African-American performance artist Clifford Owens of New York has lots of photos taken. He appears in some of them, often shown with audience members at his performances. Later, he exhibits many of them in galleries.
“The photos generally tell you something about what happens, but not the whole story,” said John Bowles, assistant professor of African-American art in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Owens will be a visiting artist at UNC Nov. 2-13, giving a free public lecture, exhibiting his work and performing twice, in shows titled “Photographs With an Audience.”
The talk, part of the art department’s Hanes Visiting Artist Lecture Series, will be at 5:30 p.m. Nov. 3 in the Hanes Art Center Auditorium, Room 121. Just outside in the John and June Allcott Gallery will be an exhibit of Owens’ work, displayed from Nov. 3 to Dec. 2. The gallery is open from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays; 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fridays; noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays and 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. Sundays.
The performances, in Gerrard Hall at 8 p.m. Nov. 6 and Nov. 7, will be part of The Process Series, a program of UNC’s Office of the Executive Director of the Arts. In the series, artistic works in progress are performed free to the public and discussed afterward by their authors and the audience. The series gives audiences a sense of the creative process, and authors get feedback they can incorporate into completion of the works.
Seating will be limited. Audience members will be asked to sit on throw rugs and pillows and should be warned in advance that a strobe flash will be used.
Owens has said his performances serve as subject matter for his photographic works as he leads the audience through a series of interactions and gestures, periodically pausing to capture opportune moments on film, said Joseph Megel, an artist in residence in the communication studies department and director of The Process Series.
Owens’ work will return to Chapel Hill virtually in February as part of the CHAT festival – Collaborations: Humanities, Arts and Technology – a series of performances, projects and discussions at UNC Feb. 16-20 designed to demonstrate how the arts and humanities can be expressed through new technologies.
Bowles’ graduate students are building a Web site for the CHAT festival that will present the works and history of African-American performances artists including Owens. Part of the Web site will be about Owens’ performances at UNC, which will include an audio track. Other artists represented will include Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi of Los Angeles, Saya Woolfalk of New York and Ben Patterson of Wiesbaden, Germany, a pioneer in the fluxus art movement in the 1960s.
“The history of African-American performance art is not well documented,” Bowles said, a void that the students hope to help fill with the new Web site. The project also will be a learning experience for him and his students. “We’re building the Web site ourselves, and it’s making all the students and myself think about how archives shape the way we understand history, and how different the history of art will appear once we have documentation of these performances.
“The site will give us an opportunity to reflect on how we perceive the past and our relationship to it.”
Owens’ UNC visit is supported by the Hanes Visiting Artist Lecture Endowment, the Alumni Sculpture Garden Endowment, the John and June Allcott Endowment of the art department and the CHAT festival, presented by the Institute for the Arts and Humanities.
