Jessi Rae Morton, News Editor
Sheryl Oring’s I Wish To Say National Tour
Presented by the Office of Intercultural Engagement for Hispanic Heritage Month
At the Taylor Garden Fountain near EUC
Sept. 17, 2024, at 3 p.m.
From the event page:
Twenty years ago, artist Sheryl Oring embarked on a mission with a simple yet profound tool: a manual typewriter. Her project, I Wish to Say, invited people to express their thoughts directly to the U.S. president. Oring, dressed as a 1960s secretary, created a public office where she typed participants’ messages verbatim onto postcards. Each original was sent to the White House, while a carbon copy was preserved for her archive.
To date, Oring has typed 4,314 postcards across hundreds of locations in the United States, from parks and town squares to college campuses and festivals. This fall she is visiting university campuses, parks, and libraries across the country to encourage civic participation in this critical election. Oring, formerly a professor in the UNCG School of Art, will be on the UNCG campus during Hispanic Heritage Month. Join her in this powerful act of civic engagement, and make your voice heard!
How Do You Know If Fish Are Happy?
An exhibition by Jan-Ru Wan
Gatewood Gallery on the campus of UNCG
Sept. 5 – Oct. 8, 2024
Reception: Sept. 18 at 4 p.m., with the artist talk starting at 4:30 p.m.
Margaret and Bill Benjamin Auditorium
Thursday, Sept. 26, from 5 to 7:30 p.m.
From the event webpage:
Join us for a screening of the film Crip Camp, with light refreshments served in the Sculpture Courtyard before the film.
This event is the first of the Crip* Film Series. The program emerged from conversations with the Crip* Advisory Committee, whose members expressed the desire to have alternate media to complement the works on view. The films were chosen from suggestions by the Advisory Committee, as well as research by WAM staff.
Co-hosted by the UNCG Ability Ambassadors Association. Free and open to all.
Currently on Exhibit at the Weatherspoon Art Museum
Making Connections: Art, Place, and Relationships
2nd Floor: The Gregory D. Ivy Gallery, Weatherspoon Guild Gallery, and Gallery 6
Sept. 14, 2024 – July 5, 2025
Following the success last academic year of the collection exhibition, Making Room: Familiar Art, New Stories is Making Connections: Art, Place, and Relationships. Building on the museum’s desire to engage its audiences in more personal and meaningful ways, this installation of works from the collection showcases the Weatherspoon as an academic museum with deep connections to and relationships with its campus, Greensboro, and broader communities.
Back in 1941, the Weatherspoon was founded with the goal of serving as a teaching resource specifically for UNCG’s department of art. Over the course of its 80+ years, the museum’s mission has expanded to serve many more. Objects included in this iteration of collection highlights showcase the Weatherspoon’s relationship over the years with various art collectors, UNCG fine art alumni and faculty, Greensboro community leaders, artists who taught at Black Mountain College and those who exhibited in the museum’s signature exhibition, Art on Paper, as well as a few of the many UNCG departments that currently incorporate the museum’s collection into their pedagogy.
Crip* | Artists Engage with Disability
2nd Floor: The Bob & Lissa Shelley McDowell Gallery
Sept. 7, 2024 – April 26, 2025
This group exhibition features contemporary artists who engage with experiences and understandings of disability. They do so by thinking about the ways that one’s personal experience of disability always intersects with other aspects of their life. Some of the artists in the show identify as disabled and some do not, but each has a relationship to at least one identity that is not perceived as normal. Too often, such artists are expected to “perform” these identities by making images of themselves. While those images can help diversify the art world, they can also pigeonhole artists, flatten our interpretations of their work, and make the distinctions between “normal” and “not-normal” more rigid.
To counter these tendencies, the artists in Crip* pay attention to concepts that exist beyond the reach of simplified categories, and they celebrate the rich and complex knowledge gained through lived experiences that are shaped by any number of overlapping personal factors—among them ability, disability, race, gender, sexuality, location, community, and economics. Collectively, their work encourages us to fracture and reassemble the ways in which we think about who we are.
Artists whose work is featured in the exhibition include Liz Barr, Emilie Gossiaux, Max Guy, Christopher Robert Jones, Carly Mandel, Darin Martin, Alison O’Daniel, Berenice Olmedo, Carmen Papalia, Brontez Purnell, Finnegan Shannon, Heather Kai Smith, and Alex Dolores Salerno.
Crip* is curated by Liza Sylvestre and co-organized by Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois Chicago. Support provided by the Presidential Initiative: Expanding the Impact of the Arts and Humanities, and by the James and Beth Armsey Fund. The Weatherspoon Art Museum’s installation is generously supported by Kristen and Marc Magod/The Zeist Foundation.
THE CAROLINIAN 