Weatherspoon Art Museum Hosts Dario Robleto : Chrysanthemum Anthems

Wednesday, 06 September 2006 07:34

Greensboro, NC — The Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro presents Dario Robleto: Chrysanthemum Anthems, a solo exhibition of sculpture by this acclaimed San Antonio-based artist that focuses on symbols of grief and mourning connected to U.S. soldiers of war.  The works in the exhibition integrate the ephemeral by-products of past wars—excavated shrapnel and bullet lead, soldiers’ uniforms, telegrams and love letters home, mourning clothing, and hair lockets—and harken back to the aesthetics of material culture in antebellum era America.

Robleto is heavily influenced by DJ culture and the theory and practice of mixing and sampling; to enter his world is to understand that “everything is made from something”—that a piece of music (even without the sound) has a composer, a score, instruments— and that all of this, on a molecular level, persists throughout time, even as it mutates over the years.  As Barry Schwabsky writes about the artist in Artforum, his work acts, “as if to claim that a person's soul must be re-embodied in the flowers that have sprouted from his corpse.”  The artist’s extreme care and craftsmanship makes his work extremely convincing as actual artifacts.  But Robleto’s intention is neither to deceive us nor to evoke nostalgia for the past; rather, it is to insist upon and reinforce the vital relevance of the past to the present, and to our future.

Dario Robleto: Chrysanthemum Anthems will travel to the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (March 11 – June 24, 2007) and the Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN (August 25 – November 4, 2007).  A unique 64-page catalogue, designed by PictureBox, Inc. in collaboration with the artist and produced with the support of D’Amelio Terras, New York and Inman Gallery, Houston, includes an essay by Weatherspoon curator Xandra Eden and full color images of Robleto’s recent work.  Distributed by D.A.P.

This exhibition is part of the Falk Visiting Artist series, a program produced collaboratively since 1982 by the Weatherspoon Art Museum and the Art Department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.  Exhibition dates September 24 – December 17, 2006.

Artist’s Bio
Dario Robleto (b. 1972, San Antonio, Texas) received a BFA from the University of Texas-San Antonio in 1997. Recent solo exhibitions include Eunich Euthanasia, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Wichita (2004); Say Goodbye to Substance, Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York (2003); A Surgeon, A Scalpel, and a Soul, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2002); and I Thought I Knew Negation Until You Said Goodbye, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2001).  Group exhibitions include Ahistoric Occasion, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), North Adams (2006-7); 2004 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2004); Treble, Sculpture Center, New York (2004); Rock My World, California College of Arts and Crafts, San Francisco (2002); Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle (2002); and One Planet under a Groove: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art, Bronx Museum of the Arts (2001).  Robleto is represented by D’Amelio Terras, New York, Inman Gallery, Houston, and ACME, Los Angeles. Robleto lives and works in San Antonio.

About the Weatherspoon Art Museum
The Weatherspoon Art Museum at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro has one of the foremost collections of modern and contemporary art in the Southeast.  The Weatherspoon provides an opportunity for audiences to consider artistic, cultural, and social issues of our time as it enriches the life of our university and community.  The Weatherspoon Art Museum was founded in 1941. A bequest in 1950 from the renowned collection of Claribel and Etta Cone, which included prints and bronzes by Henri Matisse and other works on paper by American and European modernists, helped to establish the Weatherspoon’s permanent collection.

Visit our website at: http://weatherspoon.uncg.edu