Alun Be, Visiting Artist in Residence

Empowering Women
March 6 – April 25
Upfront Gallery

First Friday Gallery Walks:
March 6  + April 3 | 6-10pm

Sponsored by PricewaterhouseCoopers

Alun Be, Madame Badiane

To coincide with the major traveling exhibition Good as Gold: Fashioning Senegalese Women, opening at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Senegalese artist and photographer Alun Be will be at Artspace for a month-long residency. While in residence, Be will collaborate with community organizations to continue work on his series, Empowering Women.

Alun Be is an artist who strives to portray African modernity. Born Alioune Ba in 1981 in Dakar, Senegal, Be credits the development of his oeuvre largely to his French, American, and West African upbringing. Be’s parents did not believe art was a stable career, pushing him to pursue an M.A. in Architecture. After two years as an architect in Senegal, a move to Denmark sparked his love for photography. Since then, Be has exhibited at the Milan Universal Exposition (2015), the Dakar Biennale (2018), the Museum of Contemporary Photography of Chicaco (2018), and others, and spoken at TEDxNapoli and TEDxWanChai Salon. His photography series deal largely with intergenerationality, female empowerment, and technology.

Site-Specific Installation:
Tedd Anderson

Davie St Entrance

Tedd Anderson’s mural features the iconic “dry space” characters for which the artist is known set in a landscape filled with swirling, topographic lines, jagged edges, and meditative objects and shapes. A banner with a poem scrawled on its surface runs through the piece, bringing the imagery into a cohesive whole.