A special exhibition entitled "The Neugents, Close to Home," featuring 70 images by award-winning North Carolina photographer David M. Spear, will be on view in UNCA’s University Gallery Feb. 9-March 13. An opening reception will be held from 6:30-8:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 9, in the gallery, located on the first floor of Owen Hall. This is the sixth year that University Gallery, which usually hosts student shows, will offer an exhibition by a professional artist.

The exhibition documents the daily life of an extended family of Rockingham County, North Carolina tobacco farmers in powerful and often disturbing images. Depictions range from matriarch Mamie Neugent milking the family cow, washing grandchildren and scrubbing possums for stew meat to scenes of the family’s work in the tobacco fields to one of Mamie’s grandsons showing off stitches from a knife fight, a daughter-in-law’s bruises from an assault, and a family member writhing in an alcohol delirium.

Spear, a Madison, N.C. native, has works in permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Art in Houston and the Ackland Museum in Chapel Hill. He received a North Carolina Artist Grant in 1991, and was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1992.

The opportunity to present "The Neugents, Close to Home" is due both to Spear’s artistic tenacity and to the generosity of the Miller Brewing Company of Eden, N.C., and its parent company Philip Morris Companies Inc. Two other donors, Dalton L. McMichael and Marion A. Spear, both of Madison, N.C., also helped fund this project. The exhibition is on loan from N.C. State University’s Gallery of Art & Design.

Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday.

For more information, call the UNCA Art Department at 828/251-6559.