McKinney Avenue Contemporarypresents a Wordspace sponsored exhibit, curated by Charles Dee Mitchell: Between Covers: An Exhibition for Smart Phones and the Internet. The exhibit introduces a new online registry that celebrates the diversity of North Texas published writers, from poets and novelists, to the authors of cookbooks and textbooks. Through the wonders of smart phone technology, attendees can access videos of local writers and literary organizations on the wall-mounted QR codes that, when read by smart phones, take the viewer to videos or websites In the New Works Space
The WordSpace exhibit is on display with two other Charles Dee Mitchell-curated exhibits at the MAC: “Bill Davenport and the Golden Treasures of the Pharaohs” by Bill Davenport and Selections from the “Seals of the Philosophers” by Douglas MacWithey.
Part roadside attraction, part excavation, Bill Davenport fills the large gallery with specimens unearthed from contemporary mass society. Inspired by Harry Burton’s photographs of the King Tutankamun excavation, the Houston based artist utilizes steel, paper mache and found objects to presume the chaos and mysticism of ordinary man’s treasures.
Bill Davenport is a Houston based artist who holds a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and an M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts. He works as a contributing editor for Glasstire and a freelance art critic for the Houston Chronicle. Bill has been exhibited in over 60 exhibitions beginning his career as a resident at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in the 1991 Core Fellows Exhibition and most recently at the Inman Gallery in Houston and the Angstrom Gallery in Dallas.
The Seals of the Philosophers was a collaborative effort of Douglas MacWithey and Charles Dee Mitchell for over a year before MacWithey’s unexpected death in August 2010. Illustrations from Opus medico-chymicum of Johann Daniel Mylius, a 3000 page alchemical text published in the 17th Century, inspired the past five years of MacWithey’s studio work. Selections from the Seals of the Philosophers is an in depth look at that work, including sculpture, drawings, and notebooks.
Douglas MacWithey was born in Ames, Iowa, in 1952 and received his MFA from Southern Methodist University in Dallas. MacWithey was part of the Dallas art scene from the 1980’s, although this was to be his first exhibition here in over ten years. Recent exhibitions include “Douglas MacWithey: Selections from the Seals of the Philosphers” at testsite in Austin and “Douglas MacWithey: Sculpture and Drawings” at Barry Whistler Gallery..
The opening reception will be Saturday, September 17 from 5:30pm to 7:30pm at The MAC galleries, located at 3120 McKinney Avenue, which is in the Uptown District of Dallas. Exhibitions will be on view through October 22.
Selections from Douglas MacWithey’s notebooks will be read Wednesday, September 21 from 6:00pm to 7:00pm by curator Charles Dee Mitchell, and the novelists David Searcy and Ben Fountain. The evening is a presentation of WordSpace. Immediately following the reading at The MAC there will be a reception from 7 to 9 pm at The Reading Room, 3715 Parry Avenue. “How it is the dead man suffers the loss of his loved ones”, MacWithey’s large three panel drawing from which the reading is taken, will be on view. The drawing dates from the 1980’s and has never been shown before. It will be exhibited at The Reading Room, a project space dedicated to the intersection of the visual and literary arts, through September 30.
The opening reception will be Saturday, September 17 from 5:30pm to 7:30pm.
The exhibit closes October 28th.
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