Home arrow Arts arrow Tissue becomes art in Freelon Asante exhibit
Tissue becomes art in Freelon Asante exhibit E-mail
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Water-stained tissue paper, discovered in her grandmother’s basement, did not look like ruin to Maya Freelon Asante.

Rather, the Baltimore-based artist and Durham native foresaw what beautiful stains she could create by exposing tissue paper to water.

 image 2
 
Maya Freelon Asante, Brandywine
Workshop Philadelphia, 2008,
credit: Ryan Joseph
The public can see the results of Freelon Asante’s discovery in her solo exhibit “FREE,” Jan. 29 through March 27 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History.

The artist will attend a free public opening reception for the exhibit at 7 p.m. Jan. 29 at the center, located just west of the Morehead-Patterson Bell Tower off South Road.

Look also for Freelon Asante’s artistic family members at the reception. Her mother, Nnenna Freelon, a Grammy-nominated jazz vocalist, and her brother, Pierce Freelon, a hip-hop lyricist and UNC alumnus, will perform a musical collaboration. Both have performed at the center before. Her father, Durham architect Philip Freelon, designed the Stone Center building.

For “FREE,” Freelon Asante will combine tissue paper with photography and painting to create site-specific installations in the center’s Robert and Sallie Brown Gallery and Museum. Ranging from miniature to monumental in size, the works will have varying degrees of permanence and include fragile tissue paper sculptures and archival tissue-ink monoprints – a term coined by the artist.

 image 1
From “FREE”:
“Allan R. Freelon Sr.,”
tissue ink mono/photo
print, 12 inches by
20 inches, 2008,
by Maya Freelon Asante
 “‘FREE’ is only the third solo exhibition featured in the Robert and Sallie Brown Gallery and Museum since it opened in August 2004,” said Joseph Jordan, Ph.D., Stone Center director. “It is fitting that during the gallery’s fifth anniversary year, a fourth member of the Freelon family is featured at the center. ‘FREE’ – essentially, new interpretations of enduring themes – helps us to continue a conversation with elders, contemporary artists and emerging figures in the art world.”

One work in “FREE” will be a 20-inch by 12-inch likeness of Freelon Asante’s great-grandfather, Allan R. Freelon Sr., an impressionist painter, photographer and printmaker (1895-1960). In the artwork, Freelon Asante merges an old family photograph with her vibrant tissue monoprint, creating what she calls “a harmonious link between the past and the present.”

Freelon Asante also will be the Stone Center’s artist in residence this semester. She attended the North Carolina Governor’s School, Durham School of the Arts and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. She earned a master’s degree in fine arts at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She has taught design, mixed media and art history at Towson State and Morgan State universities in Maryland.

For more information, call (919) 962-9001.

Web sites: http://www.unc.edu/depts/stonecenter
http://www.freelonasante.com

Note: Freelon Asante can be reached for additional images and information at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and (919) 491-4209. She will be available for media previews of “FREE” on Jan. 21, 22 and 23.

Web site: http://www.brandywineworkshop.com/

Stone Center contact: Olympia Friday, (919) 962-7265, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
News Services contact: LJ Toler, (919) 962-8589