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Romare Bearden
(1914-1988)
Conversation Piece
1969
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Since 1965, the Weatherspoon Art Museum at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro has enjoyed the corporate benefaction of the Dillard Paper Company—now xpedx. The company’s generous support has enabled both the presentation of the Art on Paper exhibition and, through the Dillard Fund, the development of an important collection of works on paper purchased from those shows.
Anyone who has ever worked with drawings knows their value as primary documents, and that they tell a great deal about the creative process. Artists use drawing as a way to generate and stockpile ideas. Even under the most austere conditions, drawing requires only a pencil, some paper, and an idea. Drawings constitute a unique genre, and every artist, whether a painter, sculptor, or printmaker, develops a personal rapport with it, even while exploring various techniques and media. The Dillard Collection, conceived first and foremost as a teaching tool that offers students an empirical, hands-on encounter with original works of art, continues to function in that capacity.
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Or you can browse the collection highlights below.
Collection Highlights
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Jacob Lawrence
(1917-2000)
Crippled Child on Crutches
1935
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Lawrence's work recounts the African-American experience in this country. Although he has been labeled a protest artist and social realist, in truth he considered himself first and foremost an artist. His images convey the hopes, dreams, and courage of the black community. In Crippled Child on Crutches, he captured life observed on the streets of post-Depression Harlem. He also recorded another history of America, one that was told to him by his family, neighbors, and friends. Lawrence's art is human and accessible, with a quiet dignity and understatement that makes it all the more powerful. He is the first African-American artist to have his work included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. |
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Andy Goldsworthy
(b. 1956)
Snowball and Windfallen Wood/Alder Tree Dumfriesshire
1996
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Andy Goldsworthy is an environmental sculptor who uses nature itself to create his art. He works out of doors with materials as various as trees, grass, snow, and ice to make temporary pieces of "earth art" such as an icicle bridge across a pond or a line of poppy petals hung from a tree. This art recognizes the inherent beauty of things around us, and the fragility and short life of things such as leaves and snowballs. Indeed, Goldsworthy’s art projects are ephemeral—they will decay soon—so he documents his work in photographs and books showing all the aspects of the production of a given work of art. The photograph here documents the charcoal of the burnt tree Goldsworthy used in part, along with a snowball, to create this image. |
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Hans Hofmann
(1880-1966)
Untitled
1949
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For Hans Hofmann, the essence of a picture was the surface itself, the area where all emotional and intellectual experiences are constructed with color, line and shape alone. He wrote the following: "Depth in a pictorial plastic sense is not created by the arrangement of objects one after another toward a vanishing point, in the sense of Renaissance perspective, but on the contrary by the creation of forces in the sense of push and pull." Hoffman is telling us that forms in a picture, as in this untitled watercolor, can be seen as receding or advancing toward the viewer based on their color and arrangement, creating movements, rhythms and tensions that are independent of describing any objects. |
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Romare Bearden
(1914-1988)
Conversation Piece
1969
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Romare Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, but spent most of his life in New York City. He attended the Arts Students League in New York, where he studied with George Grosz. During the 1950s he exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists, and even spent a period of time in Paris. In the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement captivated Bearden and became the thematic heart of his work. Bearden studied all kinds of art: African, European, Chinese, Byzantine, as well as American, and with this knowledge he expressed the customs and identity of contemporary African-Americans. His images deal with death and rebirth, freedom and oppression, mythic and contemporary life. Conversation Piece presents a theme that frequently appears in his work: The role of the black woman in American culture. Bearden examined her in many guises: as healer, lover, maker of magic, prostitute, matriarch, nurturer, neighbor, and friend. |
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