Outside the art gallery was a busy place to be. Besides an energetic Blue Grass band in front of the entrance, there were outdoor mobiles, dancers, ice cream and sandwich wraps, and a petting zoo. The zoo featured dog-sized ponies, and slightly smaller goats and lambs plus a leghorn chicken, delighted children, puzzled parents and exhausted volunteers.
Above the petting zoo the eastern wing of the museum towered decorated with advertisements, and looking toward its left you can see the main entrance with the band in front and the refreshments are out of sight farther to the left. According to "AreaGuides.net>Hickory", it is "One of the oldest art museums in North Carolina, the Hickory Museum of Art displays a superb collection of American art, with a featured holding of landscapes from Thomas Cole and other painters of the Hudson River School tradition. Other areas of focus within the museum include pieces of contemporary folk and outsider art from the South, clay works from North Carolinian artists and studio art glass." More information at http://www.hickorymuseumofart.org/home.php
One of the exhibitions on September 13, 2008, Doug Marlette. Doug is best know for his cartoons, but he is also a writer. Very well known to some of us of course, as the cartoonist for the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper before he made it big-time. He is a native North Carolinian, but for some reason he went to Florida State University for his degree. Where he got attracted to kudzu is not known to me although he obviously had been familiar with it all his life.
The main exhibition right now is a commemoration of the amazing Black Mountain College.
What happens when John Dewey's educational philosophy is taken to extreme? Wow! Black Mountain College. Not for everybody, or even most people, and never more than just a blip on the world's education glacier, still it changed the direction of that glacier by infecting the world's leading artists, poets, writers, philosophers, scientists, architects, and a whole lot more with the academic disease called imagination.
The college was only in existence for a short 24 years and fewer than 1,200 students ever attended it and only 60 total ever graduated and the college closed forever 51 years ago. But the names of its students and teachers read like a list of the leaders of mankind's intellectual explorers. http://www.bmcproject.org/ The walls of the museum are now filled with photographs and paintings of those who attended or taught at Black Mountain College such as Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Josef and Anni Albers, Jacob Lawrence, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Cy Twombly, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Arthur Penn, Buckminster Fuller, along with many other BMC students and teachers.
The Hickory Museum of Art has done a very good job of presenting the Spirit of Black Mountain College in this exhibition.
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