Posts Tagged ‘north carolina’
N.C. Arts Council’s Museum in a Minute: Reynolda House Museum of American Art
Posted on: December 1, 2010
Opening as a public art museum in 1967, the Reynolda House Museum of American Art contains collections of renowned American art ranging from the colonial period to the present. The Reynolda House also possesses an impressive costume collection that includes 700 articles of clothing dating back to as early as 1890.
N.C. Arts Council’s Museum in a Minute: The Mint Museum of Craft and Design
Posted on: November 23, 2010
The North Carolina Arts Council featured The Mint Museum of Craft and Design in its latest Museum in a Minute.
The Asheville Art Museum has been featured in the North Carolina Arts Council’s Museum in a Minute program.
The museum, which includes collections of studio craft, work by Black Mountain College artists and other leading regional and national artists, is located in the mountains of western North Carolina.
The North Carolina Museum of Art, one of the most distinguished museum in the South, recently completed a significant three-year expansion and reopened to the public on April 24, 2010. Located in Raleigh on a 164-acre park, the museum seamlessly blends art, architecture and nature.
The museum first opened to the public in 1956 in a renovated state office building in downtown Raleigh. Since its inception, the museum’s collection has grown to include European paintings from the Renaissance to the 19th century, Egyptian art, sculptures and vase paintings from ancient Greece and Rome, American art from the 18th to 20th centuries and international contemporary art, as well as various others. Click the image to the left or follow this link to view a slideshow of samples from the collections.
Admission to the Museum’s permanent collection and Museum Park is free; however, there is a charge for some special exhibitions.
Senior digital art major Travis Butler describes his artistic vision in one word — “experimental.”
His work with animal bones, found objects, felt masks and mythical creatures gives the sense of a constructed reality never 
before explored.
Butler has spent the past three months creating and collecting pieces for the installation he will present for his senior art seminar in the spring. A mixed-media artist, Butler sketches, paints and works with fiber and digital programs. Through fiber art, fiber installation and digital imagery, Butler said he ultimately hopes to achieve a detached reality in his installation.
“My installation work uses the material of felt and found rusty, recycled and discarded objects to create an environment that seems weathered and frozen in time but soft like the wasteland of a forgotten dream,” Butler said.
Butler’s Original Masks
In the senior art seminar, students are expected to spend their senior year working on one project. They build a concept, work with faculty and other students, show their work and finally present and defend a thesis at the end of the year. Butler entered his fourth year already knowing what he wanted to produce.
“This past summer, I took a course at (Virginia Commonwealth University) where I learned different fiber techniques like felting,” Butler said. “I made two of the masks there.”
These masks are perhaps the most noticeable elements in Butler’s installation. Unique in form and emotional expression, Butler makes the eyes and mouth for the masks separately with a basic fiber technique called coiling. The emotions and faces of the masks — which each take about seven to eight hours to create — emerge as the form is finalized and composed. Butler said he plans to create a community of about 10 masked figures.
“I think these anthropomorphic figures are the most recognizable because they could be related to humans or cute, cuddly creatures,” Butler said. “A connection is made between viewer and masked figure because both possess a spirit.”
Threads Tying Butler’s Work Together
This sense of spirituality, fantasy and mysticism surrounds all of Butler’s work, especially his sketches. In the installation, Butler takes this theme further, highlighting the soul and unknown history of the felt figures and the found objects that embellish them.
“The found objects contain a certain personality and history to them,” Butler said. “They can all be found on the sides of railroad tracks. But when seen in the context of the gallery, they take on new, fantastic lives. I like to think that when everyone leaves the building for the night, the figures let out a breath of air. Shadowy figures spring to life from their relaxed positions, and the silence of the white walls is broken.”
Butler said he hopes the setting and layout of his artwork will express an openness that emphasizes detachment, adventure, desire and discovery. Butler guides the viewer to experience the installation first as a removed participant, then to search for the adventure and alternate reality.
He said he leaves it to the imagination of the viewers, based on the material he has presented, to create their own stories, myths or histories.
Butler’s Artist Philosophy
As a contemporary artist, Butler does not want to control viewers. Instead, he presents his work and challenges them to appreciate it more than they may have appreciated other artwork — by literally becoming the art.
“To fully experience life, you can’t be stuck in the same routines,” Butler said. “You have to be adventurous and continually see things in new ways. In life, we are presented with questions. Should we keep doing what we are comfortable doing, or should we try new ways of thinking?”
Butler said he does not expect or want everyone to walk away from his work with the same understanding. Rather, he said he hopes they will experience the installation at different levels but ultimately grasp the larger themes of different levels of framing, searching and constructed space.
“Every adventure has a starting point,” Butler said. “In many ways, this installation piece is my starting point. I hope I can guide viewers to find their own adventures by sharing mine.”
The Wilmington area is expected to fully develop a local arts council by the end of 2011. Its predecessor, the Arts Council of Lower Cape Fear, was forced to close its doors in 2002 due to financial difficulties.
Nevertheless, a steering committee in collaboration with staff of the N.C. Arts Council has released a report that details the steps left to take to make a council a reality. Financial backers seem optimistic about the plans.
“We have so many people here who are passionate about their art, but there is no real channel for their creativity. It needs to be fostered,” said Kim Adams, of Wilmington’s Development Services department and a steering committee member.
Sayre's piece for the NC Museum of Art is made of concrete and steel bars. Photo courtesy of The North Carolina Museum of Art.
Last year, Chapel Hill officials proposed the idea of creating a “gateway sculpture” for the median of U.S. 15-501, but the state Department of Transportation quickly nixed the idea.
But Raleigh artist Thomas Sayre, who is known from creating a 24-foot sculpture for the NC Museum of Art, explained the value of public road art of the possibility of creating art that would not compromise drivers’ safety. After working for the past few month with Sayre, the Department of Transportation has developed a nine-age policy to allow the plans to move forward.
The state Board of Transportation is expected to approve the new guidelines next month.
The Carrabus Arts Council–who provide grassroots arts grants–has awarded $22,910 in grants to 11 community organizations for art programs or activities that enhance the quality of life in Carrabus County.
According to Noelle Rhodes Scott, president and CEO of the Cabarrus Arts Council, “It is this beautiful network of arts councils and Grassroots funding that has given North Carolina its great reputation as a state filled with the cultural arts.”
Art outings around Asheville
Posted on: October 23, 2010
The Asheville Citizen-Times has compiled a brief list of opportunities for art lovers in Asheville that will run from now until late November. Artists range from a North Carolina native to French painter Jean Claude Roy.
No Boundaries Inc. was founded in 1998 by Wilmington artists Pam Toll, Gayle Tustin and Dick Roberts to gather local artists with those from around the world to participate in an international artist colony for two weeks in November every two years in Wilmington and on Bald Head Island.
Previous participating artists have come from many countries including Macedonia, Bulgaria, Canada, Holland, France, Scotland, Germany, Iraq, Switzerland, Turkey, Italy, Denmark, Austria, Serbia, Peru, Argentina, and Wilmington’s Sister Cities in Barbados, China and England.
This year, the organization will host a 12-year retrospective showcase of the colony’s work at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
The following video showcases artwork that was produced in the colony in 2008.
North Carolina Arts 