Last October during the Click! Triangle Photography Festival I hit on the idea of doing a joint Duke/UNC MFA photography faculty show-something that had never been done before. Both programs have tremendous artists and I thought it would be a great way to increase collaboration between the two programs and get the students and faculty talking more to each other. I approached Lisa McCarty and Huston Paschal about curating the show and they enthusiastically agreed and started their studio visits.
The curators decided to select three artists from each institution: Alex Harris, William Noland, and Tom Rankin from Duke, and elin o’Hara slavick, Hồng-Ân Trương, and Jeff Whetstone from UNC. They selected 3 pieces from each artist and the checklist is here: Download Faraway Nearby Final Checklist.
I got to tag along on most of the studio visits and much of the work was completely new to me. A good deal of the work was recent but the curators took a broad look at the careers of these artists and found some early gems from the 80s and 90s.
One of the wonderful things Lisa and Huston did was sandwich the large main show between a small show of the work of John Menapace in our project gallery and a tiny show in the West Gallery of the 3 former and current Cassilhaus interns-Lisa McCarty, Rachel Boillot, and Eric Pickersgill-who are all former or current students from the two MFA programs. This set up a sort of 3 generation exhibition. Menapace is considered by many to be the father of fine art photography in this region of NC. He was very influential in bringing overdue recognition to the medium and did much to set up the photo programs at Duke and UNC. He was an inspiration to several of the 6 faculty participants and they in term were mentors and guides to the new generation of MFA students.
There was one piece from each of the interns.
The opening was a smash as usual and I think it was the first time we had all three interns at Cassilhaus at the same time.
We had another first with this exhibition-a joint student MFA mixer. Sorry I forgot to take pictures! It was a little bit of sweet revenge as the students got to do reverse crits on their professors.
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