The Road West: Julia Johnson & Anna Redwine

if ART presents The Road West: An exhibition of the Ancestor Project, with poems by Julia Johnson and drawings by Anna Redwine.

On view September 7 through September 29, 2019

Reception & Poetry Reading: Saturday, September 7, 5:00 – 7:00 p.m. | Conversation with poet & artist:  Sunday, September 29, 2:00 p.m.

For a preview, go to http://ifartgallery.blogspot.com

About the exhibition 

On Saturday evening, September 7, 5:00 – 7:00 p.m., if ART Gallery will open an exhibition with portrait drawings by Columbia artist Anna Redwine and poems by Redwine’s cousin, Kentucky poet Julia Johnson. During the reception, Johnson will present a poetry reading. On the last day of the exhibition, Sunday, September 29, 2:00 p.m., the public is invited to a conversation with Johnson and Redwine.

The exhibition is the result of an ongoing collaboration between the cousins based on their exploration of their ancestry in Southwest Ireland, expressed through poems by Johnson and ancestor drawings, based on self-portraits, by Redwine. The two New Orleans natives went to the Beara Peninsula in Southwest Ireland in January 2018, staying at an ancestral cottage renovated by cousins of their moms – three Sheehan sisters of New Hampshire, who inherited the place when a great uncle died. From that base in Reenkilla, on Kenmare Bay, the cousins straddled the Kerry – Cork county line, roaming where their ancestors roamed, distant relatives among their encounters. They tried to connect in a way with Capt. Jeremiah Sheehan, born to Irish immigrants in the United States, killed at 33 in Normandy during World War II, leaving behind their grandmother, their moms and a hole.

The cousins constructed family trees, all with errant branches, none of them quite correct. They talked to cousin Susan and distant cousin Noralene, to the owners of a pub, to a retired postmaster and his wife and to “the town documentarian,” as they call a man presumably in the know, but the findings weren’t always in sync. When they looked for Curly Mary, the cousins’ great-grandmother and the start of their search, the short supply of different names in graveyards was no help. They did find Mary’s home, though.

About the poet and artist:

Lexington, KY, poet Johnson (b. 1971) in 2004 won the George Garrett Fellowship of Southern Writers New Writing Award for her 2002 book of poems, Naming the Afternoon (Louisiana State University Press). Her two other books of poems are Subsidence (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2016) and The Falling Horse (Factory Hollow Press, 2012). Johnson has published some 80 poems in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Cincinnati Review, Poetry International, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, jubilat and Tin House. Her work as editor of Mississippi Review included a special issue on The Prose Poem and the anthology 30 Years of Mississippi Review. Johnson edited The Collected Poems of Jane Gentry (University Press of Kentucky, 2017). She teaches English at the University of Kentucky, where she was the founding director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. Johnson earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia and a BA from Hollins College.

Columbia, S.C., artist Redwine (b. 1978) has shown in dozens of exhibitions in such venues as the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Massachusetts; the Art Center ­– Highland Park in Chicago; Virginia’s Fredericksburg Center for the Creative Arts; the Fine Arts Center of Hot Springs in Arkansas; the Asian Fusion Gallery of the Asian Cultural Center and 404 Gallery, both in New York City; the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina in Columbia; the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia, in two exhibitions of selections from the State Art Collection, managed by the South Carolina Arts Commission; and the Columbia Museum of Art as part of Independent Spirits: Women Artists of South Carolina. Redwine’s current exhibition is her fifth solo show with if ART Gallery, two of which took place at Columbia’s now-defunct Gallery 80808/Vista Studios. In 2019, her work will be in Lines of Thought at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art Museum in South Korea and in a drawing exhibition at Indiana University Southeast in New Albany; she also will be a resident at the Program for Drawing Performance in Brighton, U.K. Redwine holds a BA in English from the University of Mississippi and an MFA and MBA from the University of South Carolina.