The Hard Edge & The Soft Line: A Retrospective of Maud Gatewood
June 28, 2024 - January 5, 2025 | Fort, Atwell, & Rankin East Galleries
Maud Gatewood, Untitled (Molly Skating), c. 1982, acrylic on canvas. Collection of Lee Fazzi & Christine Burns-Fazzi
Maud Gatewood (1934–2004) is an exceptional figure in the art history of North Carolina and the American Southeast. A painter of exacting technique with a keen eye for composition and cultural commentary, her pictures capture the Carolinas (and the expanding world beyond) across much of the 20th Century. A native of Yanceyville in Caswell County, NC, Gatewood’s paintings reveal rural landscapes and their denizens in the midst of transformation while also cleverly framing the experience of modern life with acerbic wit and a surprising wealth of empathy.
The Hard Edge & The Soft Line: A Retrospective of Maud Gatewood is a major undertaking by BRAHM. This retrospective project provides a comprehensive narrative of Gatewood's career, considering the evolution of her oeuvre and her significant contributions, as an artist and an educator, to the field of contemporary representational painting in North Carolina and the region. A recuperative exercise, the exhibition and its accompanying scholarship will feature a broad range of her works, including paintings, works on paper, and archival material, excavating Gatewood’s rigorous technical experimentation, coded but no less rich explorations of gender and sexuality, and reverence for depicting the built and natural landscapes of her native state and elsewhere.
Of particular interest to this exhibition are her landscape and figural studies, experimental use and application of paint, material assemblage, and pointed social commentary. However, Maud’s rich legacy cannot be wholly articulated in thematic analyses. The real hero of Gatewood’s body of work lies in the images themselves. Long undervalued in the larger canon of contemporary American painting, her work has been a favorite of regional art historians and collectors, and this project aims to rectify that dissonance and firmly situate the artist within the trajectory of pictorial development in American art.
With the collaboration of six public institutions and six private collections coupled with BRAHM’s Permanent Collection, the installation will feature approximately 40 works that represent the breadth of Gatewood’s career. Included on the checklist are loans from the North Carolina Museum of Art (Raleigh, NC), Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC), Gregg Museum of Art & Design (Raleigh, NC), Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem, NC), University of North Carolina at Charlotte (Charlotte, NC), and Guilford College (Greensboro, NC).
In concert with The Hard Edge & The Soft Line, the Museum will also produce an accompanying online exhibition catalog. This born-digital publication ensures that Gatewood’s life and work will be shared beyond those who see the exhibition in person. Including three new scholarly essays, recollections by colleagues, collectors, and leaders in the field, and a robust and extensively sourced timeline of her life, this permanent web-based wing of the museum will be a significant source for future research regarding Maud Gatewood. All visitors will receive a printed copy of an image from the exhibition and a QR code connecting them directly with this digital guide. This additional project supports BRAHM’s commitment to provide free admission to in-person visitors and free access to online resources.
This exhibition is generously supported by the Samuel M. & Alma Catsman Foundation Inc.
Maud Gatewood, After Rain, 1990, Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 72 in. (91.4 x 182.9 cm.)
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, Gift of Frances M. and William R. Roberson, Jr., 98.4.8