Press release from UNC Asheville:
The Department of Art and Art History at UNC Asheville opens a retrospective exhibition on Friday, February 23 of the work of the late Connie Bostic. The noted Asheville artist and community arts activist died at age 87 on January 14. A panel discussion beginning at 5 p.m. will be followed by a reception in the S. Tucker Cooke gallery in Owen Hall. The exhibition runs through March 29.
Bostic was a 1989 studio art graduate of UNC Asheville and went on to earn an M.A. in painting from Western Carolina University.
A Citizen-Times obituary described her as a “fearless force of nature, artist, arts advocate and community builder who helped shape Asheville and empowered creative expression.”
The exhibition, titled “To Be an Artist Means Never to Avert Your Eyes,” is curated by Carrie Tomberlin, senior lecturer of art and art history, and Arnold Wengrow, professor emeritus of drama, who has written extensively about Bostic’s work for the Citizen-Times and Mountain Xpress.
“Connie Bostic is one of North Carolina’s most prolific, most important, and most enduring artists,” Wengrow said. “Since 1970 she has produced over 600 paintings, drawings, and mixed-media works of great originality.”
Bostic grew up in Spindale, North Carolina, but relocated to Fairview, just outside of Asheville, in 1970.
“Much of her work is autobiographical,” Wengrow said, adding,“She looks at what it means to grow up female in the 1930s and ‘40s in a small town in North Carolina.”
The panel, moderated by Wengrow, includes Margaret Curtis of Tryon, nationally renowned painter and recipient of the 2021-2016 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship; Alice Sebrell, photographer and director of preservation at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center; and Kyle Sherard, also a UNC Asheville arts graduate and a former visual arts columnist for Mountain Xpress, who is currently an assistant district attorney for Buncombe County.
For more information, visit: https://aah.unca.edu/exhibitions/s-tucker-cooke-gallery/2024/connie-bostic
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