by the people who use it.” PS

This is an excerpt from Art of the State: Celebrating the Art of North Carolina, published by UNC Press.

2023 Art of the State Department

Art of the State

Careful Chaos

Chieko Murasugi’s art subverts order and changes perspectives

By Liza Roberts

Abstract painter Chieko Murasugi has navigated conflicting perspectives all her life. She holds a Ph.D. in visual science and works as an artist; she is the Tokyo-born daughter of Japanese immigrants who was raised in Toronto and lives in America; she is a former impressionist painter who has turned to visual illusion to anchor her geometric art.

“I want to make the elusive, disparate, confusing, multifaceted nature of the world absolutely clear,” says Murasugi. “I want to be clear in my view that the world is unclear.”

Illusions underpin this message; her interest in them is one of the few things that has remained constant in her life. As a scientist, Murasugi studied visual perception because she was fascinated by mysteries like 3D illustrations that seem to flip upside down or right-side up depending on the angle of the viewer, or the ghosts of afterimages, or the way the interpretation of a color changes depending on the colors that sit beside it. Now, as an artist, she uses phenomena like these to tweak a viewer’s perception, to make a picture plane shift before their eyes, to turn it from one thing into another. She populates these paintings with crisp, unambiguous, flat-colored shapes. “I have clarity and I have ambiguity at the same time,” she says. “And that’s really at the crux of my art. It’s the ambiguity, the clarity, the dichotomy.”

Her art creates it, and she’s long lived it. Murasugi grew up in a “very white” Canadian suburb, “very clearly a minority.” As a child, her father, a descendant of 1600s-era samurai, showed her maps of Japan’s former reach across Asia, and told her “Americans took it away.” He told her about how American forces firebombed downtown Tokyo, and how he and her mother barely escaped with their lives.

But these were not facts she’d been taught in school, or heard anywhere else. “I had taken world history, and I had not heard anything about the firebombings of Japan,” she says. “And so everywhere I went, I was presented with diverging, often conflicting, but very disparate narratives. Who am I supposed to believe?” When she was studying for her doctorate at York University in Canada, she recalls, her professors proudly touted the department’s significance in the field. Then she went to Stanford to do postdoctoral work in neurobiology and nobody had heard of her colleagues at York University. “Again, I had to shift my perspective,” she says. Fueling those shifts was an overwhelming curiosity, she says, “always wanting to know why. Why, why, why. Curiosity has been the driving force of my life.”

Years later, when Murasugi left her accomplished academic career and the world of science for art, her viewpoint shifted again. In a deeply rooted way, she was coming home; she had always drawn and painted, and she studied art in college as well as science. Even at the height of her successful scientific career as a professor and research scientist, Murasugi believed that she didn’t truly belong. She thought she wasn’t quantitative, logical or analytical enough, that “there was something that was missing in the way that I was thinking,” she says. With art, the opposite was the case: “I knew I could do it.”

After she moved to North Carolina with her husband several years ago, this innate conviction took her back to school, to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for an MFA. There she met fellow artists she respected and joined with to co-found and co-curate an artist-run Chapel Hill exhibit space called Basement, which has earned a reputation as an incubator for emerging artists and which regularly exhibits their work to the public.

Over the last 18 months, Murasugi has found fresh directions, resulting in a new body of work, called Chance, that explores randomization, color theory, chance and chaos. “My mother was basically dying when I began this series,” she says. “Her impending death, having to process her death, is what inspired it. And I continued it for about a year, because I was just bereft.” Murasugi’s mother survived World War II “by chance” and always thought of her life as defined by that good fortune; this fueled Murasugi’s experimentation with art made, in part, “by chance.”

Using an algorithm available on the website random.org to arrange her own colors, shapes and patterns into random arrangements and compositions, Murasugi created a series of colorful, geometric works. In late summer 2022, she posted these works on the Instagram feed of Asheville’s Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, part of her digital residency with the museum. She also exhibited them at Craven Allen, her Durham gallery.

More recently, Murasugi has returned to the illusion-anchored canvases she began a few years ago — what she now refers to as her “old way of painting.”

It has been “a huge struggle,” she says, because “the end point is unknown.” Unlike the work made with the guidance of the randomizing program, “the trajectory is not straightforward” with these newer, intuitive paintings. “It’s forward and backwards, left and right. I’ve always worked this way, before I went to the Chance series, and I’d almost forgotten how difficult painting is. Both fun, and excruciatingly difficult.” Some of the pieces currently underway will find their way to CAM Raleigh for a show called Neo-Psychedelia that opens Nov. 10. She will also have a piece featured and sold at ArtSpace’s ArtBash, a fundraising gala, on Nov. 18, also in Raleigh.

Murasugi’s work has also been exhibited in museums in San Francisco, New York and across the South, and is in the collections of the City of Raleigh and Duke University. Its abstraction welcomes any interpretation at all; its subtle illusory elements gently subvert them. “People have said to me over the years: Your work is so beautiful. And I think, well, I hope it doesn’t stop there,” she says. “As long as they see that there were two ways of looking at it.” PS

This is an excerpt from Art of the State: Celebrating the Art of North Carolina, published by UNC Press.

2023 Art of the State Department

Art of the State

Triumph in a Bridge

Matthew Steele celebrates the beauty of the manufactured world through sculpture

By Liza Roberts

Left: Gallery view of Mirrored Turbine, 2022, walnut, copper rod, 23-gauge nails, 84 x 84 x 4 inches. Commission through Hodges Taylor.

Right: Telophase no.1, 2022, oak and 23-gauge nails, 24 x 24 x 72 inches.

Infrastructure inspires Charlotte artist Matthew Steele. Bridges, highways, architecture and other physical manifestations of technology demonstrate to him the lengths human beings will go to “transcend the greatest obstacles we know.”

With honed precision, Steele’s work explores the elegance, complexity and rigor of such industrial and manmade structures, the labor that made them, and the life they each contain. The still rotors of a turbine become a thrumming work of abstract beauty when Steele makes them of wood and copper. He allows them to hang alone, the promise of movement in every blade. Steele’s scaffold-like towers of walnut merge to create a geometric, jagged skyline, but with an irregular, tendriled base: Are they putting down roots? Are these structures not built, but alive?

“There is desire in a highway,” Steele says. “There is triumph in a bridge.”

Steele moved to Charlotte in 2012 for a McColl Center residency and has made the city his home. “I’ve always been interested in the manufactured world,” he says. “I came from a super small town in Indiana. I knew the feeling I had when I would go to a city or a large industrial space, and just how alien it felt. I think I’m still narrowing in on that feeling.”

In 2015, Steele became an artist-in-residence at Goodyear Arts, a nonprofit arts program in Charlotte. This allowed him to further explore that feeling and its embodiment in his work, which has been exhibited and collected internationally. Steele and his wife, Susan Jedrzejewski, associate at Charlotte’s Hodges Taylor Gallery and a former codirector of Goodyear Arts, live in a 2,000-square-foot house with a walk-out basement that serves as Steele’s studio. This is where he makes the work that fuels his creativity. “There’s something incredible about waking up and making something,” Steele says, “of walking downstairs and turning on the table saw.” At the end of the day, Steele says, nothing can compare to the satisfaction of that kind of work: “Something can exist that didn’t exist that morning.”

Left: Sundowning, 2021, machine drawing / pen on black Stonehenge, 50 x 92 inches.

Right: Noir no. 2, 2023, walnut, 23-gauge nails, 47 x 73 x 4 inches. Right: Telophase no. 1, 2022, oak and 23-gauge nails, 72 x 24 x 24 inches. Commissions through Hodges Taylor.

Most of the time, that something is made of wood, and usually, that wood is walnut. It’s the wood he first learned to use many years ago when his father brought home a huge supply, and still, no other wood compares. “It’s pretty forgiving,” Steele says. “It has a quality that feels special. I’ve created the deepest relationship with walnut.”

It’s this richly colored, earthy-scented material that forms the work inspired by steel buttresses, by engine components, by industrial infrastructure. To Steele, that paradox points to a larger message. “I remember a thought I had in college about people in the world that we build,” he says. “It’s so easy for us to think of us as separate from nature, but we make our beehives, and we make our own beaver dams. We’re just animals.”

In Charlotte, Steele is making his mark. Last year, he received an Emerging Creators Fellowship from the Arts & Science Council, and he is currently at work on a major piece of City of Charlotte-funded public art that will anchor a streetscape project on J.W. Clay Boulevard in the University City area.

Making public art — which has kept him busy in recent years — is the realization of a long-held goal. In 2019, after a series of rejections for proposals he’d submitted for public art commissions, Steele decided to make a work of art to please himself: “I just thought, Nothing is working. I’m just going to make whatever I want.” He took the form of Greek statue The Winged Victory of Samothrace as inspiration and “depicted that idealized sculpture as this sort of grim, dark oil-covered mess.” The resulting (Nothing is Working) Victory is a metal form that recalls the iconic sculpture’s shape, but is built using intersecting pieces of metal, held up on a wooden trestle. The process taught him to make organic, volumetric shapes he hadn’t been able to create before. A few weeks later, Steele got his first call to make a piece of public art — one that called on his newfound skill.

Left: Basalt Pillars, 2021, walnut, 23-gauge nails, 16 x 48 x 4 inches.

Right: Rendering of Fabric, a city-funded work slated for installation in University City in 2026. Rendering courtesy of Matthew Steele.

Guaranteed funding, a larger scale, a public audience and a sense of permanence make these commissions particularly prized. But the making of a piece of public art can become weighed down in procedure — paperwork and correspondence and engineering — that can remove an artist from the creative process. “It’s a tricky transition,” Steele says. “You’re using new materials, on a completely different scale.”

Schematic depictions of Fabric, the piece he’s currently working on for the City of Charlotte, clearly share the elegance, energy and story of his studio work. Before submitting his proposal for the commission, Steele researched the industrial history of the area and became inspired by the early-1900s textile mills of the NoDa area. “I found old photos from the archives, images of factory rooms with thousands of spools of thread,” he says. “I just couldn’t get over the visual, all of these threads coming through.”

He began to experiment with steel rods and developed the design for what will become a 10-foot-tall, 6-ton piece of steel rods. Slated to be installed in 2026 on a median in J.W. Clay Boulevard, the piece will be a sort of pyramid of rebar, where slivers of daylight will shift with the movement of a viewer.

“Public art is really, really exciting,” he says. “You get to do something you wouldn’t do any other way.” PS

This is an excerpt from Art of the State: Celebrating the Art of North Carolina, published by UNC Press.

2023 Art of the State Department

Art of the State

Visual Language

Jennifer Meanley creates kaleidoscopic realities

By Liza Roberts

Center: As if smoldering and smoke were oneness evoked by thought and expression, oil on paper mounted on panel, 15 x 15 inches, 2019.

Right: Milk-Ersatz, spilt, oil on canvas, 48 x 56 inches, 2017.

Intimate but alienating, lush and allegorical, Jennifer Meanley’s paintings appear to capture the moments upon which events hinge. Figures, often out of scale with their environments, gaze at odd angles within untamed, kaleidoscopic settings, more consumed with their interior lives than with the discordant scenes they inhabit. Animals, alive and dead, sometimes share the space. Something’s clearly about to happen, or might be happening, or perhaps already has happened. Are her subjects aware?

“There is often a sense of lack of synchronicity between how we experience our bodies and how we experience our mind, our emotional states,” Meanley says. Her paintings “often register that paradox, whether that’s with the animals, or the symbolism with the space itself . . . or whether the figure seems to be looking and registering and connecting” to reality. Or not.

At UNC-Greensboro, where she teaches drawing and painting, Meanley paints these large-scale depictions of human experience. Simultaneously capturing the spheres of action, memory, participation and observation, she invites a viewer to examine the parts and absorb the whole. Like poetry, her works reveal themselves in stages and elements: image, rhythm, tone, vocabulary, story. Color plays a major role. “I’ve always had a penchant for really saturated colors,” she says, especially as a way to indicate atmosphere, like light, air, wind and the grounding element of earth.

Left: Midnight Filigree, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches, 2020.

Right: Repertory Lights in Deep-Night, oil on canvas, 61 x 72 inches, 2020.

Does she begin with a narrative? Not really, or not always. In a painting underway on her working wall — in which a caped, gamine figure gazes upon a flayed animal, possibly a deer, within a riotously overgrown landscape — the New Hampshire native describes her impetus: “I was thinking of this sort of crazy Bacchanal,” she says, “or of a surplus, imagination as a kind of surplus.” Anything is possible in the abundant realm of the imagined, she points out. The real world is another matter.

It’s no surprise to learn that Meanley writes regularly in forms she compares to short stories that emerge from streams of consciousness. It’s a process she describes as if it’s a place where she goes: Language is “like a field that I experience, stepping in and noticing punctuation, noticing the spaces between things, or the pauses, the way breath might be taken. That’s all really, really fascinating to me.” When she’s teaching, she tries to create a corollary to visual language in much the same way: “What does it mean to literally punctuate a drawing, in a way that you would take a sentence that essentially had no meaning, and make it comprehensible?” she asks her students. “Through timing, and space, and rhythm, and breath.”

All of which connects to physical movement, another practice Meanley credits with fueling her creative process. Long walks with her dog in the woods spark marathon writing sessions, which then engender drawings and paintings.

Left: Migratory Inflection, oil on Canvas, 18 x 24 inches, 2019.

Center: Roil, Oil on Canvas 18 x 24 inches, 2019.

Right: Beloved, oil on canvas, 72 x 190 inches, 2017.

In the last year, her writing sessions have taken on new importance, Meanley says. Writing “is a way for me to deepen my personal exploration of my own psychic space, which is the origins of the paintings as well.” Though she doesn’t intend to publish these writings, Meanley is open to the possibility of including some of her words in new paintings. “I think the world that I’m exploring has to do with the idea of psychological interiority and how that can find representation” through words and images. In the meantime, the kinetic activity of walking continues to fire her imagination.

It has also attuned Meanley to the natural environment of the South, so different from what surrounded her in New Hampshire, where she grew up, and where she also earned her BFA at the University of New Hampshire, or even at Indiana University, where she received her MFA. In and around Greensboro, she finds nature so lush, so green, so impressive. “I started realizing that there’s this battle within the landscape. Just to even maintain my yard, I feel like I’m battling the natural growth here. It did amplify that sense of tension, of creating landscape as a narrative event . . . as an important space to contemplate hierarchies of power.”

Summer, with its time away from the demands of academia, provides Meanley with more time for outdoor exploration and for contemplations of all kinds. She’s also looking forward to having time to tackle larger works, with the hope of a solo exhibition later this year or in 2024. “Doing a solo show is an endeavor,” she says. “Right now I’m gearing up.” PS

This is an excerpt from Art of the State: Celebrating the Art of North Carolina, published by UNC Press.

2023 Art of the State Department