UNC Asheville's Humanities Program and Black
Mountain College Museum + Arts Center will host an evening with
acclaimed author and Black Mountain College alumna Suzi Gablik at
7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 13, UNC Asheville's Humanities Lecture
Hall. Her talk, "Art without Isms," springs from a defining moment
in Gablik's career 20 years ago that today strikes her as
extraordinarily relevant to a civilization facing deep difficulties.
This lecture coincides with BMCM+AC’s yearlong series of exhibitions
dedicated to the women of Black Mountain College. The first of three
exhibitions, "The Shape of Imagination: The Women of Black Mountain
College," opened in October and will run through February 14, 2009.
Gablik, born in New York City in 1934, came to BMC for the Summer
Session of 1951. After attending Black Mountain College, she studied
under Robert Motherwell, a major figure in the American Abstract
Expressionist movement and former professor at BMC, She earned a
bachelor's degree from Hunter College in New York City in 1955.
Early in her career, she worked primarily as a painter and visual
artist, and held her first one-women exhibition in 1966.
Gablik's professional focus began shifting from artist, to art
critic, lecturer and philosopher in the in the early 1970s, as she
explored the aesthetic, ethical and philosophical responsibility of
the artist as an agent for social change. Her book "Has Modernism
Failed?" came out in 1984 and addressed her concerns about the
failure of modernism to uphold socially constructive ideals as the
movement entered the 1980s and deteriorated into an exploitative,
for-profit enterprise. Gablik authored another book, "Re-enchantment
of Art," in 1991 that asserted the importance of art’s role as a
cultural healing mechanism, which required the opposition of artists
towards working within established trends.
Working as an art critic for Art in America for almost a decade, and
publishing several additional books, Gablik has contributed
extensively to other publications and enjoyed a long history as a
teacher and university lecturer.
Tickets will be sold at the door. General admission is $10 or $7 for
BMCM+AC members and local students. UNC Asheville students,
faculty and staff will be admitted free with ID.
For more information, call Alice Sebrell at 828/350-8484.
