WILSON, N.C. — The Barton Art Galleries is pleased to announce the opening of the “Convergence,” an invitational group exhibition featuring the works of Bill Byers, David Davenport, Tom Grubb, Jo Pumphrey, and Michael Voors. The exhibition opens on Friday, Sept. 27, with a public reception from 6 – 8 p.m. and a gallery talk at 7 p.m. The event will be held in Case Art Building on the campus of Barton College. The exhibition will run through November 1. The event is open to the public at no charge, and the community is invited to attend.
The Barton Art Galleries is sponsored by the Virginia Thompson Graves Art Endowment and the Barton College Friends of Visual Arts. For additional information about the exhibition or opening reception, please contact the Barton Art Galleries at 252-399-6477 or email artgalleries@barton.edu.
Featured Artists —
Alumnus Bill Byers is a painter with an enduring interest in photography. Having grown up along the Inter-coastal Water Way on Wrightsville Sound near Wrightsville Beach, Byers now makes his home with his wife, Jo Pumphrey, in the city of Brevard, nestled in North Carolina’s Appalachian Mountains. This close proximity to vast forest has given Byers a unique opportunity to explore, observe, and find inspiration for his paintings and photographs. “These intimate but visceral encounters with the unforeseen invigorate me and compel me to return to the forest again and again,” he shares. Byers is a member of the faculty at Brevard College where he teaches studio courses in painting, drawing, and photography.
David Davenport, a painter, is heavily influenced by his childhood, having grown up in a coastal farm community. He learned early on a respect for the land and developed an awareness of one’s place in time. Davenport was intrigued by light penetrating the dark shadows of old barns. “These clumsy, hand-made structures rode like arks on their sea of land,” he explains in reference to his painting “Memory Maps.” “In them were stored the reaping of human interaction with nature. The landscape and symbolic places in the landscape always penetrate with a personal style. In addition, many of the paintings suggest places in undefined locations in the landscape. This allows viewers to infuse their own memories and emotions into the paintings. I render the atmosphere that surrounds the objects with symbolic colors and a sense of timelessness.”
A native of Florida, Jo Pumphrey currently resides in Brevard with her husband, Bill Byers. Her works in the exhibition refer to surroundings or places she has visited. “A sense of place, in which we derive meaning and give meaning to a space, is intertwined with being human,” she shares. “We are in some manner shaped by place, nurtured by it or challenged by it.” Pumphrey’s paintings are not about the place itself but about her interest in holding and distilling a contemplative way or experience in her relationship with a place. Pumphrey currently serves as a professor of art at Brevard College. Her paintings have been exhibited throughout North Carolina, New York, Maine, and Virginia.
Tom Grubb lives in Eastover and is a professional artist installing site-specific sculptures across the United States and abroad since 1980. His current sculpture series “Voyager” will be installed in climatically sensitive areas throughout the world. This idea is to draw attention to the most critical issue facing the world today—Global Warming. To fund his studies in graduate school, Grubb worked on ships in the North Atlantic and eventually became a captain. This experience inspired his sculptures, which explore the dimensions of “time and space.” Grubb shares, “In the wheelhouse and on the deck, I could view the moon and stars moving across the sky, through the riggings of the boat. The cables attached to the masts and booms formed ‘volumes of space’ without mass. In my sculptures, I explore this feeling of space and the passage of time.”
Michael Voors is a professor at East Carolina University in the School of Art and Design, where he has taught since 1980. Voors has been particularly inspired by locations that have ancient or sacred character. His art has been nurtured by travel and reveals qualities of light and passages of time. Voors has had solo exhibitions in North Carolina The Netherlands, and Amsterdam, and his work has been included in group exhibitions in Taiwan, China, Ireland, and New York.
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