January 18–February 22, 2019
Drawing Discourse, UNC Asheville’s annual juried international exhibition of contemporary drawing, will feature works by 48 artists and will open Friday, Jan. 19, with a juror lecture and reception. The opening lecture by Juror Stuart Shils will take place at 5 p.m. in Humanities Lecture Hall and a reception will follow at 6 p.m. in S. Tucker Cooke Gallery, where the exhibition will remain on view through Feb. 23. This ninth annual Drawing Discourse exhibition drew a record 1159 entries from 400 artists in eight countries.
Juror, Shils is a weekly critic at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he also teaches painting. His work has been presented in solo shows in New York, Philadelphia, Tel Aviv, Boston, Scottsdale, Stuttgart, Los Angeles, Richmond, San Francisco, and Cork (Ireland). “I prefer when drawing is not predictable, well-mannered or polite,” says Shils “For that reason I welcome the arrival of new or alternative media that question what drawing is or might be. I often tell students that while we may devour the drawings of the past with even erotic pleasure, at the end of the day the people who made them are dead and we are not, and that the real challenge for us is not to imitate those voices, but rather to carry the ball of our own curiosity further down the court, finding our own, sometimes uncertain ways of speaking visually that may or may not look like what is already familiar. What really matters is not technique or style, but shaping an articulate and improvisational narrative on a page, on a surface, or on a screen, whose graphic footprints take the viewer’s eyes and mind on a momentary, but yet exciting adventure.”
A panel discussion will be held on Saturday, Jan. 20 featuring artists Stuart Shils and Benny Fountain and Executive Director of the Spartanburg Art Museum, Elizabeth Goddard.
All Drawing Discourse events are free and open to everyone. For more information, email exhibit organizer Tamie Beldue, UNC Asheville associate professor of art and department chair, at tbeldue@unca.edu.
