marlene mountain
marlene mountain 25-year retrospective
press release
hayes macmillan art of boone north carolina
april 7-may 21 2000

marlene mountain 25-year retrospective

For Release Week of April 2-8
For information, contact Megan Hayes (M-F, 8-5, call 262-6084, x104)

RETROSPECTIVE SHOWS 25 YEARS OF MARLENE MOUNTAIN'S FEMINIST ART

Hayes MacMillan Art of Boone announces the first ever retrospective of the visual works of the world-renowned, feminist artist and poet, Marlene Mountain. Beginning April 7, 8 and 9, the exhibition will be open to the public on weekends April 7 - May 21. The opening weekend will feature a gallery talk at 8pm Saturday, April 8, and guided tours may be scheduled for private and educational groups throughout the exhibition's run.

Marlene Mountain is an artist and poet from Hampton, Tennessee, who obtained her bachelor of fine arts in painting at the University of Oklahoma Norman, and her master of arts in painting at the University of North Dakota, where she also taught drawing and design courses. Her travels, the influence of which is evident in her work, include four months in Japan, as well as travels to France, Aruba, Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. Her work has been exhibited in New York City at the IBM Gallery of Science and Art and at New York University's Grey Art Gallery, and her poetry and visuals have been published in Britain, Japan, Poland, South America, Canada and the United States. She was recently named one of the 25 Outstanding Poets of Global Haiku, and has been called 'the woman who reinvented haiku' because she introduced topical feminist and environmental issues into haiku and related poetic forms, and began to arrange the words into visual formats in the early seventies.

Mountain's work has evolved from two-dimensional design and minimalism in paintings, photography and short, non-haiku poems created in the fifties and sixties, to explorations of haiku and painting which, as she says, are intrinsically bound. The majority of her works have been created in series. Since 1979, says Mountain, 'I've written my paintings and painted my writings.' The retrospective exhibition at Hayes MacMillan Art will include works from her visual and word series created from the seventies through the nineties.

Mountain has been a major influence in the regional experience with what she calls the shevolution for more than twenty years. She was one of the original participants of Hard to Find, the volunteer regional art advocacy group, and has also exhibited numerous times at Appalachian State University.

Public gallery hours for this exhibit are Fridays and Saturdays 11am-7pm and Sundays 12pm-5pm. Hayes MacMillan Art is located at 125 S. Depot Street in downtown Boone. For more information or to schedule a group tour, call 265-4596 or email [email protected].

A reading of Marlene's linked haiku and haiku sequences by participants of SEWSA on
Saturday, April 8th at Applachian State University 5 pm.

Megan E. Hayes
Assistant Director, Marketing and Public Relations
Office of Cultural Affairs An Appalachian Summer Festival
Appalachian State University
Boone, North Carolina

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