Book Club: Hayward Oubre: Structural Integrity Edited by Katelyn D. Crawford
Thu, March 12th at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Free
NOMA’s book club meets monthly to discuss fiction and non-fiction books related to art in the museum’s collection and exhibitions.
This month’s book club selection is the exhibition catalogue for Hayward Oubre: Structural Integrity. This ground-breaking book is devoted to the life and work of Hayward Oubre, bringing together important examples of Oubre’s sculptures, paintings, and prints to explore his career, creative process, and legacy.
About NOMA’s Book Club
NOMA’s book club is an informal group open to anyone on a month-to-month basis. You do not have to attend every meeting or read every book to participate. In addition to monthly book discussions, the book club meets periodically for curatorial programs related to the book selections.
Books are selected in advance and planned according to the museum’s exhibition schedule. Participants are expected to procure their own copy of the titles. Selections are also available at the NOMA Museum Shop, where museum members receive a 10% discount.
Meetings are held in person or via Zoom. All meetings begin at 12 pm. For more information or questions, please email programs@noma.org.
About the Book
Hayward Oubre: Structural Integrity
Best known for his wire sculptures, Hayward L. Oubre, Jr. (1916–2006), was an important Black American artist and educator, who has until now received little attention from scholars and museums. He created sculptures, paintings, and prints that tested the bounds of each of these mediums. These works share a previously untold history of American modernism rooted in the South. Academically-trained, Oubre worked with an everyday material—wire coat hangers—that led some early critics to associate his sculpture with folk art, despite wire rising to prominence as a material for modernist sculptors in this period. While making his art he also trained a subsequent generation of artists through his teaching, first at Alabama State College (now Alabama State University), from 1949 to 1965, and then at Winston-Salem State University, from 1965 to 1981, both Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Within Oubre’s story is a history of Alabama art shaping American art that has never been written. This new volume, and its accompanying exhibition, will begin to tell this story, laying the foundation for future projects on the work of Black artists in Alabama and the South.
-description from the Birmingham Museum of Art
About Katelyn D. Crawford
Katelyn D. Crawford, PhD, is the William Cary Hulsey Curator of American Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art, AL.