Mid-America Arts Alliance Receives National Endowment for the Arts Support to Tour Whitfield Lovell Exhibition

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 18, 2002

Mid-America Arts Alliance Receives National Endowment for the Arts Support
to Tour Whitfield Lovell Exhibition

Kansas City, MO --- Mid-America Arts Alliance announces that it has received a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the exhibition tour of Whispers from the Walls: The Art of Whitfield Lovell, organized by the University of North Texas Art Gallery and toured by ExhibitsUSA, the national museum service division of Mid-America Arts Alliance. The grant is part of the NEA’s “Challenge America” program, and will provide access of this major work to museums of all sizes and characteristics throughout the country.

Whispers from the Walls: The Art of Whitfield Lovell is a large scale, multimedia installation work coupled with such traditional arts as painting and sculpture, providing museum-goers with a contemporary window onto African-American culture in the early part of the twentieth century. American artist, Whitfield Lovell created the work, consisting of a house and three tableaux,, during a four-week residency at the University of North Texas in Denton in the spring of 1999. The installation is a poignant and highly evocative piece that mixes found objects, photographs, wall drawings, and sound to create a sensory experience of African-American culture from the 1920s.

The exhibition opened September 1, 2002, at The Contemporary Art Center of Virginia in Virginia Beach. It continues its tour in November to the Texarkana Regional Arts and Humanities Council in Texarkana, Texas. Future venues include the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Montgomery, Alabama, the Public Library of Charlotte in Charlotte, North Carolina, the California African-American Museum in Los Angeles, Reed College in Portland, Oregon, the McAllen International Museum in McAllen, Texas, the San Antonio Museum of Art in San Antonio, Texas, and the Hansen Memorial Museum in Logan, Kansas. The three-year tour ends in August of 2005.

The centerpiece of Whispers from the Walls is a one-room cabin surrounded by a profusion of tattered clothing. The inside of the house is filled with personal effects—pots and pans, tables and chairs, dime-store jewelry, a wrinkled suit on the back of a door—and life-size charcoal drawings of human figures. These “tenants,” realistically rendered, are based on old photographs from an African American archive in Dallas. They demonstrate Lovell’s masterful drawing skills and give the piece a strong human presence. Lovell also adds layers of sensory experience, from a half-filled decanter of whiskey, and fresh flowers in a vase, to the sounds of a 1920s blues tune that emanates from an old record player. The effect is to make the viewer feel at once like an intruder in the present and a visitor to the past.

The exhibition is curated by Diana Block, Director, University of North Texas Art Gallery, Denton, Texas. Essayists for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition include Lucy R. Lippard, art historian, Galisteo, New Mexico, and Jennifer Ellen Way, Ph.D., Professor of Art History, University of North Texas.

Whispers from the Walls is toured by ExhibitsUSA, founded in 1988 to create access to an array of arts and humanities exhibitions, nurture the development and understanding of diverse art forms and cultures, and encourage the expanding depth and breadth of cultural life in local communities. Over the past fourteen years, more than 14 million visitors in 800 communities in all 50 states and abroad have viewed an ExhibitsUSA exhibition.

ExhibitsUSA is generously supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Houston Endowment Inc., the Meadows Foundation, the Louis and Elizabeth Flarsheim Charitable Foundation, Douglas County Bank/Ross and Marianna Beach, Phillips Petroleum Company, the William Randolph Hearst Foundation, the Don and Sybil Harrington Foundation, the H&R Block Foundation, the William T. Kemper Foundation, Commerce Bank, trustee, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, DST Systems, Inc., the Cooper Foundation, Maureen and Robert Decherd, the Helen Jones Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the state arts agencies of Arkansas, Kansas, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.

Mid-America Arts Alliance, founded in 1972, is a non-profit regional arts organization based in Kansas City, Missouri. It is governed by a board of directors drawn from its partner states of Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas. Major support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, participating state arts agencies, and leading foundations and corporations. For further information, visit the Mid-America Arts Alliance Web site at www.maaa.org or contact Dan Billingsley at (816) 421-1388.