Artist Talk with Beverly McIver

Craven Allen Gallery will host an artist talk with Beverly McIver on Saturday, October 4th at 4pm. Beverly will discuss the works featured in her exhibition Notes to Self, reflect on her career, and share her outlook for this new post-retirement chapter of her life.

After a lifetime of teaching, McIver made the difficult decision to retire from her position at Duke University to focus on artmaking with a renewed intensity.

Her exhibition Notes to Self is a deeply personal selection of new work, including still lifes which verge on the abstract, and portraits of herself and her family. Alongside these paintings are seminal pieces, never before seen, which McIver created as part of her personal practice. In these intimate works she explores themes and techniques that would later appear in some of her most celebrated canvases. Drawing, printmaking and collage allowed her to create freely, exploring concepts outside the bounds of oil paint. Watermelons, clown makeup and other signature motifs are rendered in atypical ways with diverse materials.

Beverly McIver lives and works in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Known for her expressive self-portraits and intimate family narratives, her work is held in major collections including the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. She has received numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, and, most recently, election as a National Academician by the National Academy of Design. McIver was the subject of the Emmy®-nominated HBO documentary Raising Renee and in 2022 was celebrated with Full Circle, a traveling retrospective organized by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. She is currently developing an artist residency program, Renny’s Place, in honor of her sister.