JUNE 11 – AUGUST 7, 2024

Opening Reception with the Curator
Tuesday, June 11, 5 – 7 PM

SOCO Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of New North State, an exhibition curated by Marshall N. Price, Chief Curator and Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. The exhibition features new work by artists Kennedi Carter, Stephen Hayes, Jim McDowell, Damian Stamer, Saba Taj, and Lien Truong. The gallery will host a public opening reception with the curator and artists on June 11th from 5 - 7 PM.

New North State is titled  in  reference to the “Old North State,” a moniker given to North Carolina during the colonial period. Intended to denote the northern region of the Carolinas after they were cleaved into North and South, the name carries with it painful and traumatic associations of an antebellum past. For some, this history is reason to believe in lost causes and misguided narratives. The artists in New North State, however, envision the past, present, and future differently; they represent a new understanding of these concepts. 

While not every one of them directly addresses specific historical narratives, this intergenerational group of artists articulate a South that reckons with its past and looks ahead to an aspirational future. Collectively, these artists, Kennedi Carter, Stephen L. Hayes, Jim McDowell, Damian Stamer, Saba Taj, and Lien Truong  represent new approaches, new futures, and ultimately, a new North State.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

KENNEDI CARTER

Kennedi Carter is an artist and photographer, currently based in the American South. A Durham, North Carolina native by way of Dallas Texas, Carter’s primary focus is on Black subjects. Her work highlights the aesthetics and sociopolitical aspects of Black life as well as the overlooked beauties of the Black experience: skin, texture, trauma, peace, love and community. Her work aims to reinvent notions of creativity and confidence in the realm of Blackness. Carter's photography has been featured in GQ, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, British Vogue and more.

STEPHEN HAYES

Multi-disciplinary artist Stephen Hayes earned a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture at Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta. His thesis exhibition, "Cash Crop," has been traveling and exhibiting for nearly a decade. Hayes uses three symbols in his work: a pawn, an ear of corn, and a horse to explore America's use and misuse of Black bodies, Black minds, and Black labor. Artists, he believes, are as much translators as they are creators. Hayes has been teaching for over a decade and is currently Associate Professor of Sculpture at Duke University. He is the 2020 winner of the 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art awarded by the Gibbes Museum of Art (Charleson, SC).

JIM MCDOWELL

A studio potter and teacher for over thirty-five years, ​Jim McDowell, aka the Black Potter, specializes in creating unique face jugs and folk art representative of his family history and African-American background as it relates to slavery in America. McDowell earned an Associate of Art degree from Mt. Aloyisius College, and his work has been displayed in art centers and museums across the country and in Europe, among them the Nasher Museum of Art, the Cubitt Gallery, London, England; 4-F Gallery, Los Angeles; Walter Anderson Museum of Art, Ocean Springs, MS; and others. He is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Museum Grant and awards from the Heinz Foundation. McDowell has taught at the Chautauqua Institution, the Winterthur Museum, and Warren Wilson College, among others, and has presented programs at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC, and Touchstone Center for the Arts in Pennsylvania.

DAMIAN STAMER

Damian Stamer received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Jacob K. Javits fellow in 2013 and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Herberger Institute of Art and Design and Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University as a National Merit Scholar in 2007. He also studied at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts as a Fulbright grantee, and the State Academy of Art and Design in Stuttgart, Germany as a Rotary Ambassadorial scholar. Recent solo exhibitions include Damian Stamer: Ruminations, The Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC (2023); Collaborations 2, Koki Arts, Tokyo, Japan (2023); New Sharon Church Rd., Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Philadelphia, PA (2022); And Then It Wasn’t, SOCO Gallery, Charlotte, NC (2021); Returning, Koki Arts in Tokyo, Japan (2019): Unseen, Craven Allen Gallery, Durham, NC (2019); Interiors, SOCO Gallery, Charlotte, NC (2018); A Stone’s Throw, Gallerie Michael Schultz, Berlin, Germany (2016). Stamer’s work was included in State of the Art 2020, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, The Momentary, Bentonville, AR (2020) and Drawn: Concept & Craft, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Winston-Salem, NC (2020). Stamer’s paintings explore themes of memory and impermanence through formal and conceptual approaches. Detailed architectural forms reminiscent of his childhood memories of the South are combined with gestural brushstrokes that push and pull the images into existence. The artist lives and works in Durham, North Carolina. 

SABA TAJ

Saba Taj is a visual artist based in Durham, NC. Inspired by beauty, queerness, and Islam, Taj engages with representation as a resilience practice. Their work includes mixed-media drawing, painting, and collage, as well as sewing and performance. Through these techniques, Taj explores the liminality of minoritized individuals as an embodiment of resistance, hope and possibility. The artist received their MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel and their BA from North Carolina Central University. They are a 2023 Brightwork Fellow and have exhibited at the Nasher Museum, the Gatewood Center, Greensboro, the Sumter Art Gallery, SC, and elsewhere.

LIEN TRUONG

Lien Truong’s art practice examines cultural and material ideologies and notions of heritage. Her work blends painting techniques, materials and philosophies, and military, textile and art histories; creating hybrid forms interrogating the relationship between aesthetics and doctrine. Her paintings have been presented in numerous exhibitions, including the Nasher Museum of Art, the National Portrait Gallery, North Carolina Museum of Art, Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Oakland Museum of California, Cameron Art Museum, Art Hong Kong, Sea Focus in Singapore, Southern Exposure, Nhà Sàn Collective and Galerie Quynh in Vietnam. Truong is the recipient of a 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, fellowships from the Institute of the Arts and Humanities, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Jack and Gertrude Murphy Fine Arts Fellowships; and residencies at the Oakland Museum of California and the Marble House Project. Her work is featured in several publications including Art Asia Pacific, The San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Oakland Tribune, New American Paintings, and ARTit Japan. 

ABOUT THE CURATOR

MARSHALL N. PRICE

Marshall N. Price is the Chief Curator and Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and serves as adjunct faculty in the university’s Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies.

He received a Ph.D. in Art History from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Before joining the Nasher Museum, Price was Curatorial Assistant at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and from 2003 until 2014 held the position of Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Academy Museum, New York.

He has organized numerous exhibitions including Roy Lichtenstein: History in the Making, 1948-1960, Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush, Colour Correction: British and American Screenprints, 1967-75, Jeffrey Gibson: Said the Pigeon to the Squirrel, and John Cage: The Sight of Silence, among others.