Barbara Mellin: A Joyous Phenomenon
September 16, 2021 – October 17, 2021 | Southern Idiom Gallery

SECCA's Southern Idiom exhibition series continues with A Joyous Phenomenon, featuring new works by artist and printmaker Barbara Mellin. An opening reception for the exhibition will be held from 5–8pm on Thursday, September 16.

The exhibited etchings are a celebration of life, customs, differences and similarities. The focus of the series is the global appeal of dance, a joyous phenomenon that is incorporated into almost every culture. The artist has focused on traditional dances from around the world, sometimes crossing political boundaries. The figures are each dressed in ethnic clothing, expressing the uniqueness of their heritage within the universal format of dance.

Many of these dances are on the UNESCO Cultural Heritage list, and with this body of work, the artist hopes to showcase and preserve these traditions.

Leslie Smith: Upright and Asymmetrical
October 30, 2021 – November 28, 2021 | Southern Idiom Gallery

SECCA's Southern Idiom exhibition series continues with Upright and Asymmetrical, featuring new works by Leslie Smith. An opening reception for the exhibition will be held from 1–4pm on Saturday, October 30.

The artist makes drawings, prints, and books based on her interest in mind, body, and the way we think about the self. She holds an MFA in Book Arts from the University of Iowa Center for the Book and has exhibited nationally and internationally. She is currently the Director of Graphics and Textiles at Sawtooth School for Visual Art.

Smith uses writing, drawing, printing, and papermaking to ask and answer questions. For the artist, imagery leads to writing and writing leads to imagery. For the last few years, the artist has been interested in the body and the mind. Curiosity has pushed her toward speculative questions.

Babette Shaw: And the Flies Decide Nothing
November 6, 2021 – January 31, 2021 | Potter Gallery

SECCA is proud to present And the Flies Decide Nothing, a photographic exhibition by California-based social practice artist Babette Shaw. The exhibition acts as a narrative cultural portrait comprised of a series of eight still life photographs, or "reliquaries," that dialogue with an original poem. An opening reception for the exhibition will be held Saturday, November 6 from 5–8pm.

Artist Babette Shaw engages in cultural excavation. With focused intention to challenge social hierarchies regarding gender and race constructions, she gathers everyday gendered objects, organic and inorganic matter, and historical momento mori and vanitas tropes. Through the mediums of sculpture and photography, she creates what she calls "reliquaries" to reveal where we are presently in regard to gender and race constructs. Her work is evocative, stirring, and at times, humorous.

To aid in the illustration of the complexities of our current cultural and historical conflation of ideals, she developed a process and aesthetic that blurs distinction between painting, sculpture and photography. At once the images read as monumental, voluminous Dutch master paintings, three-dimensional topographical and gravitational creations, and large-scale photographs.

Black@Intersection: Contemporary Black Voices in Art
November 19, 2021 – April 17, 2021 | Main Gallery

SECCA is proud to present Black@Intersection: Contemporary Black Voices in Art, a special group exhibition featuring more than twenty artists, organized by guest curator Duane Cyrus. An opening reception for the exhibition will be held Friday, November 19 from 5–8pm.

In January 2021, SECCA posted an open call for guest curator submissions, seeking new voices and new perspectives for an upcoming project. SECCA hoped to develop a collaborative exhibition that showcases work being produced in response to the current moment, primarily the onset of and quarantine surrounding COVID-19 and the protests and events surrounding the death of George Floyd and the wider Black Lives Matter movement.

After evaluating numerous exceptional applications, SECCA selected Duane Cyrus for the guest curator position based on his proposal for Black@Intersection. The exhibition features Black and African Diasporic artists from North Carolina and beyond. The artists simultaneously exemplify and defy––yet continue to redefine the perceived norms around concepts of Blackness as we see it in our world. They resist the nullifying commodification of blackness into a type of monolith and do so by creating works that reify the world on their own terms.

Duane Cyrus is a Bessie Award nominated performer and a professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where he teaches Choreography, Improvisation, Repertory, and Career Strategies for Artists.

He is also the director of Theatre of Movement, a collective that produces performing and visual art collaborations and curations––meshing Cyrus' dance background with photographers, filmmakers, actors, poets, and musicians. Duane holds a BFA from the Juilliard School and an MFA from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Inside/Outside: Charlie Brouwer
August 2021 – December 2022 | Various Indoor & Outdoor Spaces at SECCA

The "Benediction Project" has arrived in Winston-Salem. According to artist Charlie Brouwer, "the project connects community with people of faith and places of worship through art". The project began in December, 2019 in Virginia's New River Valley (the artist's home territory) where during 2020 the sculpture, titled "Benediction", traveled to 10 places of worship. Participation in the project is free to any place of worship that wants to express through public art, their desire to be a blessing to the surrounding community. The artist installs the sculpture for 40 days on the grounds of the place of worship where it can be seen by the public facing out towards the community.

The project is a public art component of Inside/Outside: Charlie Brouwer, a SECCA exhibition that began in August and will run until December 2022. Planning the exhibition has been a collaboration between the artist and Wendy Earle, Curator of Contemporary Art.

The exhibition has a unique schedule and format. Every 40 days for one year, the artist will install outdoor sculptures on SECCA's grounds and indoor works and installations in spaces throughout the museum. Beginning in August 2022, the artist will begin removing some work each 40 days until the exhibition closes in December. Brouwer's reason for 40 day periods is connected with its special significance in sacred Jewish, Islamic, and Christian texts where it stands for "an important or long time" or "the right amount of time".