June Issue 2001
Seeing The World In Black And White at Folk Art Center in Asheville, NC
The work of Southern Highland craftspeople comes in fascinating displays of color, from the subtle hues of ash-glazed pottery to the vibrantly dyed fabric of a contemporary quilt. This year, the Southern Highland Craft Guild invites its membership to participate in a strictly black-and-white affair: a members' exhibition which restricts color of any kind. Entitled simply Black and White, this show challenges artists to create in a world beyond the rainbow, where there are no gray areas, where everything is either black or white. Presented in the Folk Art Center's Main Gallery in Asheville, NC, through Aug. 12, Black and White has attracted the imaginations of nearly 130 members, representing all craft categories, and abounds with ways to creatively dispense with the chromatic scale and work solely in basic binary. The show's formal title is Black and White: Revisited in reference to a popular past Members' Exhibition with the same criteria and title.
From artists whose work typically depends on the use of strong color to those whose work is naturally either black or white, to woodworkers and others who are handicapped by an often monochromatic medium, a full spectrum of artists have taken on the challenge. Potters can use special glazes on clay to achieve tones of either black or white, but some potters have gone beyond the obvious, creating black and white on ceramic surfaces without the use of glazes. Asheville ceramicist "Chiwa" Clark, for instance, hand built a bird vessel with a white clay body and burnished it smooth with a polished stone. Then she smoke-fired it while surrounding it in plant material, leaving a black carbon impression against the smooth white surface. Primitive potter Rick Bowman (Hartselle, AL) achieved black and white by reproducing the techniques of the Mississippian tribe that used a shell-tempered clay. This special clay is made with crushed mussel shells embedded in the body, and Bowman fires it as the ancients did, in an open pit. As the clay blackens in the fire, the shells appear as white specks. It takes special know-how to fire this clay; there are tricks to avoiding "particle sprawl" where the clay crumbles in the heat. On both the "Ceremonial Black Drinking Cup" and "Turtle Effigy Jar" submitted for this show, Bowman demonstrates his mastery of this difficult technique.
Furniture makers Jerry and Michele Smith (Berkeley Springs, WV) attest that their contribution to this show is "radically different than anything [they've] done before." Their hand-made twig chairs have always been unpainted, with bark still attached, but for this show, a white lacquer was applied to twigs stripped of bark. The seat of the chair is woven with black shaker tape, creating a ghostly contrast. Furniture maker Gary Peterson (Asheville, NC) brings a sculptural wooden clock to the show, whitened with milk paint. As a departure from his usual Arts and Crafts styling, this clock has a playful, folk art appearance.
This simple theme, from which one might expect many straightforward offerings, has prompted a ground swell of creative innovation from Guild membership. Even those artists who can handily work in either black and/or white have maximized the visual power of this duality, evoking the strange, the beautiful, the altogether stark. In the absence of color, attention is called to our sense of purity, cleanliness, of things light and empty. In the saturation of all colors, we visualize the unlit, the unknown, the heaviest darkness. The play between these opposites is explored with such ingenuity and flavor that the viewer, for a few moments, may forget they are seeing the world in black and white.
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