Upcoming Exhibitions

European Modern: Master Artists from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
August 23 through December 29, 2013
Opening Reception, September 5 from 6-8pm
United-Legard Galleries

Hand-selected works from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts will travel to Abingdon for this extraordinary exhibition. Visitors will have the opportunity to delight in the drawn and painterly techniques that span generations of important European artists as they journeyed away from the defined edges of Neoclassicism and toward the uninhibited marks of the Modern Era. Artists on view include Neoclassicists, English Painters, and German Expressionists. Become acquainted with works by the famous French Impressionists such as Degas, Cezanne, Toulouse Lautrec, Van Gogh, and many other memorable names from art history.

Great and Small: Nineteenth Century Diminutive Objects from the Region
August 29, 2013 through January 12, 2014
Opening Reception, September 5 from 6-8pm
Price-Strongwell Galleries

The tradition of making diminutive furniture, or miniature furniture, has origins in Europe and was brought to this region through our early American ancestors. This exhibition will bring together a sampling of nineteenth-century diminutive furniture from Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee. Commonplace furnishings such as desks, chests, sugar boxes, and chairs were made on occasion – some with simple materials and ingenuity while others fine timber and carpentry skill. Today, these diminutive pieces are considered rare, and therefore greatly admired when presented. Other pieces such as pottery, baskets and toys will offer a full view of historic life on a miniature scale.

 

From These Hills: Contemporary Art in the Southern Appalachian Highlands
October 18, 2013 – February 17, 2014
Opening Reception, October 17 from 6-8pm
United Company Regional Art Gallery

William King Museum celebrates the diversity of artistic talent in the Southern Appalachian Highlands. From These Hills is a biennial exhibition series begun just one year after the Arts Center opened in the spring of 1992. This biennial exhibition invites artists in all stages of their careers working in Southwest Virginia, Northeast Tennessee, Western North Carolina and parts of Kentucky and West Virginia to submit their work for consideration. The exhibition always boasts a wide range of mediums and subjects, yet always forms a unified voice regarding the significance of living in this notable time and place.

Guest Curator Steven Matijcio is the curator of contemporary art at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto and received an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York. Matijcio has held positions in a number of important galleries and museums including the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the National Gallery of Canada. Matijcio was awarded a prestigious Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award in 2010, and was chosen from an international field of candidates to take part in curatorial residencies in Gwangju, South Korea and Berlin, Germany. In 2012, Matijcio was named the Curator of the 4^thNarracje Festival in Gdansk, Poland, which projects large-scale video art across the city. He has lectured on theory and criticism, written for numerous catalogs and journals, and was commissioned by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to curate one of their first online exhibitions.

There/Here: The Architectural Research Projects of Tyler King
February 7 through June 29, 2014
Opening Reception, February 6 from 6-8pm
Price-Strongwell Galleries

There/Here began in Richmond, Virginia as a research project conceptualized and curated by then student Tyler King. He selected, visited, and documented forty vacant buildings in Downtown Richmond, and produced the first of its kind online inventory of the past uses and present state of each historical site. NTHNG MSSNG is a complimentary catalogue of the project where King writes, “While vacant buildings are often viewed as a latent redevelopment opportunities, NTHNG MSSNG offers a moment to pause, and consider the life of these buildings, independent from how they could perform economically—or how they once performed economically.”
Invited to launch a similar project in his hometown of Abingdon, Virginia, King will use the historical survey records recently labeled The Coletti Papers, as they were a donation to the William King Museum by Vivian Coletti, and organize an exhibition with a similar lens, here applied to the historic architecture of Washington County, Virginia.

Tyler King received a Bachelor of Science in Urban and Regional Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. He returns from Germany late in 2013 after studying at Bauhaus-University Weimar.

Artist by Trade: Independent Projects by Barter Theatre Creatives
March 7 – August 2014
Opening Reception, March 6 from 6-8pm
United Company Contemporary Regional Gallery

It takes dozens of creative individuals to put on even one production at the Historic Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia. William King Museum wants to pay tribute to the efforts of those on and off stage by giving them a platform to showcase the independent projects that are behind their creative process. This multi-media exhibition will highlight a few of the behind-the-scenes artists that pour their imagination into their work. It’s the Barter Theatre staff like you’ve never seen them before!