On April 18th, two special exhibitions will be leaving the Gibbes Museum of Art. See below for more information about these two exhibitions.
Manning Williams: Reinventing Narrative Painting
Reinventing Narrative Painting is the first major retrospective of Manning Williams's work since his death in 2012. The exhibition will be accompanied by a book published by Evening Post Publishing and will travel to the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, GA. Williams's paintings are rooted in the history, traditions, and terrain of the South Carolina Lowcountry. A Charleston native and lifelong resident, Williams earned degrees from the College of Charleston and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. His highly personal approach to realist painting emphasized storytelling and was fueled by an interest in portraying subjects that he found on the periphery of the city and along the barrier islands. Western subjects also commanded Williams's attention, and during the later years of his career, his concern with narrative was expressed in a more abstract style. Reinventing Narrative Painting features 30 paintings from Williams's prolific career that spanned more than 40 years.
In Body and Soul: The Figure in Modernist Photography
Drawn from the Robert Marks Collection, this exhibition features 30 photographs by renowned 20th-century photographers. From Alfred Stieglitz's intimate composite portraits of Georgia O'Keeffe to Lewis Hine's depictions of American laborers, modernist-era photographers radically shifted how the human body was captured on film and for what purpose. Employing a variety of techniques from cropping and zooming, to distortion and framing, modernist photographers explored the human figure for social, performative, voyeuristic and documentary purposes. Highlights include the work of Stieglitz, Hine, Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, George Platt Lynes and László Moholy-Nagy.
For more information and a full listing of exhibitions, visit www.gibbesmuseum.org.
