News & Events

UNC Asheville's Craft Studies Initiative Hosts "Meet the Maker" Lecture Series

September 3, 2010

UNC Asheville’s Craft Studies Initiative will launch its fall lecture series, “Meet the Maker: Conversations of Meaning with Craftspeople,” this month. The series introduces students and community members to individual craftspeople, artists and designers through meaningful conversations and demonstrations.

Five lectures will be held on the UNC Asheville campus between September 9 and December 7. All are free and open to the public.

-- Thursday, Sept. 9: Noted landscape painter Robert Johnson will present a slide show and discuss his work at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 9, at Owen Hall, room 302. Johnson is a visual storyteller whose interest in sacred places and man's connection to the natural world are reflected in his rich works.

His work has been exhibited in many museums, including the North Carolina Museum of Art, Morris Museum of Art in Georgia, Chrysler Art Museum in Virginia, and the Asheville Art Museum. Johnson's series, "Eight Views of Mt. Pisgah," is permanently installed in UNC Asheville's Ramsey Library. He holds a master of fine arts degree from Mills College in California.

-- Thursday, Sept. 16: Textile artist Victoria Hyatt Sowers will speak at 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 16, at UNC Asheville's Intercultural Center, Highsmith University Union, room 114. Sowers learned to weave from her mother, Emily Hyatt, and together they formed Sandy Creek Weavers, where they specialize in rugs, tapestries and memorial weavings. Their work has been featured in Southern Living and Handwoven magazines.

Sowers' talk is part of her week-long campus residency, where she will facilitate the weaving of a fabric "time capsule." Her work will be on display from September 10 through October 6 in the Highsmith Gallery, located on the ground floor of Highsmith University Union.

-- Thursday, Oct. 7: Studio furniture maker Gail Fredell will discuss her work at 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 7, at Owen Hall, room 302. Frendell, who recently moved to Asheville, is completing a number of projects that range in scale and context from residential, functional furniture to public sculpture, for both interior spaces and landscape settings.

Fredell has taught at Penland School of Crafts, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine, and served as the director of the furniture program at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado. Her work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum of California, Stanford University Memorial Chapel and the AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park. She will be participating in "The Furniture Divas" exhibition at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Mass. in 2011.

--Tuesday, Nov. 16: New York–based sculptor Arnie Zimmerman will discuss his work at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 16, in Owen Hall, room 302. Zimmerman is considered to be one of the most significant contemporary artists working in ceramics today. Known early in his career for architecture-scale carved vessels, he is now well-known for his intricate and vast figurative ceramic installations. Zimmerman's "Inner City" installation, most recently on view at the Rhode Island School of Design, is made up of 150 figurative and architectural elements.

Zimmerman has been featured in American Craft and American Ceramics magazines. His work is in a number of private and public collections, including the Museum of Art and Design in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Contemporary Art Center in Honolulu, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Nacional Museu do Azulejo in Portugal, the Frost Art Museum in Miami, the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, the National Museum of American Art, and Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park in Japan.

-- Tuesday, Dec. 7: Fred Horowitz, co-author of "Josef Albers: To Open Eyes," will speak at 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 7, in Owen Hall, room 237. "To Open Eyes" chronicles Josef Albers' life in teaching, from his first years in the Bauhaus in prewar Germany, to Black Mountain College in the 1930s and 1940s, and then at Yale in the 1950s. Albers was an internationally eminent artist, teacher, and design and color theorist, and his work has had wide influence on generations of artists, architects and designers.

Horowitz, who studied with Albers at Yale, later taught at the University of Michigan School of Design and Washtenaw Community College. He will be in Asheville to teach a weekend workshop based on the Albers Color Course, as designed and perfected by the legendary teacher at Black Mountain College. This workshop is co-sponsored by the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.

For more information about this series, call 828/250-2392 or go to www2.unca.edu/craftcampus/mtm.htm on the Web.