Roger Manley To Be Featured Speaker at FOVA Winter Lecture On February 5

WILSON, N.C. — January 27, 2015 — Please join the Friends of Visual Arts at Barton College for the upcoming FOVA Winter Lecture featuring Roger Manley. His lecture is titled “The Outsider Environment,” and the event will be held in Hackney Library at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 5. Please note that this event has been moved from its originally scheduled location inside Barton Art Galleries. There is no charge for the program, and the community is encouraged to attend. Refreshments will be served.

Manley is director of the Gregg Museum of Art & Design at North Carolina State University. Formerly, he served as curator for the Gregg Museum in the 1990s when it was named the Gallery of Art & Design. His first show for NCSU was the 1988 exhibition, “A Blessing From the Source,” which featured the 3,500 biblical sculptures of the late Outer Banks visionary folk artist Annie Hooper.

Throughout his career, Manley has worked as a curator with more than 40 institutions, including the Asheville Art Museum, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Center on Contemporary Art/Seattle, the Collection de l’Art Brut in Switzerland, the Columbia Museums of Art & Science, Duke University, Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art, the Haggerty Museum of Art, the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, the Illinois State Museum, Intuit/Chicago, the Jargon Society, the McKissick Museum of the University of South Carolina, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Sawtooth Center for Visual Design, and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art.

As an artist (photographer, filmmaker, writer), Manley has been a fellow of the Headlands Center for the Arts in California, the Fondation d’Art de La Napoule in France, and Mishkenot Sha’ananim in Israel, as well as a visiting artist with the North Carolina Arts Council’s community college programs. He is a recipient of both the NEA Artists Fellowship and the NEH Scholars Fellowship, and of grants from the Watson Foundation, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Laurie Foundation, the Bunnen Foundation, and the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation. His feature documentary film, “Mana – beyond belief,” premiered at Lincoln Center in New York in 2005 and has won awards at several international film festivals. The North Carolina independent newspaper Indy Week awarded Manley its Community Arts “Indy” Award for service to the arts in the Triangle.

Manley has produced numerous exhibitions of his own photographs of Hispanic migrant farmworkers, Palestinian villagers, Gullah Sea Islanders, Australian Aboriginals, Native Americans, Canadian gold miners, prisoners, textile mill and factory workers, and self-taught artists. His photographs are in the collections of a number of internationally recognized institutions. His books, however, reveal a more playful interest in the quirky and bizarre. In addition to books on outsider art like “The End is Near!,” “Self-Made Worlds,” “Signs and Wonders: Outsider Art Inside North Carolina,” and “Tree of Life,” he has co-authored “Dear Mr. Ripley: Wonders of the Age from Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!” and “Hoaxes, Humbugs, and Spectacles,” and has completed three books for the Weird U.S. series: “Weird Carolinas,” “Weird Louisiana,” and “Weird Tennessee.” For fun, he hunts fossils, haunts flea markets, and practices Darwinian gardening (survival of the fittest).

Manley was born in San Antonio, Texas, grew up in an Air Force family, and graduated from Davidson College in 1974, after which he spent two years living in the Australian Outback with a tribe of Aboriginals. He later completed graduate work in Education at the University of Denver and in Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is married to the writer and photographer Theadora Brack.

For additional information about the FOVA Winter Lecture, please contact the Barton Art Galleries at (252) 399-6477 or artgalleries@barton.edu.

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