A lot of “important” contemporary art addresses, more or less successfully, big concepts–sprawling social concerns, meta-ideas and epistemological considerations. This intellectualism can be good, but too often it leaves the viewer’s emotions untouched. Ideally, of course, Big Ideas would be accompanied by Big Feelings. But here in this imperfect world, sometimes small, everyday ideas are […]
Kate Dobbs Ariail
Bio: Kate Dobbs Ariail writes about the arts.
Posted inNews
Eco-gnomical
Of all of the art movements begun in the latter part of the 20th century, from abstract expressionism through the many -isms leading to late postmodernism, the most significant may very well turn out to be eco-art. Eco-art encompasses many types of output and ways of working, but generally speaking, environmental or eco-artists share an […]
Posted inArt
State of Clay
Pottery may be the oldest art, and almost certainly is the oldest art practiced in North Carolina, where people were making and decorating functional ware long before the arrival of the Europeans. Among white settlers there were potters who found the state’s many veins of clay well-suited to their craft. Some areas, especially the Catawba […]
Posted inGuides
Plenty and Grace
As so often happens, the movement that will save us from ourselves starts small, and is at first scourged and ridiculed. Thirty years ago, before the first Earth Day, the words “ecology” and “ecosystem” were hardly in common use. People laughed at organic gardeners, disparaged them for their labor-intensive ways. But organic gardening grew into […]
Posted inArt
Rewriting Macdonald-Wright
“It is strange how deeply colors seem to penetrate one, like scent,” said Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of George Eliot’s great 19th-century novel Middlemarch. Most of us are susceptible to the powers of color, and for some people, color is not just the wine of life, but the bread, the oil, the salt. Color is […]
Posted inArt
Quiet Agitation
The graphic arts have often been used to promote social change or as a direct medium for artistic commentary on deplorable social conditions. Unlike painting, which produces a unique object, printmaking by its very nature generates multiples to be spread among the people. The 20th century produced a number of artists who have exploited printmaking […]
Posted inArt
Make, Believe
When Dennis Weller, co-curator of the N.C. Museum of Art’s current photography show, Is Seeing Believing?, introduced the exhibition to some early visitors, he called it “dessert” after the big meal of the Ansel Adams show. If this is dessert, then Weller and co-curator Janis Goodman have put together a complex and subtly flavored one–several […]
Posted inArt
Dark Clouds of Joy
Piano Girl Calling Mary Lou Williams the most important female instrumentalist in the history of jazz is simply telling the truth–and missing the point. One peek at the revealing exhibit of Williams’ personal artifacts in the Duke University Museum of Art’s main gallery now through March 18 confirms that Williams was so much more than […]
Posted inGuides
Puff Mommy
Bears do it, snakes do it, even turtles and the frogs do it … Let’s do it, let’s–hibernate! Falling in love can come later. That’s for spring. This is winter, and there’s not much of nothing needs doing right now, sez me. Between late January and late February, all I really want to do is […]
Posted inArt
Small Pleasures
As The News & Observer recently pointed out when it named N.C. Museum of Art Director Larry Wheeler as Tar Heel of the Year, the visual arts are burgeoning in Triangle area. You would have to have been dead to have missed the uproar at the NCMA in the past year, and the various nonprofit […]