William Christenberry Explores the Soul of the South in New Sheldon Art Galleries Exhibit

William Christenberry Explores the Soul of the South in New Sheldon Art Galleries Exhibit

 

ST. LOUIS, MO - The Sheldon Art Galleries presents William Christenberry: Southern Artifacts, September 25, 2009 - January 23, 2010 in the Gallery of Photography and Bernoudy Gallery of Architecture. Please join us for an all-gallery opening reception on Friday, September 25, 2009 from 5 - 7 p.m.! Galleries will be open until 8 p.m due to The Sheldon concert featuring Bettye LaVette. NEW Gallery Hours are Tuesdays, Noon - 8 p.m.; Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, Noon - 5p.m.; Saturdays, 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. and one hour prior to Sheldon performances and during intermission. Admission is free. For more information on the exhibition visit the galleries' website at www.thesheldon.org/galleries.asp. Gallery Talk, Saturday, December 12, 2009 at 11 a.m. Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, William Christenberry and Friends. Gallery of Photography, admission free. Loans to the exhibition are courtesy of the artist and Pace/MacGill Gallery New York . The exhibition is made possible in part by Barbara and Arthur McDonnell and Ellen and Durb Curlee.

This exhibition, organized by the Sheldon Art Galleries , St. Louis , presents an overview of photographs and selected sculpture by William Christenberry from the 1960s onwards which illustrate the artist's interest in and reaction to the sculptural forms of vernacular structures and cultural artifacts of Hale County, Alabama, where the artist spent his childhood and early adult years. Born in Tuscaloosa, Hale County, Alabama in 1936, William A. Christenberry, Jr. grew up on a farm directly across the field from one of two families that were the inspiration for writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans' groundbreaking book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), which Christenberry discovered while studying art at the University of Alabama in the late 1950s. Since then, his works have developed into a rich synthesis of found images and objects that are informed by abstract expressionism, pop art, and the strong sense of place that his home landscape holds.

William Christenberry's works have most often been discussed in the context of his rendering of the passage of time, the preservation and transcendence of place and the persistence of memory. Over time, he has returned to many of the structures of Hale County , and has documented their passage from one permutation to the next until, in some cases, they completely disappear from or into the landscape. Though the themes of time and place are indeed important, prominent and ongoing in Christenberry's work, the idea of the found object or structure as sculpture, is also an enduring thread. In his greater body of work, buildings, cultural artifacts like gourd trees, weathered buildings, grave markers and even natural phenomenon like the engulfing kudzu vine, become strong sculptural statements in themselves.

Photography was only a reference medium in the early days of his experimentation with the process, but has developed as one of his key forms of expression. His earliest images of the Alabama landscape were made with a brownie camera, and later, with support from his friends Walker Evans, William Eggleston, and Lee Friedlander, he began to see the process as a distinct and separate vehicle for artistic expression. Christenberry began experimenting with an 8 x 10" Deardorff view camera in the 1970s, and since the early years with a box brownie camera, he has revisited churches, storage structures, country stores, homes and grave sites to trace their evolution and ultimate disintegration.

Christenberry also finds ready-made sculptures in other aspects of the Southern landscape. Gourd trees, grave markers, the sides of weathered buildings, kudzu engulfed trees, and signage are ready-made assemblages that are found works of art, complete in their totality, without any additional artistic intervention. He further extends this investigation of these ready-made sculptures and assemblages by translating the forms that he finds in the landscape into three dimensions. Re-creating miniature buildings, and abstract sculptures titled "Dream Buildings" from the distilled formal elements Christenberry finds in the Hale County landscape, these works coalesce the essence of the buildings, or their formal elements, at a particular time and place.

Christenberry has never been only a photographer, painter or sculptor. Each medium provides for him another means to express his interest in and preservation of his home landscape and the stories that surround his own history. In these works, he celebrates the simple, yet beautiful lines, forms, and textures created by the people and found in the landscape in which he is rooted. These are layered works which express through their subject's own reality, and the embellishment of Christenberry's imagination, the complex threads that are woven between the realities and fictions of our own histories.

The work of William Christenberry has been the focus of numerous one person exhibitions, notably in an inaugural exhibition at the renovatEd Smithsonian Institution, Museum of American Art in 2006-2007, where he also curated the Permanent Collection installation of folk art; and the Aperture Foundation traveling exhibition William Christenberry Photographs 1961-2005, among many others. His works are found in many public collections including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the George Eastman House, Rochester; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Menil Collection, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; the Milwaukee Museum of Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. His work has also been the focus of a number of monographs including William Christenberry: Southern Photographs (1983); Christenberry: Reconstruction: The Art of William Christenberry (1996); William Christenberry: The Early Years, 1954-1968 (1996); William Christenberry: Art & Family (2000); William Christenberry (2002); and William Christenberry (2006). Retired since May, 2009, Christenberry was Professor of Art at the Corcoran School of Art Since 1968 and has been based in Washington D.C. since then. He returns yearly to Hale County, Alabama.

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