Randy Shull, Large Carved Wood Menorah Sculpture, 2005

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Randy Shull is an artist who works fluidly between a variety of mediums, including furniture design, spatial design, painting, and … Read more Randy Shull is an artist who works fluidly between a variety of mediums, including furniture design, spatial design, painting, and landscape design. He is highly acclaimed for his rich and sensual use of color and space. Awarded a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship in 1994, an NEA Southern Arts Federation grant in 1995, and a master residency at Oregon School of Arts & Crafts in Portland, Randy has also had four solo shows in New York in the past decade. His work is included in a number of important museum collections including The Brooklyn Museum; The High Museum in Atlanta; The Renwick Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.; The Mint Museum of Craft & Design in Charlotte; Racine Museum of Art; The Gregg Museum of Art & Design, and Museum of Art and Design in New York. Randy stays involved in the local community by serving on the board of the Asheville Art Museum. Randy maintains studios in Asheville, NC and Merida, Mexico. In 2008 and 2009 Randy’s work was the subject of a twenty-year retrospective that opened on January 24th at the Gregg Museum of Art & Design at NC State, and traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Craft & Design as well as The Bellview Art Museum and The Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Reviews of the exhibition can be found in the Raleigh News and Observer and the San Francisco Chronicle. The craft revival in the 1920s brought a renewed interest in traditional native crafts and folk art at places like the John C. Campbell Folk School and Penland School of Crafts. Using pocket knives, carvers transformed scraps of wood into dolls and toys for their children. As tourism developed, carving became an important source of income, and successful carving centers developed in Cherokee, Asheville, Tryon and Brasstown. Seaborn Bradley was known for making war clubs, tomahawks and walking sticks; Will West Long and his son Allen made masks used in native celebrations; and Hayes Lossiah crafted traditional Cherokee blowguns, darts, bows and arrows. Goingback Chiltoskey and Amanda Crowe became influential teachers for the Cherokee community. Eleanor Vance and Charlotte Yale, coming to N.C. most likely as missionaries, established Biltmore Estate Industries in Asheville in 1905, initially focusing their production on carving and later adding weaving. In 1915, the pair moved south of Asheville to establish Tryon Toy-Makers and Wood-Carvers. In the 1930s, several folk art wood carvers were known in and around Brasstown, home of the John C. Campbell Folk School, including Floyd Laney, William Julius “W. J.” Martin, who carved traditional animals, and influential carving teacher Parker Fisher. Other carvers, like Herman and Mabel Estes, made mostly functional items including serving platters. “Brasstown Carvers” was established in the 1950s, known for its small, highly polished animals and nativity scene figures. Today, the Southern Highlands Craft Guild and Piedmont Craftsmen give visibility to the finest wood artists in the state. The aptly named Woody family, now in its seventh generation of crafting traditional wooden rockers and chairs by hand without nails or glue, maintains its business in Spruce Pine while the work of high-end Asheville furniture artists like Randy Shull and Brent Skidmore appears in venues like the Mint Museum Uptown in Charlotte. Renowned Saluda woodturner Stoney Lamar creates art with a lathe, and Bynum outsider artist Clyde Jones invents “critters” with his chainsaw. All have earned international recognition. A blurring of lines between craft and visual art also is evident today. Casar resident Bob Trotman began his career as a furniture maker but now fashions compelling sculpture using wood as his medium. Chapel Hill sculptor Patrick Dougherty has craft at the core of his work, weaving saplings to create monumental sculpture. SELECTED COLLECTIONS AND INSTALLATIONS The Gregg Museum of Art & Design, Raleigh, North Carolina Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC Museum of Art and Design, New York, New York Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, North Carolina Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia Mint Museum of Craft + Design, Charlotte, North Carolina Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile Alabama Private Collections: Australia, Japan, Columbia, Venezuela, Germany, and USA See less