Tuesday, June 09, 2009

“Arcadian Monuments” on Exhibit

A series of 25 photographs of rustic buildings and old homesteads forgotten by time along the Appalachian landscape is currently on exhibit at Hunter Library.

“Arcadian Monuments” is the work of documentary photographer Anna Fariello. Over the past 20 years, Fariello has driven hundreds of miles along rural roads and byways in southern Virginia, eastern Tennessee, and western North Carolina to find the solitary structures. She often visits the sites first, returning later with her cameras and softly colored filters to preserve through photography what she describes as “vanishing cultural artifacts.”

Many of the photographs in the series were originally part of a touring exhibition of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Fariello, research associate professor and director of the Craft Revival Project at WCU [http: craftrevival.wcu.edu], is a former research fellow with the Smithsonian American Art Museum and a former field researcher for the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. The author of several books, she taught at Radford University and Virginia Tech before coming to WCU in 2005.

The exhibit runs through December 31. Take the library’s main floor elevator to the second floor. Open to the public 8:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m. Monday-Friday.