Margaret Bowland: Excerpts from the Great American Songbook
Traveled to Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC May 18-July 31, 2011
Margaret Bowland's Excerpts from the Great American Songbook was on view at Babcock Galleries March 1 - May 3, 2011, and is traveling to the Greenville County Museum of Arts May 18 - July 31, 2011. The exhibition explores problematic and provocative issues of race, gender, beauty and individuality in contemporary social thought. She evokes great old musical standards like "Isn't It Romantic," with its velvet melody caressing one's ear and lyrics hanging in the air: "Soon I will have found some girl that I adore/Isn't it romantic?/While I sit around my love can scrub the floor..." Suddenly, it isn't so romantic as the song floats one into the dark side of gender and race. Bowland says "beauty makes sense to me...has weight for me, only when it falls from grace. It starts to matter when it carries damage. Sorrow allows [beauty] to cast a shadow". And what is the shadowy dark side of beauty? Bowland's paintings, conceived with a rich tenebrist light seem to punch their way into one's consciousness through the captivating metaphorical image of a young black girl whose inner awareness looks upon an outer world in which "it ain't necessarily so". Everything is so audaciously familiar in Margaret Bowland's paintings, so known and certain, and yet immediately, viscerally and fastidiously uncertain.
Bowland teaches at the New York Academy of Art, has shown at Tatistcheff Gallery, New York, at Thomas Paul Fine Art, Los Angeles, at Morton Fine Art, Washington, D.C. and is represented exclusively by Babcock Galleries. Recent exhibitions at public venues include the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, California, Art Fair 21, Cologne, Germany and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Her work has been reviewed by Jeff Wilkins, Peter Frank and F. Lennox Campello and the Fall/Winter issue of Tidal Basin Review carries an extensive interview of the artist by Randall Horton, and essay by Leola Dublin Macmillan entitled "Black Girls and Beauty: Contextualizing the work of Margaret Bowland". Margaret Bowland: Excerpts from the Great American Songbook is accompanied by a new book on the artist written by Siri Hustvedt and published jointly by Babcock Galleries and the Greenville County Museum of Art.
March 1 - May 3, 2011