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Spring into ART at the Turchin Center March 4

The community is invited to celebrate four new contemporary art exhibitions in the galleries of the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts at Appalachian State University during the Spring Exhibition Celebration on March 4 from 5-9 pm. This event is held in conjunction with the downtown Boone Art Crawl. Numerous exhibiting artists will be on-hand to meet visitors and provide insight into their intriguing work. The musical group Belleville Rendezvous will perform. Refreshments and a cash bar will be available. This event is free and open to the public. 

Boone 150, the Town of Boone’s Sesquicentennial celebration, kicked off in January 2022 and continues throughout the year with a series of events and commemorations. The Turchin Center for the Visual Arts is proud to honor this important community milestone by showcasing and celebrating artists with deep roots in Boone and across the High Country. According to TCVA curator, Mary Anne Redding, “Even though the lingering effects of the pandemic continue to complicate life in the High Country as well as the rest of the world, the arts can bring joy and celebration and have a way of uplifting and healing the communities that gather to look, listen, and learn. The Turchin Center is pleased to offer four inspirational new exhibits with the coming of spring. We hope you will join us for the ongoing celebration of Boone’s 150th anniversary.” Two current exhibitions are featured as part of Boone 150 and include the 19th Annual Appalachian Mountain Photography Competition and To Be and Become: Corn Wagon Thunder

Exhibitions 

The New West, An Old Story: Photographs by Joan Myers and Steve Fitch

January 21– June 4, 2022: Hodges Gallery 

Since the 1860s, photographs have been instrumental in promoting the West as an unexplored wilderness and the land of opportunity. Joan Myers and Steve Fitch are challenging the romantic myth of the American West to reflect the cultural, environmental, and racial complexities of our shared histories more accurately in an on-going conversation about what it means to be an American, how identity and the landscape are intertwined and what the real West looks like today.  

Myers and Fitch have both lived in the West for most of their lives. They document the changing landscapes of which they are a part; their lives intimately intertwined with the history of the arid lands they call home. Their images capture landscapes made famous in countless Western narratives of both literature and film, but they move in closer with their lenses to reflect the details often overlooked in a sweeping landscape narrative, gently critiquing the myth of the oversized cowboy with his long gun, the absurdity of the oversized teepee selling espresso, the oversized sombrero, the seedy roadside hotels bedazzled with garish flashing neon, the derelict movie theaters and drive-ins hawking a fading American Dream. 

Joan Myers_Second Ammendment Cowboy_TX

Joan Myers has been taking photographs for more than forty years, exploring the relationships between people and the land. Myers turned to photography during the early 1970s as her life’s work.  Her photographs have since appeared in more than fifty solo and eighty group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe including three Smithsonian exhibitions.

Her award-winning books include Fire and Ice: Timescapes (Damaiani, 2016), The Jungle at the Door: A Glimpse of Wild India (George F. Thompson, 2012), Wondrous Cold: An Antarctic Journey (Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins 2006), Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California (New Mexico 1999), Pie Town Woman (New Mexico, 2001), Whispered Silences:  Japanese Americans and World War II (Washington, 1996), Santiago: Saint of Two Worlds (New Mexico, 1991) and Along the Santa Fe Trail (New Mexico, 1986). 

Steve Fitch has always been an educator, he taught photography for forty-two years at the University of Colorado, Boulder; The University of Texas, San Antonio; Princeton University and Santa Fe University of Art and Design. He has received four National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships as well as the Eliot Porter Fellowship. His photographs have been widely exhibited and collected as well a published in a number of  books including Diesels and Dinosaurs: Photographs from the American Highway (1976), Marks in Place: Contemporary Responses to Rock Art (1988), Gone: Photographs of Abandonment on the High Plains (2003), An Island in the Sky: Llano Estacado (2011), Motel Signs (2011), American Motel Signs, 1980 to 2008 (2016), Vanishing Vernacular: Western Landmarks (2018) and most recently, American Motel Signs, 1980 to 2018 (2020).

Steve Fitch_Motel, Highway 66, Elk City, OK

Celestial: Dare Coulter 

March 4 – August 27, 2022: Mayer Gallery

With the Universe as the source of inspiration, the Celestial exhibit is a series of multimedia works that explore the metaphor of creation. Dare Coulter is an award-winning artist, muralist, and sculptor. Her mission for her artwork is primarily to create positive and magical imagery of Black people and families. She hopes to have a mural on every continent within the next five years, and a series of sculptures depicting Black joy all over the world. 

19th Annual Appalachian Mountain Photography Competition

March 4 – June 4, 2022: Mezzanine Gallery

In its 17th year, the Appalachian Mountain Photography Competition (AMPC) provides both amateur and professional photographers with the opportunity to showcase their interpretation of the unique character, people, places and pursuits that distinguish the Southern Appalachians. The categories include: Adventure, Blue Ridge Parkway, Culture, Our Ecological Footprint, Flora/Fauna and Landscape. 

Over 800 entries were submitted and the jury panel selected 52 finalist images that will be on display in the Mezzanine Gallery.  Visitors to the Turchin Center are invited to participate in the People’s Choice Award selection through April 1, 2022. All awards will be announced on Saturday April 2, 2022, at the Saturday screening of the Banff Film Festival and through media outlets. According to Richard Campbell, Associate Director of Outdoor Programs, “We are thrilled with the images this year and look forward to showcasing them to the public when the exhibition opens on March 4th.”

The jury who selected the finalist images and the final award-winning photographs are accomplished photographers and artists.  Byron Tenesaca-Guaman is a visual artist and bilingual educator residing in Western North Carolina. Born in an ancestral Indigenous community in the Andes Mountain region of Ecuador to a family of basket weavers and agriculturists, Byron’s early years were spent learning the reciprocity system that exists between humans and the mountains. His continued passion for art and education has also led him to take on the roles of artist-in-residence, kindergarten teacher aide and HiSET instructor. He received a Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) in Comprehensive Education from Western Carolina University. A certified K-12 art instructor, Byron currently serves the mountain community as the visual arts teacher at Johnston Elementary School. He was one of 50 artists selected to be part of The Asheville Art Museum’s inaugural exhibition “Appalachia Now! An Interdisciplinary Survey of Contemporary Art in Southern Appalachia.” His artworks, in various media, document, layer and weave the memories, culture, and history of the Andean and Appalachia Mountain regions together.

Julie Rae Powers received their MFA in Photography from The Ohio State University and their BFA in Photography from James Madison University. Recently, JR started Soft Lightning Studio, a photography publishing platform dedicated to broadening space in the photo world for image makers who are persons of color, queer, women, and others. Their work has focused on family history, coal, Appalachia, the queer “female” gaze, the butch body and queer chosen families. Their work is collected by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan and have been awarded the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in 2016 and 2020. For their day job they work as an instructional designer.

The AMPC is a partnership between Appalachian State University’s Outdoor Programs, the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts and Virtual Blue Ridge. The AMPC provides support for the university’s Office of Outdoor Programs and their extended expeditions that are educational journeys of discovery that take students around the world. The competition is generously sponsored by the Mast General Store and supporters include the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation, Nikon Cameras, Stickboy Bread Company, Bistro Roca, Peabody’s Wine and Beer Merchants, Smoky Mountain Living, Footsloggers, and Appalachian Voices. Visit the AMPC for more information: www.appmtnphotocomp.org  

To Be and Become: Corn Wagon Thunder

Through June 4, 2022: Community Gallery

Corn Wagon Thunder’s photographic self-portraiture is borne of a fascination with the existential questions ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Why am I?’. She is interested in dissecting the paradoxical mode and manner of her own being. With a nod to the absurd, she uses symbolism to visualize the riddle of life. Yet, with tenderness toward the mysterious edges of self-discovery. She focuses the camera on herself as a method of examining her personal mythology and to consider how one constructs and transforms meaning in relation to existence. According to Corn Wagon Thunder, “To Be and Become (Lost in the Becoming) chronicles my journey into midlife. Becoming the thing I didn’t want to be – yet became, was becoming.”

Corn Wagon Thunder is a photographer and collage artist residing in the Southwestern United States where she is currently pursuing a master of fine arts degree at the University of New Mexico. Corn received her bachelor of fine arts in printmaking from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and has also studied at Penland School of Craft in North Carolina.

Corn Wagon Thunder was included in Appalachia Now! An Interdisciplinary Survey of Contemporary Art in Southern Appalachia at the Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina. Corn Wagon Thunder created this body of work while working and living in Boone. Although she is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, she says part of her heart will always remain in the beautiful Appalachian Mountains. 

Corn Wagon Thunder_The Mysterious Presence of Absence

Continuing Exhibitions at the Turchin:

  • To Remain Connected: Jenny Irene Miller, Raven Moffett and Shauna Caldwell, Guest Curators (through May 7, 2022)
  • In the Garden of Healing: Dara Mark (through May 7, 2022)

For more information about exhibitions, visit tcva.org/art

ARTtalks at the Turchin

As a complement to the varied exhibitions at the Turchin Center, ARTtalks are led by exhibiting artists, scholars and practitioners. Each talk provides deeper insight into creative practice, context for current exhibitions or contemporary issues shaping the world in which art is created, experienced and interpreted. ARTtalks are free and open to the public. Visit tcva.org for more information and to register (no registration required for in-person event).

ARTtalk: Dara Mark: In the Garden of Healing – Wednesday, March 16, 6 pm (virtual format)

ARTtalk: Joan Myers and Steve Fitch: The New West, An Old Story – Thursday, April 7 at 6 pm (virtual format)

ARTtalk: Contemporary Appalachian Photography Panel Discussion: Byron Tenesaca-Guaman, Julie Rae Powers and Corn Wagon Thunder (Saturday, April 2, 2 – 3:30 pm (in-person with virtual option)

Turchin Center programming is generously supported by Appalachian Home Care, Bickers Consulting Group, Art Cellar, Allen Wealth Management and Cheap Joe’s Art Stuff.

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. Regular 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 Facebook @TurchinCenter.