William Christenberry: Site/Possession

Sign up for our monthly email list to receive gallery news and program information.

You gift matters! Support the Samek Art Gallery today.

William Christenberry: Site/Possession

Organized by the University of Virginia Art Museum

Curated by Andrea Douglas

August 26 – October 9, 2009

Since 1959 William Christenberry has, through his art practice, attempted to "possess" the Southern landscape and culture that has formed his identity. A native of Tuscaloosa, Ala., he has returned to Hale and Perry counties consistently for more than 40 years to document changes and refresh his inspiration. In this pursuit to fix his memory of place, Christenberry has developed a visual language that encompasses drawing, painting, prints, photographs, sculpture and installation, all of which are represented in this exhibition.

Site/Possession, unlike all previous exhibitions of Christenberry's work - which have primarily stressed the way in which his photographs, paintings, and constructions have described this lived environment - focuses on the artist's drawings, created between 1959 and 2006, and his Klan Room Tableau. Through his lyrical and forceful renderings of Southern trees, K buildings, memory forms, and Klan-related imagery, the exhibition explores the sensorial role of drawings as a medium through which he digests and expresses the culture and landscape that has both nourished and horrified him.

Christenberry is not interested in creating an image that reproduces the way a place actually looks. Working both intuitively and as a trained professional artist, he seeks to capture real feeling of a place. This is particularly true of the Klan Room Tableau, arguably Christenberry's most vociferous expression of social protest and emotive power. The installation can be seen as a means of exorcising the demons that have haunted the artist since his first encounter in 1960 with a Klansman as he neared the third floor of a Tuscaloosa courthouse.

Christenberry's work has been the focus of many recent exhibitions, including Passing Time: The Art of William Christenberry, a survey Smithsonian American Art Museum that recently completed a national tour. He is represented by Hemphill Fine Arts in Washington, D.C. and Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York City.