In conjunction with the final week of its current exhibition of contemporary art, “More Love: Art, Politics, and Sharing since the 1990s,” the Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, NC, is pleased to present the interactive, ephemeral art work “Chalk” by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla.
From 1pm on Monday, Mar. 25, 2013, through 1pm, Wednesday, Mar. 27, 2013, twelve large pieces of chalk – each 64 inches long, eight inches in diameter, and weighing approximately 100 pounds – will be publically on view and available for use in Union Plaza, in front of the F.P. Graham Student Union, at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Since 1998, Allora and Calzadilla have placed oversized chalk sticks within public spaces in many different cities around the world. Made available to passers-by, “Chalk” encourages written and drawn exchanges between citizens and engagement with the urban landscape itself. Like many other works of art in the exhibition “More Love,” the pieces of chalk are catalysts, requiring action on the part of individuals other than the artists to activate them. Although Chalk has been staged in several different cities, each iteration of the project brings its own idiosyncratic response and allows the work to maintain a sense of site-specificity, reflecting the particular concerns and conditions of a given locale. By enlarging and unleashing a conventional stick of chalk on the campus of a leading research university, Allora and Calzadilla transform a pedagogical tool of the classroom into an instrument of communication and critique. The Union Plaza, already a popular forum for self-expression and knowledge sharing, will be further transformed, if only temporarily, by drawings, commentary, and other forms of written and illustrated expression.
“More Love: Art, Politics, and Sharing since the 1990s” at the Ackland Art Museum is the first major exhibition to investigate the ways in which contemporary artists have addressed love as a political force, as a philosophical model for equitable knowledge exchange, and as social interaction within a rapidly changing landscape of technology and social media.
Organized by consulting curator Claire Schneider, ”More Love” includes 48 works of art by 33 emerging and established contemporary artists who actively engage with love and the many ways it can be expressed through beauty, emotion, humor, texts, elaborate craft, sound environments, and interactive projects. For each of these artists, love is a significant tool or strategy that constitutes a creative practice built on generosity, inclusiveness, sharing, and questioning.
The Ackland Art Museum is located on the historic campus of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Ackland’s holdings consist of more than 16,000 works of art, featuring significant collections of European masterworks, twentieth-century and contemporary art, African art, North Carolina pottery, and folk art. In addition, the Ackland has North Carolina’s premier collections of Asian art and works on paper (drawings, prints, and photographs). As an academic unit of the University, the Ackland serves broad local, state, and national constituencies.
The Ackland Art Museum is located on South Columbia Street, near the corner of East Franklin Street, on the campus of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Parking is available at several nearby municipal and private parking decks, and at meters on Franklin Street.
More information is available by calling 919/966-5736 or visiting (www.ackland.org).
