(Reservations required by Friday, April 26th)
WILSON, N.C. — “From Murphy to Manteo — An Artist’s Scenic Journey,” the final seminar in the well-received “Lunch and Lecture Series” hosted by the Barton College Friends of Visual Arts, will be held on Monday, April 29, at Noon, in The Sam and Marjorie Ragan Writing Center. Barton’s professor emeritus of art and artist-in-residence J. Chris Wilson will lead the luncheon seminar.
The “Lunch and Lecture” cost is $10 for Friends of Visual Art members and $20 for non-members. To join the Friends of Visual Arts, visit www.barton.edu/culturalarts. Reservations for the “Lunch and Lecture” are required by Friday, April 26, at 4 p.m. Please contact Bonnie LoSchiavo at 252‐399‐6477 or email: artgalleries@barton.edu.
Wilson will deliver an illustrated presentation about his current landscape series “From Murphy to Manteo — An Artist’s Scenic Journey” that was featured in the March issue of “Our State” magazine. Currently, some of Wilson’s large landscape paintings from this series are on view in the lobby of the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, the State Library of North Carolina, and the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources. Wilson will also discuss some of the recent publicity and support for the series as well as future exhibitions and features.
Wilson has been painting the North Carolina landscape for more than 35 years, and he is currently working on an expansive series of large paintings that survey the scenic landscape of North Carolina from Murphy to Manteo along the US 64 corridor. This current body of work began to take shape as a series more than a decade ago. As Murphy to Manteo has become synonymous with meaning “across all of North Carolina,” the ultimate objective for Wilson is to produce 100 large oil paintings that are a comprehensive portrait painting of the North Carolina scenic landscape along the 563 miles of the US 64 corridor from the mountains to the sea.
The project evolved as a result of Wilson becoming interested in serial landscape images while living and teaching at a university in Japan. He began to visualize the entire state of North Carolina as potential subject matter after exhibiting landscape paintings in the offices of then Lieutenant Governor Bev Purdue in 2001. Through his work, Wilson seeks new and varied compositional strategies, while striving to emphasize a personal voice in the post-abstract Southern Realist tradition.
He earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Georgia, where he also completed post-graduate work, with Lamar Dodd as his major professor. He has exhibited throughout the Southeast and all across North Carolina. Wilson’s art is represented in numerous public and private collections in the United States, especially in the Southeast, and in England, Japan and Saudi Arabia.
Retiring from full-time teaching in 2012, Wilson has continued to serve as the College’s first Artist-in-Residence. During his 38-year tenure, he served in a number of leadership roles on campus that included directing the Department of Art and Design’s painting program from 1974-2012, serving as director for The Scholastic Art Awards for Eastern North Carolina and director of the Barton Art Museum. He also is a past chair of the Department of Art and Design.
During the 1994-95 academic year, Wilson represented Barton College while teaching at a sister institution in Nagoya, Japan. He received the Sears-Roebuck Foundation Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership Award, which included travel and study in England in 1990. And, in spring 2011, Wilson was honored with Barton College’s Jefferson-Pilot Faculty Member of the Year Award, which included a stipend for international travel.
With a passion for bringing art into the community, he has been involved in symposia, community presentations, and publications on art, decorative arts, and historic preservation. He has served multiple terms on the Edgecombe County Cultural Arts Council, serving as president, and on the board of the Arts Council of Wilson, serving as secretary. Wilson currently serves as a board member for Preservation North Carolina, The Blount-Bridgers House/Hobson Pittman Memorial Gallery Foundation, and The Arts Council of Wilmington.
Among his regional awards, Wilson has received the Jaqueline Drane Nash Award of Merit for Leadership by the Edgecombe County Historical Society and, most recently, he was selected for a Gertrude S. Carraway Award of Merit by Preservation NC.
Wilson’s paintings have been exhibited widely in the Southeast, including the first regional retrospective by a North Carolina artist in 2003 with works exhibited in seven locations in Wilson, Rocky Mount, and Tarboro. He has had numerous solo exhibitions including at the Greenville Museum of Art in North Carolina, The Burroughs-Chapin Museum of Art and the Spartanburg County Museum of Art in South Carolina, and the Albany Museum of Art in Albany, Ga. His works also have been featured in many North Carolina galleries, including Blue Spiral in Asheville, erl Originals in Winston-Salem, Somerhill Gallery in Chapel Hill, Flanders Art Gallery in Raleigh, City Art Gallery in Greenville, the Fayetteville Museum of Art, and Carteret Contemporary Art in Morehead City. Hundreds of his paintings are included in public, corporate, and private collections in the United States, England, Japan, and Saudi Arabia.
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