Call for Entries -- The Contemporary South Show, Visual Art Exchange, Raleigh, NC

Readers of this blog may want to know that there is now a Call for Entries into a juried show called Contemporary South, to be up from January 6-26, 2012 at the Visual Art Exchange in Raleigh, NC.

The VAE is Raleigh's community-supported non-profit creativity incubator and gallery that supports and educates emerging, professional and student artists.

This show is a multimedia show, and very much open to photography.  I would love to see photographers from parts of the South outside of central North Carolina get involved with this show.

There will be awards given, with first place receiving $500, second place receiving $250, and third place receiving $100.

All entries will be judged on the basis of jpeg submissions, which may be made either online or by CD.

Artists who are members of the VAE may submit up to two images for $10 entry fee per entry. Non-members of the VAE may also submit up to two images for $15 an entry.

The deadline for all entries to arrive at the VAE is December 1st, 2011.

For full information and online submissions, go HERE on the VAE website.

Jennifer Schwartz Goes on a Crusade

Jennifer Schwartz at the Jennifer Schwartz Gallery in Atlanta is really interested in encouraging people to become art collectors, and especially collectors of photography.

To that end, she has established a program called THE TEN, with its own website. The deal is, Jennifer chooses a photographer who creates a portfolio of ten images and Jennifer offers them for $250 each.

Or, as she puts it, "The Ten is a highly curated monthly online exhibit of ten photographic images.

"The artwork you see is only available on The Ten and will never be for sale in any other location.One size, one price, one opportunity to purchase. Ever.

"Collectors are guaranteed premium, signed photographs that have true value. A new Ten collection is unveiled on the tenth of each month. The editions are relatively small (25), the price is relatively low ($250), and the collectibility is incredibly high."

Artists featured so far through THE TEN program include Lori Vrba, Mikael Kennedy, Elizabeth Fleming, Laura Griffin, and Rachel Barrett. Vrba and Griffin are Southerners, so worthy of our special attention.

OK, so that's the Story on THE TEN. But now Jennifer has decided to take the show on the road.

She is going on a crusade. She plans to get a van, paint it white, and in the spring of 2013, she will go on a ten week, ten city tour of the USA, selling her art from the back of the van and talking to people about buying original art.

To fund this, she's got a KickStarter campaign going on, and a video, also blog entries describing how the whole thing is going.

And she has talked Lori Vrba into going with her part of the way, and to donating five 8x8 signed silver gelatin prints of her image "Rebecca's Palm" to the cause as premiums for the campaign.

This is all a hoot, as we say down here, and worthy of your attention and support, if you are able.

I plan to make a pledge as I am able, and be on the lookout for a white van with Jennifer and Lori if in their travels they make it up this way. 

Museum Shows of Interest to Southern Photographers

Three items of interest:

1. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC has opened (as of October 2nd) a major show of work by Harry Callahan called Harry Callahan at 100. The show is up through March 4th, 2012.

The show celebrates the 100th anniversary of Callahan's birth and includes over 100 photographs that document Callahan's long career, "from its genesis in Detroit in the early 1940s and its flowering in Chicago in the late 1940s and 1950s to its maturation in Providence and Atlanta from the 1960s through the 1990s."

"Throughout his long career," the National Gallery writes, Callahan "repeatedly found new ways of looking at and presenting the world in photographs that are elegant, visually daring, and highly experimental."

Harry Callahan is a Southern photographer by adoption, having spent a number of years toward the end of his life living and photographing in Atlanta, making a large body of work there, including the image "Ansley Park, Atlanta, (1992)" above.

More on the show here, from Artfixdaily.

2. The Turchin Center for the Visual Arts at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, is having a show of work by John Scarlata called Living in the Light.

Scarlata was a nationally and internationally exhibited and collected photographer who was also a distinguished educator.From 1979 until 1999, he taught at Virginia Intermont College in Bristol, Virginia. From 1999 until his death in 2010, he served as the chair of the photography program at Appalachian State University.

Scarlata's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including recent shows in Cuba and China.

This is a retrospective of Scarlata's work that was up last year at the Wellington Gray Gallery at East Carolina University in Greenville and is now up at the other end of North Carolina through January 21st, 2012.

There will be a panel discussion of  Scarlata's work on November 3rd, 2011 at 7:30 in the Turchin Center featuring Jay Phyfer (Professor of photography and digital imaging, Virginia Intermont College), Gil Leebrick (Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Wellington B. Gray Gallery, East Carolina University), Pac McLaurin (PhotographyDepartment, Appalachian State University) Joe Champagne (Professor of Photography & Digital Imaging Virginia Intermont College), Jackie Leebrick, Ben Garfinkle (Oakland California) and Tom Braswell (Photographer and InterimGallery Director from Wellington B. Gray Gallery, East Carolina University).

More on the panel here. 

3. The Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, SC will open a show on October 28th, 2011 called Masters in Photography, which will be up through January 8th, 2012.

The Gibbes says this show "features twentieth-century, masters of photography selected from the Gibbes permanent collection and local private collections including works by Alfred Stieglitz, Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Berenice Abbott, and many more."

Some Brief Notes -- Page and Dudik

Two short notes on important items of interest:

1. Susan Harbage Page's powerful work on the Texas/Mexican Border is now up at the Flanders Gallery here in Raleigh, through November 1st, 2011.

We got to the opening a couple of weeks ago and met Susan and had a great talk about her work. 

Here is a thoughtful review of the show, from the NCARTBlog, written by Matt Zigler.

2. Eliot Dudik's portfolio Road Ends in Water is featured on the website The Great Leap Sideways, along with an interview with Eliot.

The Great Leap Sideways started as a tumblr blog, here. But its now an online photography gallery, with lots of interesting images, including Eliot's. 

Panel on Alan Cohen at the Gregg Museum

A distinguished panel of photographers will discuss the work of Alan Cohen at the Gregg Museum of Art and Design, on the NC State campus, on Thursday, October 27th, 2011, at 6:00 pm.

Cohen has over 150 images up in the Gregg, in a major career retrospective for this distinguished photographer who was born in North Carolina and studied at NC State University. The show is up through December 17th, 2011.

The show is called Earth with Meaning, for Cohen in these images meditates on the contemporary world with all its scars, especially attending to places marked by history or the processes of natural events, pointing his camera downward to record the exact spots that permeate memory.

In abstracted close-ups, Cohen challenges viewers to consider the battlegrounds of World War I, the death camps of Germany, the silenced dissidents of Oaxaca, and the subtle yet significant changes reflected in the streets of Berlin before and after the Wall came down. Each of these stories is told with great simplicity and gravity through the powerful language of black and white photography.

The topic of the discussion on the 27th is Image and Meaning: Challenging History & Photography.

Panelists include a range of major figures in the world of photography.

Among them are

Brooks Jensen is co-founder, publisher and editor of the journal LensWork one of today’s most respected and important periodicals in fine art photography, and is author of the best-selling Letting Go of the Camera: Essays on Photography, and Creative Life and Single Exposures: Random Observations on Art, Photography and Creativity.

Under Jensen's leadership, LensWork Publishing has become a leader in multimedia and digital media publishing with LensWork Extended, a PDF-based, media-rich expanded version of the magazine. Jensen lives and works in Anacortes, Washington.

Mary Shannon Johnstone is Associate Professor of Art at Meredith College in Raleigh. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and MFA in photography from Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the recipient of numerous awards for her photography, including Pause, To Begin, the Critical Mass Top 50 award in both 2009 and 2010 and Honorable Mention in Lens Culture’s 2010 International Exposure Awards.

Frank Konhaus is founder and principal of KONTEK Systems, Inc. He and his wife Ellen Cassilly direct an artist residency and exhibition program at Cassilhaus, their home in Orange County. In 2006 he brought French photographer and installation artist Georges Rousse to North Carolina and became executive producer of the resulting film, Bending Space: Georges Rousse and the Durham Project. Konhaus has served on various boards and committees for the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke, is active in the Friends of Photography at the NCMA, and is a passionate collector of contemporary photography.

Tom Rankin is Director of the Center for Documentary Studies and Professor of the Practice of Art and Documentary Studies at Duke University. A native of Kentucky, his books include Sacred Space:  Photographs from the Mississippi Delta (1993 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Photography); Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre:  Photographs of a River Life; Faulkner's World:  The Photographs of Martin J. Dain; and Local Heroes Changing America: Indivisible.   

Allen Thomas, Jr. is the Business Manager of Thomas & Farris, PA, and a major collector of contemporary photography. He is the current Chair of CAM Raleigh’s Foundation Board, and a member of North Carolina Museum of Art Board of Trustees. The NCMA’s 2005 exhibition In Focus, based on photographic works Thomas had gathered, was the first show in the museum’s history created from a single collection. The 2009 inaugural exhibition at the new Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, VA, was Rethinking Landscape, also a solo collection show.

Burk Uzzle was born in Raleigh and just 17 when he became a staff photographer for the News & Observer. At 23 he became the youngest photographer ever hired by LIFE Magazine, and then went on to a 15 year membership in Magnum Photos, the international photographers co-operative, where he served for two years as its president before leaving in 1983. His solo museum exhibitions include the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the International Center of Photography in New York. Books of his work include Landscapes, All American, Progress Report on Civilization, and A Family Named Spot.

Yours truly John N Wall, is the chair of this panel, and the usual things I say about myself are that I am a Professor of English Literature at NC State and a documentary and fine art photographer who has exhibited his work in solo and group shows across North Carolina and from Vermont to Florida and from Texas to California. I teach photography at the Raleigh Institute of Contemporary Art and write about Southern photography at www.southphotography.blogspot.com.

Come join us on the 27th!