FALL 2021 SERIES
Richard Avedon – Carmen (Homage to Munkacsi), 1957
LIFE ON
THE STREETS
Photographers Richard Avedon,
Garry Winogrand, Jeff Wall
& the Urban Experience
DATE: Tue., October 5, 2021
TIME: 5:30 PM
LECTURER: Molly Gwinn
LOCATION: SCC’s McPherson Theater
What makes a photograph extraordinary? An image that finds its place in a museum gallery. A composition that elevates a tourist snapshot into a momentary truth of life unfolding, spontaneously, before our eyes. The best street photography accomplishes that transformation through the quick eye, hand, and intuition of master photographers who prowled the streets of Paris and New York after World War II. Paris is the acknowledged cradle of street photography—as it has been for other modernist breakthroughs in art, literature, and drama—and Henri Cartier-Bresson is considered the godfather. His phrase, “the decisive moment,” summarizes the goal of the street photographer, “to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.”
Americans Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander were masters of Cartier-Bresson’s style of capturing life at a “decisive moment”; they discovered their subjects by accident and photographed them quickly, up close and often at awkward moments. In contrast, Richard Avedon mimicked the mood of spontaneity in his fashion photographs for Harper’s Bazaar. In reality his vignettes of Paris after the war were carefully choreographed to evoke nostalgia for the city and desire for the glamour of couture.
LECTURER: Molly Gwinn is an art historian who has designed, led and presented in the Fine Arts Lecture Series since its beginning in 2006 and has offered a number of classes with the Center for Creative Living at Sandhills Community College. She earned her doctorate from Rutgers University and has taught at Rutgers, the School of Continuing & Professional Studies at New York University and the Dallas Museum of Art.
Mary Lee Bendolph – Blocks, strips, strings & half squares, 2005
VISUAL JAZZ
The History, Utility,
Beauty & Identity
of the American Quilt
DATE: Tue., October 26, 2021
TIME: 5:30 PM
LECTURER: Ellen Burke
LOCATION: SCC’s McPherson Theater
In 1998, collector Will Arnett, working on a history of African American vernacular art, came across a photo of a quilt made of work clothes draped over a wood pile. This photo led Arnett and his son, Matt, to Gee’s Bend, a remote and impoverished area of Alabama, and the quilts of Annie May Young. Arnett described the quilts as the “Visual equivalent of Jazz and the Blues.” In 2006, six of Young’s quilts along with 64 others from Gee’s Bend quilters became part of a traveling exhibit to major museums across the country. “Gee’s Bend’s eye-poppingly gorgeous quilts turn out to be some of the most miraculous works of modern art in America,” wrote New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman. “Imagine Matisse and Klee arising not from rarified Europe but from the caramel colored soil of the rural south.”
Join us as we examine quilts as art and the often unheralded artists who lovingly created them. Quilts are storytellers, guardians of traditions, voice to social issues, and literally the very fabric of the lives of the quilters. Our discussion will include the Pilgrim Roy collection, the largest private quilt collection in the country, the quilts of Gee’s Bend, Susana Allen Hunter, storyteller Faith Ringgold, the radical quilts of Rosie Lee Tompkins, Bisa Butler, and the AIDS Memorial Quilt NAMES Project.
LECTURER: Ellen Burke is an art educator with 37 years of experience as a studio instructor and fine and performing arts administrator. In addition to teaching in Massachusetts, she was an adjunct instructor in art education at the New Hampshire Art Institute. Since moving to Pinehurst she has presented art appreciation discussions at local galleries and teaches small group art lessons to children and adults. One of her passions is engaging students in careful observation, reflection and discussion of works of art.
COST: $35/person for each lecture (or $60/person for both lectures)
The lectures will be presented in Sandhills Community College’s McPherson Theater
(Across the breezeway from Owens Auditorium in Wellard Hall at 3395 Airport Rd., Pinehurst)
Space limited to 40 people. Reserve your space now with full payment at the Arts Council’s offices (Campbell House, 482 E. Connecticut Ave., So. Pines) or call 910-692-ARTS (2787).
