The Telfair Museum of Art Presents Passing Time: The Art of William Christenberry

SAVANNAH, Ga., May 16 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- This summer, theTelfair is pleased to present a major exhibition on the work of William Christenberry, whose art explores the spirit of Southern culture. Passing Time: The Art of William Christenberry will be on view at the Jepson Center for the Arts from May 14-September 28, 2008.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080516/DC22496 )

William Christenberry's work, rooted in hisAlabama upbringing, is born of things familiar and deeply felt. Whether in paintings, drawings, sculptures, constructions, found objects, or photographs, each expression gathers meaning from a specific time and place through which we experience one man's collected and recollected journeys. They are meditations on universal themes of loss and isolation, memory and comfort, creation and change.

Since the 1960s, Christenberry's annual trips from hisWashington, D.C., home to the South have allowed him to maintain links to the land where he grew up. The perspective of a visitor allows him to observe changes to the landscape and reinterpret regional subjects like roadside buildings and gourd trees, or the harrowing presence of the Ku Klux Klan. After four decades, what began as an uncertain pursuit has evolved into a body of work reflecting the full immersion of the artist into his own past and experience. Christenberry's art offers, in the words of a fellow Southerner James Agee, "the cruel radiance of what it is."

William Christenberry was born inTuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1936. After earning a Master of Arts in painting from the University of Alabama, he moved toNew York City in the early 1960s. There he discovered the 1941 James Agee / Walker Evans book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a Depression-era classic that had a profound influence upon the young artist. While living inNew York, Christenberry also met and was befriended by Walker Evans, the pioneering photographer well known for his own work in ruralAlabama, who would encourage Christenberry's exploration of the spirit of Southern culture. In 1968, Christenberry took a teaching position at the Corcoran College of Art inWashington, D.C., a post he still holds today.

Passing Time: The Art of William Christenberry is organized and circulated by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The exhibition's tour is sponsored in part by the C.F. Foundation,Atlanta.

Images available upon request.

Related Programs

First Saturday for Kids

June 7, 10am-1pm

Jepson Center for the Arts

Includes model house-making activity based on Christenberry exhibition.

Free admission; sponsored by the Byck-Rothschild Foundation and The Anderson Family Foundation.

Toddler Third Thursday

June 19, 10-11:30am

Jepson Center for the Arts

Includes model house-making activity based on Christenberry exhibition.

$4 per child plus adult admission; call 790.8823 to register.

Sponsored in part by JCB, Inc.

Evenings at theTelfair Lecture

"William Christenberry's Vernacular: Documentary and Art"

July 10, 6pm

Jepson Center for the Arts, Neises Auditorium

Join Daves Rossell, professor of architectural history at the Savannah College of Art and Design, for an exploration of vernacular architectural forms in Christenberry's art. Free with admission and to museum members.

SOURCE Telfair Museum of Art

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