“Connie Bostic is one of North Carolina’s most prolific, most important, and most enduring artists,” said Arnold Wengrow, professor emeritus of drama. “Since 1970 she has produced over 600 paintings, drawings, and mixed-media works of great originality.”
Wengrow, alongside Carrie Tomberlin, senior lecturer of art and art history, curated “To Be An Artist Means to Never Avert Your Eyes” for the S. Tucker Cooke gallery in Owen Hall at UNC Asheville.
The exhibit will run from February 23 to March 29, with panel discussion on Connie’s work on February 23 at 5 p.m., followed by an opening reception from 6-8 p.m.
The panel, moderated by Wengrow, includes Margaret Curtis, renowned painter and recipient of the 2021-2016 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship; Alice Sebrell, photographer and director of preservation at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center; and Kyle Sherard ’10, former visual arts columnist for the Mountain Xpress and assistant district attorney of Buncombe County.
Bostic grew up in Spindale, North Carolina but relocated to Fairview, just outside of Asheville, in 1970. She passed away early in the morning of January 14, 2024 in her beloved Fairview home, “Mayhem Manor.”
“Much of her work is autobiographical: what it means to grow up — specifically to grow up female — in a small town in North Carolina,” Wengrow wrote about her, “Her two most compelling series, “The Bostic Girls” and the 240-panel “In the Chicken Yard,” capture girlhood in rural Spindale, North Carolina. In both series, full-length figures emerge from a ground of indeterminate space. They are fragile, yet firmly planted. This contradiction—fragility and sturdiness—gives these works tension.”
She had always had a love of art and drawing, and began pursuing it seriously when she enrolled at UNC Asheville, graduating with a bachelor’s in studio art in 1989 before receiving a masters in painting from Western Carolina University in 1990, according to Wengrow’s biography of the artist.
Bostic has been described as the “grandmother of the Asheville art scene,” according to her obituary. In the mid-to-late eighties she established her first studio off Biltmore Avenue, helped administer WCU’s World Gallery, and brought the first contemporary art gallery to Asheville when she established Zone One Contemporary. She worked with the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center for over 30 years. She would later establish a studio in Fairview where she taught students.
Bostic committed herself to building community and frequently tackled sociopolitical issues, such a racial injustice, poverty and gun violence in her works.
“I avoid confrontation whenever possible, but I do tend to speak my mind when I think it matters. As for the paintings, they just come. Here’s a quote that I love—and I don’t know who said it—“To be an artist is never to avert your eyes.” I believe that,” Bostic said in an interview with Robert Godfrey. “I tend to think of painting as a form of communication, a way of expressing things that are important to me.”