Alex Hallmark in Four Seasons
May 25 - November 30, 2024 | Rankin West Gallery
Alex Hallmark, Winter, 2008, cast bronze and patina.
Alexander Hallmark (1949–2021) was an artist and longtime resident of Blowing Rock. Deeply embedded in this community, his career in the studio, though developed later in life, produced many of the works of public art that serve as visual anchors throughout this village and the wider High Country.
Alex Hallmark in Four Seasons is a celebration of this son of Blowing Rock in a range of orbits. At its most essential, this exhibition works to elevate one of the artist's most successful yet largely unseen bodies of work, The Four Seasons (2007-2008). The quartet of sculptures—Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter—illustrate Hallmark’s simultaneous aptitude for the technically adept and the deeply humane. Beyond this central sculptural installation, the surrounding walls narrate the most crucial elements of the artist’s story with special attention to the technical processes used to produce his cast bronze sculptural work, including models, molds, and tools. Largely self-taught, any discussion of Hallmark’s work requires an understanding of the artist’s life, and information gleaned from collected oral histories will weave that timeline through interpretive text, didactics, and a map of Hallmark’s robust body of public art throughout the region.
Beyond the gallery, the exhibition will be bolstered by a robust series of programs including a Community Day event with the WNC Sculpture Center, as well as a lecture on the history of cast metal sculpture by artist and Executive Director of the Western North Carolina Sculpture Center, Joseph Bigley.