Randy Shull
EDUCATION:
B.F.A., Rochester Institute of Technology Rochester, NY 1986
A.A., Lincoln College Lincoln, IL 1982
SOLO EXHIBITIONS:
Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA 2009
Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, Washington 2009
San Francisco Museum of Craft & Design, , San Francisco, CA 2008
Gregg Museum of Art & Design, Raleigh, NC 2008
Tercera Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2000
Hodges Taylor Gallery, Charlotte, NC 2000
John Elder Gallery, New York, NY 1998
Zone One Gallery, Asheville, NC 1998
Albers Fine Arts, Memphis, TN 1997
Mint Museum of Art, ArtCurrents, Charlotte, NC 1997
Hodges Taylor Gallery, Charlotte, NC 1996
Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York, NY 1995
Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York, NY 1994
Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA 1993
Cannon Gallery, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 1992
Hodges Taylor Gallery, Charlotte, NC 1991
Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA 1991
EXHIBITIONS:
SOFA Chicago John elder Gallery, New York, NY 1999
The Chair Show III Asheville, NC 1999
Art Craft Art National Museum of Craft Jyaskla, Finland 1999
1998-2001
Celebrating the Creative Spirit Mobile Museum of Art Mobile, AL
Traveling to: Telfair Museum of Art Savannah, GA
Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts Montgomery, AL
Museum of Western Virginia Roanoke, VA
Columbus Museum Columbus, GA
Mississippi Museum of Art Jackson, MS
1998 Body & Soul Asheville Art Museum Asheville, NC
SOFA Chicago John Elder Gallery
1997 Form Function or Metaphor Paint Creek Art Center Rochester, MI
SOFA Chicago albers Fine Arts Memphis, TN
1996 Contemporary Lights Congregation Beth Israel Houston, TX
Aqueaeous Artists Wustem Museum Racine, WI
1995 Playing for Keeps Albers Fine Arts Memphis, TN
Fellowship Award City Gallery of Contemporary Art Raleigh, NC
1994 NEA/Southern Arts Federation Artists Fellowship Exhibition
1993 Craft of the Carolinas, Gibbs Museum of Art Charleston, SC
Conservation by Design R.I.S.D. Museum Providence, RI
Image-Material Eastern Illinois University Charleston, IL
Art Miami Leonora Vega Gallery San Juan, Puerto Rico
1992 Just Plane Screwy Wustem Museum Racine, WI
Furniture as Art Montgomery College Bethesda, MD
North Carolina Artists Competition Fayetteville, NC
Artists in Residence Galleria Principal Altos De Chavon Dominican Republic
1990 Summer Invitational Snyderman Gallery Philadelphia, PA
AWARDS:
North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship Grant 1994
NEA Southern Arts Federation Grant 1993
Artist in Residence altos De Chavon La Romana, Dominican Republic
North Carolina Artists Competition Merit Award Fayetteville, NC 1992
Connomara Foundation Grant Dallas, TX 1991
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:
Juror for Penland Residents Penland School, NC
Guest Speaker Virginia Commonwealth University Richmond, VA
Guest Speaker Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC
Guest Speaker The Renwick of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
Adjunct Professor California College of Arts and Crafts Oakland, CA
1995 Instructor Anderson Ranch Aspen CO
Instructor Penland School, NC
1992 Guest Artist Yuma Symposium Yuma, AZ
Artist in Residence Altos De Chavon La Romana, Dominican Republic
Artist in Residence Penland School, NC
Guest Director Horizons Amherst, MA
slide Lecture Atlanta College of Art Atlanta, GA
1988 Artist in Residence University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA
COLLECTIONS:
American Craft Museum New York, NY
Asheville Art Museum Asheville, NC
Cousins Properties Incorporated, Charlotte, NC
Brroklyn Museum Brooklyn, NY
First Charter Charlotte, NC
Gulf Coast Museum of Art Bellair, FL
High Museum of Art Atlanta, GA
J.B. Speed Museum Louisville, KY
Mint Museum of Craft and Design Charlotte, NC
Kids Discover New York, NY
Contract Compression Austin, TX
Niagara Corporation Atlanta, GA
Private Collections in Australia, Japan, Columbia, Venezuala, Germany and USA
Randy Shull by Matthew Kangas
Randy Shull’s new painted, wall-mounted constructions represent a current culmination and triumph of his studio activities over the past decade. This award-winning North Carolina artist, with roots in Illinois, has traveled a considerable distance in his artistic evolution: from furniture to sculpture; from craft to art from un conventional and marginalized influences to a fully individual and unique vision addressing contemporary art issues.
Instead of making furniture for use, he uses furniture as imagery and allusion. Chairs stand in as figurative symbols, set in the place where the figure would be were he or whe present in each work. Poetic evocation of a humble, yet highly subjective, past is present in the recurrent chair image of the new work, along with reinforcing residues of the making process whether cutting, fashioning, pointing or sanding. More akin to tributes to American craft than straightforward examples of it, Shull’s new work is notable for its unapologetic materiality, its brilliant color sense and its transformation of found objects from everyday life into constructions that are purely for aesthetic contemplation rather than practical use. It is the representation of use, rather than his prior widely acclaimed adaptations of use through actual furniture, that characterizes the current pieces.
Building on a variety of earlier influences that critics, curators and art historians have written about with great perception folk furniture and vernacular art of the Caribbean, American south and Central Europe; Randy Shull now approaches his studio under-takings as compressed and condensed encounters between such sources and his own deepening sensibility.
All the new works share a centered, iconic composition that leads the eye to the assembly of found objets each piece honors. Dollhouse chairs, metal chocolate molds and other assorted gatherings from second-hand, thrift and antiques shops set up an atmosphere of remembrance and recovery that steers clear of nostalgia but still sticks with a warm, comforting memory of discarded functional objects which once has practical meaning associated with real work settings and childhood pastimes.
A consummate master of painted layers, Shull brings to each undertaking a mixture of intuition and plan. Within the repeated oval shapes (themselves recalling antique photo frames holding images of beloved family members), horizontal and vertical lines provide grid-, or lattice-like protection systems for the contained found objects. Sometimes resembling brick patterns, arrell struts, or even picket fence sticks, the painted backgrounds comprise an overlooked development for the 38- year-old artist: a concentration on abstract painting surfaces. Omitting the objects trouves for a moment, each work qualifies as self-contained abstract pointing in the manner of Frank Stella, Brice Mrden or Robert Ryman, for example. Shull’s art thus exists in a variety of art worlds: contemporary abstract painting, assemblage sculptures and the revival of handmade furniture.
But then, I have always felt that the repeated references to outsider art in his work by southern critics have been overstated. Today the bulk of each construction has more to do with creating an interesting painting than with summoning up allusions to the quaint, peeling country furniture so beloved throughout the South. The colors that bleed through between the bands of red, brown, orange, green and blue are carefully chosen, far more intellectual and methodical than the purportedly intuitive choices critics have commented on. In fact, despite references to wall cabinets or containers, the elongated shapes with curving ends or blunted tops suggest the unending varied shape solutions of senior America abstract painter Ellsworth Kelly, for example. Could it be that all these years Randy Shull has been gradually becoming an abstract artist of the highest order?
Leaving that possibility aside, it is still necessary to examine the meaning of these works when taking into consideration the hallowed central niches and what they contain. Ghost seems nothing less than a crematorium with a Windsor-back wooden armchair as the entry tray for the coffin. The overall brick pattern and upper chimney shape assures us of such a darker reading. The eight metal duck-shaped candy molds in Chocolate are behind barred windows in a long horizontal, prison-like band. The confined treatment of animals could be one interpretation; the screened-off way we experience animals or nature in general might be another. The smaller birds in Twin are also set against rigid horizontal lines even though the doors they perch upon are hinged and open up to a shallow empty space behind them.
The central hinged doors in several of the new works are a link to Shull’s earlier furniture but, this time around, they almost appear superfluous functional remnants, so overwhelmed by painterly intervention are the surrounding areas. Family’s six miniature chairs on the green door imply a coexistence of cultures within American society. Chinese, French, English and American chair styles are represented but all are covered in a uniform white. The vertically divided white and black trapezoidal panels around the green doors also make an oblique reference to biracial coexistence.
Finally, Banjo seems the most loaded with potential symbols and closest to the dark dream world assemblages of Joseph Cornell. A cowboy boot, a baseball bat, a miniature artists model, and even a tiny blue rhinoceros are all crammed into a vertical niche behind an old-fashioned front door. The banjo shape of the title represents another shift (as in Chocolate) to two-part backdrops that complicate two-dimentional space. The only piece with a human head peering out, Banjo presents a man caught up in or, indeed, imprisoned by memory. The chicken on a child’s toy block is beneath the toy cowboy boot, perhaps another reference to the domestication of nature or the confinement of living things.
Shull’s world never scolds or taunts us despite its periodic interpolations of darker juxtapositions of elements. But the possibilities of bittersweet and ominous memory are there, along with a ravishing command of materials that draws our eye in and quietly urges us to contemplate content as we endlessly appreciate more purely optical pleasures.