Thursday, June 16, 2022 @ 5:00 pm - 8:00 pm | Main Gallery

Join us to celebrate the opening of Will Wilson: Connecting the Dots, a mid-career retrospective of Diné (Navajo) photographer and community engagement artist Will Wilson.

An opening reception with the artist will be held on Thursday, June 16 from 5–8pm. The reception is free and open to the public, with a suggested $10 donation. Forsyth Seafood will be on-site serving dinner, and The Exquisite Taste will be serving hand-crafted cocktails.

 A prolific artist with a wide range of technical experience, Wilson presents an artistic vision that is experimental both in technique and approach. His works use the very latest photographic technology and historical photographic processes, such as tintypes. This exhibition showcases photography and sculpture from three significant bodies of work created over the last two decades, addressing topics such as environmental justice, institutional racism, and Indigenous futurism.

"As artists and agents of Indigenous imagination, we are more than our shared histories of colonization," said artist Will Wilson. "There are other aspects of our experience that we must express and convey and these expressions must be received with respect. This necessity requires that we tell our stories well, with the vision of a people who understand the generative power of representation. It is in this particular process of self-expression that we practice Native representational sovereignty."

This exhibition was supported, in part, by The Ellsworth Kelly Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Charlotte SHOUT!, presented by Atrium Health and Bank of America, is a celebration of our city's creativity, diversity, and resilience. It will be a time to unify and restore the heartbeat of our vibrant city.

Charlotte SHOUT! is an aspirational multi-week festival designed to showcase our community by celebrating Charlotte's creativity and innovation through art, music, food, and ideas. Located primarily in Uptown Charlotte, SHOUT! will feature exceptionally curated programming from around the corner and around the world. 

The festival focuses on four key pillars: Ideas, Music, Food, and Art. The pillars highlight the extraordinary talents of internationally and locally acclaimed artists, dancers, musicians, poets, storytellers, photographers, chefs and thought leaders. Together, they are a feast for all one’s senses and all ages, serving up soulful music, tantalizing food, mind-blowing images, playful art installations, inspiring performances, and bold ideas. 

SECCA is proud to present Hanging Tree Guitars, the powerful exhibition of sculptures by NC–based artist, guitar maker and one-time blues musician Freeman Vines. The exhibition will be on view in SECCA's Main Gallery from June 10 through September 12, 2021, with an opening reception on Thursday, June 10.

Reception and exhibition admission is free, with a suggested $10 donation. Face coverings are required to be worn at all times while inside SECCA's buildings.

ABOUT HANGING TREE GUITARS

For decades, artist Freeman Vines has made guitars in his shop in eastern North Carolina using found objects, including wood from a tree where a man was once lynched. In addition to Vines' haunting sculptures, the Hanging Tree Guitars exhibition also includes a number of tintype photographs by Timothy Duffy. Freeman Vines' sculpture and words are the subject of the forthcoming book Hanging Tree Guitars by Freeman Vines with Timothy Duffy and Zoe Van Buren.

"To meet Freeman Vines is to meet America itself. An artist, a luthier and a spiritual philosopher, Vines' life is a roadmap of the truths and contradictions of the American South. He remembers the hidden histories of the eastern North Carolina land on which his family has lived since enslavement. For over 50 years Vines has transformed materials culled from a forgotten landscape in his relentless pursuit of building a guitar capable of producing a singular tone that has haunted his dreams. From tobacco barns, mule troughs, and radio parts he has created hand-carved guitars, each instrument seasoned down to the grain by the echoes of its past life. In 2015, Vines befriends photographer Timothy Duffy and the two begin to document the guitars, setting off a mutual outpouring of the creative spirit. But when Vines acquires a mysterious stack of wood from the site of a lynching, Vines and Duffy find themselves each grappling with the spiritual unrest and the psychic toll of racial violence living in the very grain of America." – The Bitter Southerner in association with Music Maker

This exhibition is organized by the Music Maker Relief Foundation. Music Maker has mounted over 50 exhibitions across the U.S. in the last 6 years, including exhibitions at the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Huntsville Museum of Art, the Morris Museum of Art, and the New York Library for the Performing Arts.