(Above) Julie Armbruster and R. Brooke Priddy-Conrad, Hambone Award, 2010, graphite, ink, and watercolor on paper mounted to wood panel, 8 x 8 x 1 inches, Gift of the Ray Griffin/Thom Robinson Collection

The WCU Fine Art Museum at Bardo Arts Center presents a live streaming artist talk and Q&A with Asheville-based artists, Julie Armbruster and R. Brooke Priddy Conrad, on Thursday, June 18 at 12 p.m. These artists have collaborated on many works in the past, including the works seen here, which are all part of the WCU Fine Art Museum permanent collection. These works will be featured in the upcoming fall 2020 exhibition, Cultivating Collections.

Julie Armbruster’s work focuses on painted narratives that celebrate weirdness and idiosyncrasy through depictions of cartoonish figures in a colorful, graphic style. Collaboration and cross-disciplinarity define the otherwise indefinable practice of artist, designer, dressmaker and entrepreneur, R. Brooke Priddy Conrad. Armbruster and Priddy Conrad have four collaborative works in the WCU Fine Art Museum collection, which will be included in the upcoming Cultivating Collections exhibition. These paintings were created as part of a creative exercise called the Newsworthy Drawing Club that Armbruster formed with Priddy-Conrad in 2007. As part of this exercise, the artists met weekly and selected an article from the news for the other person to draw. Over the course of an hour, they each created an 8 x 8 inch image inspired by the article and then switched canvases to add the final details to the other’s drawing. Each of the four works in the WCU Fine Art Museum’s collection were created in this fashion. 

Cultivating Collections is a multi-year series of exhibitions at the WCU Fine Art Museum that highlights specific areas of the WCU Fine Art Museum’s permanent collection of artwork. The 2019 version of Cultivating Collections focused on photography, artists books, and contemporary Native American art. In 2020, Cultivating Collections will feature paintings, ceramics, and work by Latinx and Latin American artists. Undergraduate students in the Exhibition Practicum course at WCU curated the paintings gallery. As part of the course, students selected works to display, interviewed artists, and evaluated strengths and opportunities for the collection. Featured artists in the paintings collection include Kenneth Noland, Rosemarie Beck, Julie Armbruster*, Shari Urquhart, Robert Godfrey, Anna Jensen, Margaret Curtis, Louis Finkelstein, Tom Pazderka, Jane Culp, Lewis Buck, Lois Dodd, Edith Neff, Bill Scott, Martha Neaves, Alli Good, Dustin Spagnola, and Martin DeWitt.

This event will stream live on multiple social media channels including the Facebook pages for the WCU Fine Art Museum , Bardo Arts Center, and Western Carolina University, along with the main WCU Youtube channel. Viewers will have the opportunity to ask the artists questions and have them answered live on air! Simply leave questions in the comment sections during the live video streams to participate.