To celebrate the opening of Dress Up, Speak Up: Costume and Confrontation, please join us at 21c Durham for a special lecture by artist Beverly McIver. There will be a reception from 6pm to 8pm and the lecture will begin at 6:30pm with opening remarks by 21c Museum Director and Chief Curator Alice Gray Stites, followed by an artist lecture with Beverly McIver at 6:45pm.

About the exhibition
Featuring painting, sculpture, photography, video and film, 21c Durham’s upcoming exhibition, Dress Up, Speak Up: Costume and Confrontation, on view through June 2017, includes works by 25 artists from more than a dozen countries. Bedecked and bejeweled, the figures populating Dress Up, Speak Up occupy fluid space and time, evoking past and present, fact and fiction, memory and desire, to illuminate the complexity of contemporary identity.

Whether clad in the stylized garb of Enlightenment-era Europe, the traditional coverings of ancient religious tradition, or the gender-bending bling of popular culture, these representations of self and other role-play in real time, reaching back through history to address prevailing personal, social, and political challenges. From Ebony G Patterson’s families, dancers, gangstas and deceased, to the philosophers, dandies and faerie conjured by Yinka Shonibare M.B.E., to portraits derived from allegory, autobiography, and the art canon by Titus Kaphar, Berni Searle, Erwin Olaf, Vivek Vilasini, Fahamu Pecou, and others, this pantheon of provocative and prophetic personages are costumed to enact and confront the legacy of embedded experience.

About the artist
Beverly McIver was born and raised in Greensboro, NC. She received a BA in Painting and Drawing from North Carolina Central University and a MFA in Painting and Drawing from Pennsylvania State University.  In 2007, she received an Honorary Doctorate from North Carolina Central University where she was a Professor of Art from 2007 to 2014. Currently the artist lives and works in Durham, NC where she is the Esbenshade Professor of the Practice of Visual Art at Duke University.

> Learn more about the exhibition
> RSVP and invite friends via facebook

Image: Beverly McIver (American), Past Tense, 2016. Oil on canvas.