701 Center for Contemporary Arts Presents:
ALEX POWERS: Inquiries, January 20 – March 6, 2011
For its first exhibition of 2011, 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, S.C., presents Alex Powers: Inquiries. Admission to the 701 CCA Gallery is free, donations appreciated.
Inquiries presents a selection of works on paper from the past two decades by Myrtle Beach artist Powers, who is among South Carolina’s most prominent contemporary painters. Mainly using gouache, charcoal and pastel, Powers creates superb, lively, expressive paintings, often with a social and political bite. Powers also incorporates text, both as a graphic and content-related element, achieving a beautiful mixture of aesthetics and commentary. Inquiries deals with religion, culture, philosophy, politics, economics, civil rights, history, literature, art itself and more. “These overwhelming issues are difficult to deal with, but they are what interest me,” Powers has written. “And, since I believe in the singularity of life and art, these issues are the content of my life and my current work.”
The exhibition travels to 701 CCA from the Franklin G. Burroughs–Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum in Myrtle Beach, S.C. The 701 CCA exhibition is sponsored by City Art gallery in Columbia, which represents Powers. Additional support come from the City of Columbia and an anonymous donor. An exhibition catalogue published by the Burroughs & Chapin Museum will be available for consultation and purchase. The catalogue includes an essay by Elizabeth Howie, assistant professor of art history at Coastal Carolina in Conway, S.C.
“Powers employs what he terms ‘lost and found’ imagery, the deliberate tension between realism and abstraction,” Howie wrote. “Making sense of the clash between realism and abstraction in a way mirrors the individual’s challenge, and responsibility, in the postmodern world, to navigate the constant, overwhelming onslaught of information, visual and verbal.”
Powers was born in 1940 in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia. He has been a full-time artist and free-lance art teacher for four decades. Among the museums where he has exhibited are Alabama’s Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, MN, and the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, FL. He was represented in invitational group exhibitions in Taiwan and at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC., as well as in 100 Years/100 Artists, a 1999 overview of 20th-century South Carolina art at the S.C. State Museum in Columbia. His work is in the collections of Wisconsin’s Green Bay Museum of Art, the Burroughs and Chapin Art Museum, the S.C. State Museum, Alabama’s Huntsville Museum of Art, the Weisman Art Museum and in many private a corporate collections.
Powers has won 14 best-of-show awards in national competitions. He is a much sought-after teacher in water-based media, teaching eight to ten workshops a year in the United States and Canada. He is the author of a standard text on painting with watercolors. There are dozens of articles about his work and teaching, and he is included in 17 books. He has been a juror for some 50 exhibitions.
Alex Powers’s talk, “An Autobiography,” is free and open to the Public. There will be $5 suggested donation to attend Artist’s reception.
This exhibition is generously sponsored by City Art, representing Alex Powers.
Additional support provided by the City of Columbia and an anonymous donor.
