Love Letter to Lévi-Strauss

Artist Gina Gilmour American, born 1948

Date1976

MediumOil on canvas

Dimensions62 1/2 x 69 in. (158.8 x 175.3 cm)
Frame: 63 3/4 x 70 1/4 x 2 1/2 in. (161.9 x 178.4 x 6.4 cm)

ClassificationsPaintings

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest)

Object numberG.76.24.1

On View

Not on view

Label Text
Parrots on notebook paper - a magnetic image that raises questions. Answers, or at least ideas to consider, have been provided by the artist. The title helps. Gilmour explains that Claude Lévi-Strauss is associated with structural analysis, a school of thought in opposition to that of phenomenology. Her painting represents an arch dialogue between these two perspectives, in which "the nobility of rational efforts" is not allowed to eclipse "the perseverance of beauty." (To oversimplify: thinking should not overwhelm feeling.)

Gilmour regards the painting as a love letter from the phenomenal world (the exotic birds) to the analytical world (the lined paper), "a seductive reminder of the initiating romance that must be at the core of our investigation" of the world.
ProvenanceCreated Charlotte, NC, 1976; collection of the artist; sold to NCMA, 1976.Published ReferencesThirty-Ninth Annual North Carolina Artists Exhibition (exhibition catalogue) (Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 1976), cat. no. 39, illus. (b-w).

Edgar Peters Bowron, ed., Introduction to the Collections (Chapel Hill: published for the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1983), illus. (b-w) 293.

United States Embassy Copenhagen: ART in Embassies Exhibition (Washington, DC: ART in Embassies Program, U.S. Department of State, 2007), illus. (color), 14 and front cover.
Exhibition HistoryRaleigh, NC, North Carolina Museum of Art, "Thirty-Ninth Annual North Carolina Artists Exhibition," December 2, 1976–January 9, 1977, cat. no. 39, illus. (b-w) (Gold Medal award).

Winston-Salem, NC, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, January 7–24, 1978.

Princeton, NJ, E. R. Squibb & Sons, Inc., "The Art of North Carolina," April 25–May 31, 1981; Durham, NC, Duke University Museum of Art, June 11–July 29, 1981.

Raleigh, NC, North Carolina Museum of Art, "Paintings with a Social Conscience from the Permanent Collection," February 7–July 5, 1987.

Raleigh, NC, North Carolina Museum of Art, Mary Duke Biddle Education Gallery, "Kaleidoscope: Pattern in Art," September 15, 1988–June 25, 1989.

United States Embassy Copenhagen, ART in Embassies Program, July 14, 2006–February 6, 2009.
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