Writing About Art: A Panel Discussion
Regional arts writers discuss art journalism on March 20th
The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (BMCM+AC) welcomes five arts writers to talk about the state of the field and the issues of the day on Sunday, March 20th at 3:00 p.m. at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in downtown Asheville. This event is presented in conjunction with the exhibition In Site: Late Works by Irwin Kremen on view until June 4, 2011.
PANEL DISCUSSION
Sunday, March 20, 3:00 p.m.
Writing About Art: A Panel Discussion with Jerry Cullum, Ursula Gullow, Cinqué Hicks and Tom Patterson. Moderator: Arnold Wengrow
Four arts writers from Atlanta, Winston-Salem and Asheville shed light on the issues they see facing the field of art journalism. With blogs and online media beginning to lay claim to a larger and larger audience, is there any hope for print journalism? How does one find the balance between words, images, objects and ideas?
$7 / $5 BMCM+AC members + students w/ID
Participant Bios
Jerry Cullum has been Senior Editor of ART PAPERS Magazine since 1997, having previously served as Associate Editor since 1984. He has also served as an art critic for the Atlanta Journal and Constirution since 1988, and as a regular contributor to ARTnews and Art in America since 1998, and as freelance critic for other publications, including Sculpture, since 1989.Cullum holds a B.A. in Literature from Eckerd College; an M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of California Santa Barbara, and a Ph.D. from the Institute of the Liberal Arts, Emory University. His poems, collected in two chapbooks and recorded on an audio CD, have appeared in Poetry (Chicago), Midwest Quaterly, and other magazines. Cullum has curated exhibitions for the Telfaire Museum of Arts, Georgia State University, Georgia Perimeter College, the Marietta-Cobb Museum of Art, and private venues, and co-curated an exhibition of Atlanta artists which toured Germany and England in 1996. Cullum has taught at Emory University and the Atlanta College of Art, and served as a Visiting Critic at New castle on Tyne, U.K., and in Shreveport and Alexandria, Louisiana. He regularly lectures and serves as a panelist on contemporary art and related issues.
Ursula Gullow was born in upstate NY and graduated from SUNY New Paltz in 1994 with a BA in Sociology. She has lived in Minneapolis, MN and Seattle, WA where she received an AA in Graphic Design and Illustration from Seattle Central Community College in 2001. A painter, Gullow has exhibited her work nationally and regionally for nearly 10 years. In 2005 she completed an artist residency with the Gil Society in Akureyri, Iceland. She received a grant in 2009 from the Asheville Area Arts Council in support of her public access television show, Art Seen Asheville. Currently she teaches painting and design classes at AB Tech, and is a contributing arts writer for The Mountain Xpress and Verve Magazine. Her blog, artseenasheville.blogspot.com documents local art happenings as well as national and international artists.
Cinqué Hicks is an arts writer and cultural analyst. From 2003 to 2005 he edited and produced the resource blog Electric Skin: Black Art and Technoculture News from the Front Lines. Art in America named Electric Skin one of 10 art blogs most worth daily reading. He founded Code Z, an online daily news magazine in 2006. He is currently visual arts critic and arts writer for Creative Loafing in Atlanta. He received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a master’s in digital media from Georgia Tech where he researched creative ecologies and digital media public art.
Tom Patterson has been writing about contemporary art for more than twenty-five years. His first forays into art journalism and criticism appeared in the early 1980s in Brown’s Guide to Georgia magazine and Art Papers, both headquartered in Atlanta, where he lived during the formative stages of his writing career. Patterson is most widely known for his lavishly color-illustrated biographies of Georgia visionaries Howard Finster and Eddie Owens Martin (Howard Finster: Stranger from Another World, Abbeville Press; and St. EOM in The Land of Pasaquan, Jargon Society), both published in the late 1980s. Since then he has written extensively on the lives and work of other artists operating with relative autonomy on the margins of the academic art system. He is also the author of Contemporary Folk Art: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Watson-Guptill Publications, New York, 2001). His writings on contemporary art and artists have appeared in national and interntional art magazines including afterimage, American Ceramics, American Craft, ARTnews, BOMB, Folk Art, New Art Examiner, and Public Art Review. He augments his art criticism and other writing by working as an independent curator, organizing group and solo exhibitions for institutions including the American Visionary Art Museum, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Virginia Commonwealth University’s Anderson Gallery, the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning (Queens, NY), the Terra Museum of American Art (Chicago), Winston-Salem State University’s Diggs Gallery and the Center on Contemporary Art (Seattle). Patterson is a former editor of the Arts Journal, a multi-disciplinary arts tabloid based in Asheville, and ARTVU, a regional arts periodical based in Winston-Salem. Since the late 1980s he has written regularly about visual art for the Winston-Salem Journal. From 1992 to 1998 he did the same for the Charlotte Observer, and he also writes about art on occasion for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He is a former U.S. editor of Raw Vision, the London-based international journal of outsider art, and currently serves as a U.S. editorial contributor to that magazine.
Moderator: Arnold Wengrow is a theatre director and writer who covers arts and travel from his home in Asheville, North Carolina. He specializes in writing about contemporary theatre design and is a contributing editor of Theatre Design and Technology, the Journal of the United States Institute for Theatre Technology. He wrote the catalog essay for Mostly British: Scene and Costume Design of the 20th Century: Tobin Collection of Theatre Arts at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas,in 2002 and was guest curator and catalog author for Observe and Show: The Theatre Art of Michael Annals at the Theatre Museum of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2003. He founded the theatre program at the University of North Carolina at Asheville in 1970 and retired as Professor Emeritus of Drama in 1998. His articles have appeared in Entertainment Design, U.S. Airways Magazine, British Heritage, and The Spectator. He frequently writes about the arts for the Asheville Citizen-Times.
