William Christenberry's Black Belt
by William Christenberry
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Showcases the lifelong focus on rural Alabama by an eminent American artist. With major exhibitions running simultaneously at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Aperture Gallery in New York City, and the Birmingham Museum of Art, William Christenberry is enjoying wide exposure of his artistic body of work. Since the early 1960s, he has plumbed the regional identity of the American South, primarily centering on his early home in the Black Belt counties of Alabama, show more the same area documented during the Depression years by Walker Evans and James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Christenberry's poetic elucidation of Southern vernacular landscape and architecture using the media of photography, drawing, painting, collage, sculpture, and miniaturization reveals how history, the very story of place, is at the heart of his lifelong project. By exploring universal themes relating to family, culture, nature, spirituality, memory, and aging, Christenberry underscores the continuous thread of revelation of which Eudora Welty speaks. I think, he says, that oftentimes art can make an outsider look back on something he has never been part of and make him feel like he has always been part of it. This volume celebrates particularly the semester-long residency in 2005 when Christenberry returned to Alabama as a Weil Fellow in the Arts and Humanities at Auburn University Montgomery. It includes images of actual structures that no longer exist (but which Christenberry documented for decades), Brownie and large-format photographs, K-houses from his body of work about the Ku Klux Klan, dream buildings, pen and ink drawings, and studies for wall sculptures. It is a testimonial to the enduring influence of Alabama's Black Belt landscape on Christenberry's singular vision. show lessMember Reviews
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William Andrew Christenberry Jr. was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama on November 5, 1936. He studied painting and sculpture at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, receiving a B.F.A. in 1958 and an M.F.A. in 1959. He taught art at the Corcoran School of Art from 1968 to 2009. He created photographs, drawings, paintings, and sculptures about Hale show more County, Alabama, which is one of the poorest counties in the state. His work can be found in numerous public collections including those of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Menil Collection in Houston. His autobiography, Working from Memory, published in 2008. He died from complications of Alzheimer's disease on November 28, 2016 at the age of 80. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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