In Site: Late Works by Irwin Kremen
February 18 – June 4, 2011
Irwin Kremen
mememormee, No.4, 1995
paper and acrylic
7 5/16 x 4 3/8 in. (18.6 x 11.1 cm.)
Courtesy of the artist.
“I do not think of myself simply as a collagist, but as a painter who paints with paper.” Irwin Kremen
The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (BMCM+AC) presents the new exhibition In Site: Late Works by Irwin Kremen opening Feb. 18, 2011 from 5:30-7:30 p.m. and extending through June 4, 2011.There will be a gallery talk by the artist at 11:00am on Sat., Feb. 19th. The exhibition will primarily focus on recent collages by this master collagist but will also include a selection of his sculptures. A 48-page color catalogue will accompany the exhibition with an essay by the artist. This exhibition is organized by the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center located at 56 Broadway in downtown Asheville, NC. After it closes here, the show will travel to The Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA.
Irwin Kremen was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1925. He attended Northwestern University from 1942-45. Working as a reporter and columnist for a local daily newspaper in New York City, five months after he had quit studying journalism at Northwestern University, Irwin Kremen came across an article featuring Black Mountain College. Without hesitation, he boarded a train and joined this small, avant-garde community flourishing in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Kremen recalls that he “sought fresh experience, different ideas, expanded feeling, in short, another way to be in the world.”
Although Kremen enrolled in Black Mountain College in 1946 to pursue his aspirations as a young writer, the progressive and collective environment he encountered there permanently re-defined his ideas about education. Black Mountain College exposed Kremen to such various and influential artists as poet and potter M. C. Richards who remained a lifelong friend, artist and teacher Josef Albers, and painter and Asheville native Kenneth Noland. It was M. C. Richards who prompted his first collage experiment nearly twenty years after he left BMC.
After Black Mountain College, Kremen lived in New York’s Greenwich Village where, through his friendship with M. C. Richards, he befriended John Cage, Merce Cunningham and David Tudor, all of whom spent some time at BMC during the late 1940s and early 1950s. He met his wife Barbara at a Cage performance in 1952, and Cage dedicated his famous composition 4’33” to Kremen.
Eventually Kremen went back to school and earned his Ph.D in clinical psychology from Harvard and moved to Durham to teach at Duke in 1963. It was a few years later that M.C. Richards introduced him to collage making. What, at the time, seemed to be only a playful activity for the family, instigated a major shift in Kremen’s life as he began to make collages with a feverish obsession. The papers he uses are carefully collected from walls and other surfaces encountered during travels to Europe. He says about the work, “I hunt out papers that have been in sun, in rain, covered with the dirt of the city. Yet as I look at them, I realize their exquisite potential.”
Significantly, Kremen has developed a complex technique of hinging the elements of his collages, so each scrap of paper is allowed to exist independently within the composition. This allows for an edge integrity and subtle depth that are not possible when the usual method of gluing is used.
Irwin Kremen has had solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, as well as at a long list of other galleries and museums in the US and abroad. He won the Sam Ragan Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Fine Arts of North Carolina in 1998.
A fully illustrated, 48-page catalogue accompanies this exhibition.
Support for this project has been generously provided by the following: the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts; a Grassroots Arts Program Grant of the NC Arts Council, a state agency, and the Asheville area Arts Council; The Mary Duke Biddle Foundation; John E. Cram; and the John Wesley and Anna Hodgin Hanes Foundation. Special thanks for their dedicated work on this project to board chair Connie Bostic and graphic designer Susan Rhew. The show will travel to The Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA from August 31-October 13, 2011.
PROGRAMMING
ARTIST’S TALK
Saturday, February 19, 11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
On Site: A Gallery Talk by Irwin Kremen
Irwin Kremen will speak about his work and his time at Black Mountain College.
$7 / $5 BMCM+AC members + students w/ID
PANEL DISCUSSION
Sunday, March 20, 3:00 p.m.
Writing About Art: A Panel Discussion with Jerry Cullum, Ursula Gullow, Cinqué Hicks andTom 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
READING BY NC-BASED WRITERS
Friday, May 6, 8:00 p.m.
North Carolina Poet Laureate Cathy Smith Bowers, Barbara Kremen from Durham and Carole Boston Weatherford from High Point will read from their recent writing projects.
$7 / $5 BMCM+AC members + students w/ID
COLLAGE WORKSHOP
Sunday, May 8, 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
An Advanced Collage Workshop, led by artist and master collagist Irwin Kremen, will have participants make collages from material they bring in, with discussion of various aspects of collage making to follow afterward. Kremen will then review 45 years of his collage making that evolved into syntheses of collage, painting, and sculpture. Space is limited. Pre-registration is required.
$55 / $45 BMCM+AC members + students w/ID
Support for this project has been generously provided by the following: the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts; a Grassroots Arts Program Grant of the NC Arts Council, a state agency, and the Asheville area Arts Council; The Mary Duke Biddle Foundation; and the John Wesley and Anna Hodgin Hanes Foundation. For additional information please call Alice Sebrell at 828-350-8484
