Double Exhibition Opening Reception: Thursday, February 2 at 6:00pm

The Gregg Museum invites you to an opening reception to celebrate the first exhibitions of 2023 with hors d’oeuvres, live music, and poems by the Poetry Fox! 

True Likeness, coming to the Gregg Museum from the Van Every/ Smith Galleries at Davidson College, presents an exhibition of contemporary portraits from diverse makers in a variety of media including video, photography, painting, collage, installation, sculpture, printmaking, and drawing. Artists, some familiar, others more on the fringe of the art world, hail from all over the United States. Their own identities, and those presented through their works, provide a snapshot of who we are as a country. The exhibition took shape over the last few years as overt and coded hate speech became congruent with one of the most divisive elections of our time. For this reason, it became increasingly apparent that highlighting and celebrating diversity was paramount.

This is Not: Aldwyth in Retrospect celebrates the life and work of the one-name artist, Aldwyth. Now in her mid-eighties, Aldwyth has lived and worked alone in an octagonal house overlooking a salt marsh on one of South Carolina’s sea islands since 1980. For most of her adult life she has maintained her seclusion from the larger art world while utilizing the history of art and ideas as a catalyst for complex found-object sculptures and increasingly epic-scaled collages that often recall medieval manuscripts writ large.

This retrospective spans nearly seventy years of Aldwyth’s work, beginning with photography and moving through experimental painting, assemblage, and collage while touching on personal themes and fascinations that have remained remarkably consistent throughout her career. A tireless innovator, Aldwyth’s self-imposed rules both limited and liberated her, allowing her work to be self-contained and self-referential. Each piece is an illustration of the description that defines it, and vice-versa.