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Bardo Arts Center Blog

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WCU Fine Art Museum Contemporary Clay Exhibition

Contemporary Clay 2021

Back for its next iteration, Contemporary Clay 2021 gathers artists from a variety of backgrounds who push boundaries on topics including race, culture, sexuality, gender, and class. Guest curated by Heather Mae Erickson, Associate Professor of Ceramics at WCU, Contemporary Clay surveys the ever-expanding field of American-made ceramics. The exhibition encourages viewers to consider the concepts, processes, and context of clay in contemporary art.   

lydia see, Whitewashing the News, 2019-2020, newspaper, scrap paper, plaster mold dimensions variable.

MFA Thesis Exhibition 2021

Featuring MFA candidates from the WCU School of Art and Design, the Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition showcases work in a variety of media and surveys a range of conceptual themes and creative approaches that characterize the global cultural landscape and contemporary art practice. Exhibiting artists include Perry Houlditch, Mo Kessler, lydia see, and Lex Turnbull.  

Water for Thought Installation View in the WCU Fine Art Museum

Water for Thought

Inspired by the campus theme, this exhibition features images of riverscapes, ocean expanses, and underwater immersion as a means for contemplating the arresting visual qualities and political dimensions of water.  

Alex Stamouli, Melting, 2020, digital animation, dimensions variable

53rd Annual Juried Undergraduate Exhibition

Western Carolina University’s Annual Juried Undergraduate Exhibition is one of the longest-running Catamount art traditions. This exhibition is an extraordinary opportunity for emerging artists to share their artwork with a larger public and to enhance their skills in presenting artwork in a professional gallery setting. Entries are reviewed by an outside art professional who selects the works for exhibition at the WCU Fine Art Museum. Selected works will be on view at the Museum from February 16 through March 19, 2021.   

Mildred Thompson vitreographs at the WCU Fine Art Museum

Mildred Thompson: Helio Centric

Sunspot activity and cosmic movements fascinated Mildred Thompson, and she used these ideas as a jumping point to develop the abstract visual language for this series of vitreographs.  

Museum Tour Still

Interactive 360° Tours

Take the interactive 360° virtual tour of the WCU Fine Art Museum.   

David Skinner, Pink Flood, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 48 inches.

2021 School of Art and Design Faculty Biennial

Every two years, the WCU Fine Art Museum offers full-time and adjunct faculty in the School of Art and Design the opportunity to share their artwork with the University community through the Faculty Biennial exhibition. For this year’s Biennial, each faculty member contributed work that connects with the University’s 2020-2021 campus theme of Water.   

Bernadine George, Pot, ceramic, 4 x 5 x 5 inches, Gift of Lambert Wilson

Cultivating Collections: Ceramics

Over 80 works make up the Museum’s ceramics collection and range from functional wood-fired porcelain and sculptural stoneware to a multi-piece earthenware installation. While the first clay works entered the University’s art collection in the 1980s and 1990s as part of the Art Department’s artists-in-residence program, the ceramics collection got a kickstart in 2005 when Founding Director of the WCU Fine Art Museum, Martin DeWitt, began making strategic purchases from regional artists and WCU students.   

Above: Jane Culp, Narrow Earth Trail, watercolor and pencil on paper, 1993, 22 x 30 inches, Gift of the Artist

Cultivating Collections: Paintings

The WCU Fine Art Museum’s paintings collection contains over 180 works in oil, acrylic, watercolor, enamel, and gouache created from 1950 to the present. To engage students in the process of reviewing the Collection, the Museum’s Curator of Collections and Exhibitions, Carolyn Grosch, worked with her Exhibition Practicum class to develop, Cultivating Collections: Paintings. Students selected works to display, interviewed artists, wrote labels, and evaluated strengths and opportunities for the paintings collection.  

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