To Be An Artist Means To Never Avert Your Eyes


Exhibition dates: February 23 - March 29, 2024

Panel Discussion of Connie's work : Friday, February 23 at 5:00 p.m. in Owen 102

Opening Reception: Friday, February 23 from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.


Falling Off the Landing from series Bedtime Stories, oil on canvas


Corpse from Katrina series, oil on canvas


Chicken Yard, oil on paper


From Bible Stories series, oil on canvas




Biography



Connie Harrill Bostic was born in 1936 in Spindale, NC, a small rural town in Rutherford County, almost equidistant between Asheville, NC, and Spartanburg, SC. When her father left to serve in the army during World War II, her mother and she and a younger sister moved in with her mother’s parents who lived nearby. Her grandfather was the town sheriff and her grandmother was well-known as an avid flower gardener. She also raised chickens, and the chicken yard made an enduring impression on the young Connie, inspiring an important series of paintings.

When Connie’s father returned from the war, the couple moved back to their small house and had five more children. Connie chose to return to live with her grandparents until she left to attend Gardner-Webb Junior College in nearby Boiling Springs, NC, in 1952. After she graduated in 1954, she married George Bostic, whom she had known from the nearby town of Bostic, NC. They first lived with his parents and then moved to Indian Trail, between Monroe and Charlotte, where George worked as a manager in a mill and got his associate’s degree in accounting and business finance at King's College in Charlotte. During this time, they had five children.

In 1970, the Bostics moved to Fairview, NC, a farming community a few miles southeast of downtown Asheville, where George became a principal in an air freight company and then, after, 1976, vice president of finance for Mars Manufacturing Company. As a young mother in her thirties, Connie raised horses and whippets, became active in the dog show world, and began writing about horse shows for The Native Stone, a monthly newspaper.

In the early 1980s, Connie and George joined efforts to revitalize Asheville’s faded downtown. They invested in and helped run two businesses on Wall Street, Craig’s, a popular bar, and the Asheville Music Hall, which booked nationally known performers. In 1985, they bought a commercial building at 37 Biltmore Ave, where Connie established her first studio on the third floor. Around 1988, the ground floor storefront became home to the World Gallery, which Connie helped administer in collaboration with the art department of Western Carolina University. When WCU closed The World, Connie transformed it into Zone One Contemporary Gallery in 1991 which she managed until January 1, 2001. She then established her studio in Fairview in 2004 where she made her work and taught others.

Connie was always drawing as a child and knew early on that she wanted to be an artist. She began to pursue her ambition seriously in the early 1980s when she joined a group of women artists studying with the artist Janie McWhirter at her rustic studio in Swannanoa. She then enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, graduating with a B.A in studio art in 1989. She followed with graduate study at Western Carolina and received a M.A. in painting in 1990. She began exhibiting her work in 1987, even before she finished her academic training. By the time of her last major exhibition, a retrospective at the Upstairs Artspace in Tryon, NC, in 2023, she had participated in over eighty-five group, solo, and juried exhibitions.

Connie was committed to community building and Impelled by a deep empathy for people struggling in society. At the same time as she was prodigiously making art, she took leadership roles in local arts organizations and participated in what she called “Socio/Political Art Actions.” Her pioneering work with the fledgling Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center over thirty years helped establish it as one of Asheville’s premier downtown arts destinations. When it moved into expanded quarters in September 2018, its main gallery was named for her.\

In late 2023, when her health began to fail, Connie enrolled herself in hospice care and died at her Fairview home on January 14, 2024.


Biography written by Arnold Wengrow




The Upstairs Artspace in Tryon, North Carolina, hosted the exhibition Walking Naked in the World: Connie Bostic Retrospective, August 19-October 8, 2023. A booklet was published in conjunction with exhibition, made possible by contributions by Jason Andrew, Nancy Holmes, and Arnold Wengrow.


Please click here to view the booklet.


Many thanks to Arnold Wengrow for making this exhibition possible, and for sharing his expertise in curating the exhibition, providing eloquent text to accompany it, and for his dedication to honoring Connie's work.



Participants in the Panel Discussion of Connie's work on Friday, February 23 at 5:00 p.m.:

Link to recording of panel discussion here