Colorplay!
June 6 to July 9, 2017
Opening Reception: June 6, 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Durham-based artist Martha Clippinger activates color in space through her brightly hued weavings, roughly hewn sculptures, and paintings. Combining the sensibilities of Bauhaus fiber artist Anni Albers, the rich traditions of Mexican tapestries, Southern folk art, new abstraction, and design, Clippinger sets loose shapes, colors and structures to make the eye sing.
Here Clippinger presents an assortment of textiles, painted sculpture, and works on paper, showing the structural and affective force of color.
About the Artist
Born in Columbus, Georgia, Martha Clippinger received a BA from Fordham University and an MFA from Mason Gross School of Art, Rutgers University. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a 2017 Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artists Grant from the Durham Arts Council, a 2014 American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, and a 2013 Fulbright-Garcia Robles research grant completed in Oaxaca, Mexico. She has been a fellow at the Sam and Adele Golden Art Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation. Her work has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, and The Huffington Post. Clippinger is represented by Elizabeth Harris Gallery in New York and lives and works in Durham, North Carolina.
About 12 x 12
12 x 12 artist salon series presents 12 artists from North Carolina, the 12th State. Each Salon is a pop-up exhibition and conversation with the artist. The series schedule consists of three exhibitions per spring and fall seasons in 2016 and 2017, beginning March 1st, 2016. At the end of the salons, a group exhibition in our Potter Gallery will bring together all twelve artists.
The twelve artists in the series represent a diversity of artistic practices and cultural backgrounds. At salon events, each artist will share ideas and processes of their studio practice in the midst of recent, new, or site-specific work presented in SECCA's Preview Gallery. Each artist will discuss their experience first-hand, inviting the public to ask questions and to engage in conversation. Like a studio visit, these salon events are a social space for the discovery and discussion, providing invaluable feedback to artists and insights to those who come to experience them.
12 x 12 gives artists from across North Carolina a public platform for continued artistic development and recognition in the place where they live and work, and beyond. At the same time, the series aims to push conversation around contemporary art forward and to consider the significance of localism as a curatorial framework. What does it mean to these artists to be working in the South and Southeast today, especially after the Internet and Globalization?
The 12 x 12 artists were selected by Cora Fisher (Curator of Contemporary Art, SECCA) and four guest jurors: Linda Dougherty (Chief Curator & Curator of Contemporary Art, North Carolina Museum of Art); Lia Newman (Director and Curator of the Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College); Marshall Price (Nancy Hanks Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University); and Mary Anne Redding (Curator, Turchin Center for the Visual Arts).
An arts initiative sponsored by the Flow Foundation.