Piedmont Abstract
Overview
NCMA Winston-Salem is proud to present “Piedmont Abstract,” an exhibition featuring three artists that explore abstraction as a practice of attention, process, and becoming. An opening reception will be held Thursday, Dec. 17 from 5 to 8 p.m., with an artist-led gallery tour at 5 p.m. Admission is free and open to the public.
Rooted in North Carolina’s Piedmont, the central region between the Coastal Plain and the Blue Ridge Mountains, Piedmont Abstract brings together Hannah Surace, Jerstin Crosby, and Kendrick Shackleford, three artists living and working in Salisbury, Winston-Salem, and Chapel Hill. Across their distinct practices, abstraction becomes a way of being with experience and perception as they form.
Surace’s work emerges through accumulated repetition and gesture, embracing decorative and historically feminized motifs. In a world that prioritizes efficiency, productivity, and the pressure to be “correct,” Surace turns toward modes of making that allow her to become absorbed in the activity of making itself as a way to move through the anxieties of being alive today. Heavily layered and immersive, her paintings hold the attention, time, and quiet perseverance of unseen labor.
Crosby’s work slows recognition, allowing familiar objects, images, and stories to slip between figuration and abstraction. Searching for moments of pause, Crosby creates “slow objects” that resist the speed of contemporary life. His work pushes and pulls the formal qualities of everyday subjects, allowing parts of a form to disappear, reappear, or settle into something like a ghosted interior of the familiar. Through this instability Crosby does not abandon recognition; he stretches it, creating paintings that ask viewers to remain with what is partially seen, partially remembered, and still becoming.
Shackleford does not approach art as something he chooses so much as a way of navigating life. In a world of increasing noise, both internal and external, painting becomes a form of searching through mystery without needing to resolve it. His process often moves between direct material action and technological mediation, including scans that transform paint, chance, and happenstance into illusions of layered depth. Across these heavily worked surfaces, memory, impermanence, and presence accumulate, creating spaces where questions can remain open and where mystery is not overcome but constructed, followed, and lived with.
Together these artists embrace abstraction not as a retreat from the world but as a way of being in and remaining with what is unresolved, emergent, unstable, and deeply felt.
Whereas typical museum exhibitions do not sell the art on display, many works from Piedmont Abstract are available for purchase. Visitors can speak with gallery hosts for pricing and more information, or contact the museum at info.ws@ncartmuseum.org.
This exhibition is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support for NCMA Winston-Salem Downtown and programming is provided by Anna Reilly and Matthew Cullinan, Mia Celano and Skip Dunn, Ann and Borden Hanes, Twin City Development Foundation, Robbin and Don Flow, Stuart Parks, Innovation Quarter, EMBER Audio + Design, Joe Logan, Pinnacle Financial Partners, Claire and Randall Tuttle, Atwell Ford Real Estate, Leland Little Auctions Ltd., Fader Real Estate, and Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.
Header Image: Hannah Surace, “Powder Soft,” 2024. Courtesy of the artist.