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Turchin Center Hosts Winter Exhibition Celebration During Festive First Friday

The Turchin Center for the Visual Arts at Appalachian State University invites the community to a Winter Exhibition Celebration on Friday, December 3, 5-9 p.m. Downton Boone will be twinkling for the holidays as this event is being held in conjunction with the annual Festive First Friday with special events happening throughout downtown. The public is invited to engage, discover and connect through the arts at the Turchin Center where the festivities will include live music from Lauren Hayworth and Kim France, holiday cookies and hot chocolate. During this celebration, the Turchin Center will celebrate two new exhibitions and four additional exhibitions. This event is free and open to the public.

New Exhibitions

To Remain Connected: Jenny Irene Miller, Raven Moffett and Shauna Caldwell, Guest Curators

December 3, 2021 – May 7, 2022, Gallery A

In this exhibition, guest curators Miller, Moffett and Caldwell are bringing together work grounded in Inuit artmaking across generations, as well as through multifaceted and evolving practices, with a hope to kindle conversations around the meaningful stories that are deeply rooted in community, placemaking and engage with ongoing legacies of creation. According to the curators, “The featured artworks were selected because of the stories they tell and the connections they visualize. Our curatorial model stems from an embrace of the collective and highlights community through thoughtful portraiture as well as collaborative, familial and multigenerational art making. To Remain Connected presents rich layers of stories told through a multitude of interwoven voices rooted in land, memory and Inuit ways of being. While Inuit are linked together through art, language, food, and more, there are many unique Inuit communities, dialects, and lifeways across lands that have been renamed Alaska, Russia, Greenland, Canada and beyond.” 

Featured Artists: 

Jenny Irene Miller

Mabel Nigiyok

Elsie Klengenberg

Helen Klengenberg

Lypa Pitsiulak

Annie Pitsiulak

Thomasie Alikatuktuk

Solomon Karpik

In sharing the expansive and interconnected visual stories of these artists, this exhibition attempts to shift the pervasive and incomplete narrative that has long been supported by the colonial framework within which arts institutions, such as ours, are so deeply embedded.

About the Guest Curators:

Jenny Irene Miller (she/they), Inupiaq, is originally from Nome, Alaska. Jenny employs photography, video, and sound in her art practice which is grounded in storytelling and her identity, from Indigeneity to queerness, as well as familial and community relations. Jenny is informed and inspired by kinship.

Raven Moffett (she/they) is an artist and educator working on Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui land in Tucson. Raven’s poetic and lens-based artwork arises from examination of home and origin as a third culture, biracial and diasporic ᖹᐟᒧᐧᒣᑯ/ white queer artist. 

Shauna Caldwell (she/her) is a white, Appalachian artist, educator, and scholar rooted in her hometown of Boone, North Carolina. She uses multimedia and photographic processes to honor land, familial connections, sacred relationships, and transformation.

Several of the intentionally selected Inuit artworks included in this exhibition are from the substantial collection gifted to the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts by H.G. Jones, an archivist and historian from North Carolina, who lived and worked with these communities between 1971 and 2002, purchasing art and documenting makers in their studios for his personal research. 

In the Garden of Healing: Dara Mark 

December 3, 2021 – May 7, 2022, Gallery B

The paintings in this exhibition were made over the five-year period after Dara Mark’s husband died.  Each of them reflects her emotional state during the process of grieving and healing and describes in abstract terms an arc of personal growth. The paintings were not conceived of as therapy per se, but as the only way forward for her as an artist.  The medium – watercolor on Yupo paper – and the formal issues of transparency, flow and balance, were and are a continuation of her longtime studio practice.  

Mark describes her work: “My practice is very intuitive and allowing.  It is transparent not only because of the transparency of my materials, but also as a window into my spiritual heart.  My hope is that a viewer will sense the increasing freedom and vitality in the work as the series developed.”

About the Artist:

Dara Mark enjoyed was one of the first women to graduate from Yale College in 1971, with a major in architecture. Later, her Master’s in ceramics from the University of California, Santa Barbara gave her experience with the unpredictable fluidity of ceramic glazes, which continues to reverberate in her approach to watercolor. Mark has served as a master artist for talented high school students in Santa Barbara County, California and has taught art to all ages, from kindergarteners to seniors.  Her work is owned by private and corporate collections across the West.  Since 1997 she has been painting full time in Lamy, New Mexico.

Continuing Exhibitions at the Turchin:

  • Father, Grandfather, Artist: A Tribute to Warren Dennis (through December 4, 2021)
  • Erratic: Hoss Haley (through December 11, 2021)
  • Matters of the Heart (and Other Abnormalities): Shawn Morin (through February 5, 2022)
  • 98.6: A Creative Commonality (through February 5, 2022)

For more information visit tcva.org/art

About the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts

The Turchin Center for the Visual Arts, named for university benefactors Robert and Lillian Turchin, fulfills Appalachian State University’s long-held mission of providing a home for world-class visual arts programming.  The largest facility of its kind in the region, the center presents exhibition, education and collection programs that support the university’s role as a key educational, cultural and service resource. The center presents multi-dimensional exhibits and programs and is a dynamic presence in the community, creating opportunities for people of all ages and backgrounds to experience the power and excitement of the visual arts. Its seven galleries host changing exhibitions featuring local, regional, national and international artists.  

The Turchin Center is located at 423 West King St., in Boone. Hours are 10 a.m. – 6 p.m., Tues. – Thurs. and Saturday, and Noon – 8 p.m., Friday. The Center is closed Sunday and Monday and observes all university holidays. Admission is always free, although donations are gratefully accepted. For general inquiries, to be added to the mailing or e-news list, to obtain donor program details or to schedule a tour, call 828-262-3017, e-mail turchincenter@appstate.edu or visit tcva.org. The Turchin Center can also be followed on Instagram and Facebook @TurchinCenter.

Sponsors

The Turchin Center receives critical support from a group of outstanding media sponsors that are dedicated to promoting the arts in our region, including: High Country 365, High Country Radio, WFDD 88.5, WDAV 89.9 and WASU 90.5FM.