Links to the rest of the INDY’s 2024 Fall Arts preview can be found here.
Reneesha McCoy: Capsule | Peel Gallery, Carrboro | Aug. 21–Sep. 29
Wildly colorful bodies—made up of rake-shaped arms, elastic breasts, protruding nipples—cram and contour into the frames of Reneesha McCoy’s astonishing work. A self-taught artist, McCoy (also known as rnwulf) pursued a painting career after giving birth to her first child, and her work reflects the overwhelming, animating physicality of motherhood as well as the struggle of the self to exist outside that container. McCoy is an exceptionally gifted artist, and her paintings, at once conceptual and earthy, brim with feeling. The show began in late August but has a September 13 opening reception, timed to the Second Friday ArtWalk, that includes a Super G Print Lab, refreshments, and live music. —SE
The year 2016 may largely be remembered by its election, but another dark, era-defining event happened earlier that year: a working group of scientists convened in Norway officially declared, after years of deliberation, that we are living in a new geologic epoch distinct from the Holocene. Although the fact of climate change has been known for some time, distinguishing one epoch from the next, ours—the Anthropocene, which began around 1950 and is defined by carbon emissions and nuclear testing fallout, among other things—gives shape to that change.
The damage is shocking and not, by the prevailing curatorial Instagram ethos of our time, “aesthetic,” but as climate journalist Tatiana Schlossberg writes in a review of the exhibition catalog, “Looking is hard; not looking will end up being harder.” Second Nature is the first major exhibition of contemporary photography to look at the Anthropocene head-on; we’re lucky to have it right in front of us. —SE
Chanelle Allesandre: In a sense / In essence | LUMP Gallery, Raleigh | Sep. 7–Oct. 27
The days are contracting; fall is nigh. Maybe you’ve noticed your nervous system longing to let down its guard? Raleigh’s intimate LUMP Gallery invites viewers to step out of the sun and into an installation by multidisciplinary artist Chanelle Allesandre that weaves together “sound, flower essences, 35mm photography, poetry, and the live sculpting of an atavistic harp.” Collaborators Katie Addada Shlon and Ryan Martin join in, as do other local sound artists in performances that extend each weekend throughout the duration of September and October. LUMP’s shows tend to have some element of mystery to them and In a sense / In essence is no different, but the changing of the seasons is as apt a time as any to embrace ambiguity and take some time to listen. —SE
Craven Allen Gallery has a quote from David Hockney—“If art isn’t playful, it’s nothing”—on the web page for Durham artist Rachel Campbell’s exhibition What You See From Here. It’s a congruous pairing. Like the populist Hockney, Campbell is a devout colorist and two-dimensional painter of everyday scenes: suburban lawns, hanging plants, a tablescape. Humans are usually absent from the New Zealand–born artist’s work, but as Campbell notes in an artist’s statement, “cherished details” (a leash, a coffee cup) give the impression that someone has just exited the frame, extending viewers playful permission to fill in their own associative blanks. —SE
J. D. Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president, has admitted to being “plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures,” including those whose adherents imagine themselves as righteous warriors fighting to protect “western civilization” from a series of existential threats. Art history, being infinitely wiser than Vance and his network of paranoid white supremacists, attests to the fact that culture is born in translation and exchange across borders: Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso found inspiration in African art; early Greek sculptors learned from their Egyptian counterparts; the examples are endless.
From this perspective, the North Carolina Museum of Art’s upcoming exhibition Venice and the Ottoman Empire offers, strangely enough, a timely corrective to some of the most ahistorical impulses in American politics. As this cross-cultural exhibition demonstrates, the Ottoman Empire and medieval Venice were Mediterranean superpowers whose artistic traditions can only be truly understood together. The story of their cultural exchange is told, in this three-month exhibit, through 190 pieces drawn from the “vast collections of Venice’s storied civic museums.” —TH
Maya Freelon: Whippersnappers | Historic Stagville, Durham | Nov. 16, 2024–Jan. 17, 2025
Historic Stagville, located about 20 minutes north of downtown Durham, was once one of the largest plantations in North Carolina. This fall, Stagville—once a site where more than 900 people were enslaved between 1771 and 1865—will feature an interactive installation by artist and educator Maya Freelon.
The installation includes 20 photographs of enslaved children, whose portraits are overlaid with swirls of colors and texture using Freelon’s “bleeding” tissue technique, as if emerging from some wrinkle in time.
Freelon is one of two 2024 Artist/Scholars in Residence at the Library of Congress, from where these photographs are sourced. This powerful archival tribute, as Freelon says, is a way to “shine a light on a subject often ignored and reclaim a space that was once used to disempower and oppress.” Exhibition hours at the historic site may vary, but it’s well worth the research and the drive—Freelon’s captivating work is both an invitation and an imperative. —SE
Cassilhaus permanent collection Cassilhaus, Durham | Ongoing
Nestled into a wooded hillside west of Durham, Cassilhaus is a unique art space dreamed up, designed, and realized by architect Ellen Cassilly and retired AV designer Frank Konhaus. The structure, itself a work of art, includes a home for Cassilly and Konhaus (Cassilhaus is a portmanteau of their names); exhibition space for a photography-focused permanent collection boasting works by Sally Mann and Alec Soth, among others; and an attached guesthouse/studio that hosts a multidisciplinary residency program.
This fall, the studio is home to Durham quilter and ceramicist Kimberly Pierce Cartwright. In the past, the residency has hosted poets, choreographers, and painters. The gallery equivalent of a really good restaurant with a tiny dining room, Cassilhaus has limited capacity and requires RSVPs. Join the mailing list: it’s the only way to hear about upcoming events and programming. —TH
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