Artist Trevor Paglen, whose work we showed in "Skyward" several years ago, is having a mid-career survey at the Smithsonian.

2018 WAMA Annual Meeting and Members' Party. Photo: Carolyn de Berry, 2018.

Photo: Carolyn de Berry, 2018.

Check out this video short about the old McIver building on campus, which was the former home to the Weatherspoon Gallery prior to 1989. The video features former WAM preparator Jack Stratton talking about his time there as an art student back in the 1970s. https://youtu.be/H9ClcmqJaIk #UNCG

This week's N&R article about the history of the McIver Building at UNCG…along with the Weatherspoon’s part in that history: http://www.greensboro.com/news/schools/a-short-history-of-the-mciver-building-both-of-them/article_3f640fe4-7a39-557d-9771-88c921e5d410.html Here is a little added history about a proposed alternate building design that didn’t quite happen back in the 1950s. This is an excerpt from the catalog “Gregory D. Ivy: Making North Carolina Modern” (Weatherspoon Art Museum, 2005), by Will South. [Note: Gregory Ivy started the art department at Woman’s College (now UNCG) and was the founder of the Weatherspoon Art Gallery (now Museum) back in 1941.] << The sum of Gregory Ivy’s artistic beliefs, however, came together not in painting or sculpture but rather in architecture or, more correctly, in an architectural plan. Already in the early 1950s, as the McIver Building began to deteriorate and the art department swelled against its walls, Ivy knew there would be an imminent need for a new home for the arts on campus. Drawing on his still enormous reserves of energy, his deep knowledge of Bauhaus tenets, and his own commitment to art as a way of thinking about living, Ivy decided that all the arts should come together in one place on campus in an integrated, functional, and, ultimately, beautifully designed facility. The “Carolinian” reported on Ivy’s design for such a structure (see image) in January 1954: “A brook, dirt floors, and a huge plastic dome are among Mr. Gregory Ivy’s plans for a new, much-needed Fine Arts Building. The new structure, estimated to cost about a million dollars, will be located on West Market Street, about two blocks form Tate St. It will include not only the art department, but part of the humanities, theater and music departments. It will have three auditoriums, an outdoor theater, a conventional indoor stage to seat about 350, and a circular lecture hall. The last will be a new type of “theater in the round.” Instead of the stage turning for change of scenery, the audience would have revolving seats that would permit them to turn. There will be adequate work space for students to exercise their creative talents, as well as room for those in the history and interpretation of art. Studios, work rooms, and storage space will help provide a complete program for students interested in theater. The brook, one of Mr. Ivy’s novel ideas for the building, will be the same stream that now runs through the site. It will not be touched and will run through the first floor. The dirt floors will not be included throughout; and bare earth will appear only along the stream. These features are actually economical, Mr. Ivy pointed out.” In 1954 Ivy’s design was visionary. It would still be so today. To have art faculty, students, and the public flowing freely from one facet of the arts into another—from a theater performance into the Weatherspoon, for example—and to experience nature inside as well as out—well, Woman’s College had seen nothing like this. It never would. The state legislature was to approve the budget in 1955, construction was slated to begin in 1956, and the new fine arts complex would open in 1962. That budget, and Ivy’s plans, was never approved. A new multipurpose building—a square, singular, and unintegrated with its environment as it could possibly be—was designed and built instead. Allen W. Release, historian of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, describes the reception to the new McIver: “Controversy came aplenty with the new building. A box-like contemporary building in red brick and gray stone, it featured an abstract lighted mural over the main entrance that offended traditionalists. At the same time, occupants compared its Spartan concrete block interior to a penitentiary. Randall Jarrell called it the Thunderbird Motel. Now, when it was too late, critics waxed nostalgic over the solid, massive, traditional McIver Building that was no more.” >> Image: Gregory Ivy, design of new arts center, from the “Carolinian,” 1954.

Join us this summer at WAM!

Submissions are NOW open for “Art on Paper 2019: The 45th Exhibition” beginning TODAY…Tuesday, May 1, 2018. Visit our submittable page here: https://weatherspoonartmuseum.submittable.com/submit The deadline for submissions is July 6, 2018. Artists will be notified of their status by September 21, 2018. Email questions to: WAMaop@uncg.edu Please share! “Art on Paper 2019: The 45th Exhibition” February 2 - June 9, 2019 “Art on Paper” (AOP) celebrates contemporary art in which the use of paper—either as surface or material—is a primary concern. Since 1965 the Weatherspoon’s AOP exhibition has charted a history of contemporary art through outstanding works on paper. “Art on Paper” offers community members the exciting opportunity to purchase art, as all works in the show are for sale. Proceeds go directly to the artists and their galleries. The Dillard Fund and xpedx have provided long-standing support for the Weatherspoon to acquire selections from each AOP exhibition for The Dillard Collection of Art on Paper, which now numbers over 575 examples. The collection includes noteworthy and established artists such as Robert Smithson, Howardena Pindell, Joseph Stella, Louise Bourgeois, and Lee Krasner. Contemporary artists added to the collection include Diana al-Hadid, Amy Cutler, Rosemarie Fiore, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Saya Woolfalk. The exhibition is organized by Elaine D. Gustafson, Curator of Collections at the Weatherspoon, with support from special exhibition sponsors Lisa and Willie Bullock, and purchases supported by The Dillard Fund. Image: “Art on Paper 2017” opening; photo: YoungDoo M. Carey, 2017. #UNCG #NCarts #sogso #artonpaper UNCG College of Visual and Performing Arts UNC Greensboro UNCG Alumni Association University Libraries UNCG Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) GreenHill Elsewhere North Carolina Museum of Art NCMA Teachers University of North Carolina School of the Arts Ackland Art Museum, UNC-Chapel Hill Go Triad Triad City Beat Triangle ArtWorks ART PAPERS Hyperallergic Blouin Artinfo The Brooklyn Rail Artforum Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University Raleigh Arts The Carrack Spectre-Arts The Durham Art Guild Durham Arts Council LIGHT: Art + Design The Mint Museum Blue Spiral 1 Taubman Museum of Art Relish: A Spicy Mix Indy Week 1708 Gallery Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU Artspace

The week ahead at the Weatherspoon Art Museum... https://secure.campaigner.com/CSB/public/archive.aspx?args=MjU5NzI4NTM%3d Image: Catherine Murphy, "Ogden Avenue", 1977. Weatherspoon Art Museum; Museum purchase, 1977. From the exhibition "City, Village, Exurbia: Prints and Drawings from the Collection" on view at WAM until August 26, 2018. #UNCG

Free jazz concert at WAM this Saturday, April 28, 2-3pm with teens from the Glen Haven and Legacy Crossing communities. Jazz for New North Carolinians is a collaborative effort between the Jazz Studies department at UNCG and the Center for New North Carolinians. The program joins teens from two local refugee community centers with music majors at UNCG for private lessons and band rehearsals. #uncgarts #uncg, @uncg, @cnnc.uncg

Upcoming at the Weatherspoon... https://secure.campaigner.com/CSB/public/archive.aspx?args=MjU4MTU4Njk%3d #UNCG

REMINDER! Today, Tuesday, April 10 @ 12 noon... Noon @ the 'Spoon Public Tour of the exhibition "Carol Cole: Cast a Clear Light"; on view Mar 3 - Jun 17, 2018. Our 20-minute Noon @ the 'Spoon tour is a fun way to explore a new exhibition during your lunch break. Offered the second Tuesday of the month. Docent Marge Cromer leads this month's tour. Free and open to the public. Carol Cole states this belief with conviction and demonstrates it with passion. For the past forty years, she has been creating and collecting work that affirms our human need for nurture, our shared vulnerabilities, and our potential for living generously. She calls this art humanist, and finds in it important antidotes to the universal ills of greed, neglect, and selfishness. As an artist, Cole’s work is anchored in feminism, and she has developed a body of work that uses a single female breast as an icon of nurture. In multiple media, she morphs and transforms that icon from recognizable to abstract and back again. Each iteration employs the motif inventively to create images by turns poignant, witty, and irreverent. Image: Carol Cole, "Circles in Mass" from the series "The Glass Menagerie for Tennessee Williams", 1977. Colored pencil on paper, 29 x 23 in. Courtesy of the artist. #UNCG