New Work by Connie Bostic
The local grand dame of modern visual art, Connie Bostic owned cutting-edge Zone one gallery in downtown Asheville in the ’90s, where she hosted an amazing array of local, national, and international talent, including no less than Robert Mapplethorpe and Keith Haring. Asheville Made last caught up with the avant-garde great grandmother, who works in a variety of media, while she was in family mode, making papier-mâché elephant tusks for a grandchild’s school play — and also exhibiting a series of unflinching painted portraits of domestic abuse. This fall, she shows new oils at Flood Gallery in a show running through the end of October. Bostic explores issues that are at once particular to a time and place and ominously universal. She notes in an artist’s statement, “This work has to do with growing up and the expectations one learns to deal with as a young girl. Bombarded with examples of glamour and sexuality, she is told to ‘act like a lady.’ She learns early that it is not acceptable to resist male authority and [that she must] wait for male advice or even permission before striking out on her own. She is vulnerable in so many ways …” The artist, who is in her eighties, goes on to note that “these messages are no longer as prevalent as they were a few generations ago, but they still lurk beneath the surface of our political and religious landscape.”
Flood Gallery, 850 Blue Ridge Rd., Black Mountain. floodgallery.org. 828-273-3332.
The exhibition is on display through Oct. 31.