FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

July 27, 1998

CONTACT: EARLENE STEWART

Rocky Mount, NC - North Carolina Wesleyan College has recently opened its new gallery for contemporary self-taught art, located in the Thomas J. Pearsall Jr. Building. The gallery will be officially dedicated during the Founders' Day ceremonies on October 22 and named The Four Sisters Gallery after the Braswell Sisters who have been generous benefactors to the College since its inception in 1958.

The inaugural exhibition is titled "Celebrating the Art of the Coastal Plain: Selections from the Robert Lynch Collection and Contemporary Self-Taught Art from 1952." It features objects from the College's collection of better than 140 of the finest pieces of the Robert Lynch Collection of Outsider Art, as well as 20 acquisitions from over the past four years.

On view in the gallery are objects fashioned in particular by individuals who, for one reason or another, never had formal art training, yet were compelled by their particular necessity to be productive visual artists. Some of these men and women had their schooling cut short in the elementary grades, rendering them functionally illiterate in mainstream culture. Some have felt alienated from mainstream society given their medical misfortune or their need to express their independence. Some too have felt "called" to art as missionary testimony. We can learn much about our interconnected world of beliefs, universal design and improvisational intelligence by ldsboro, and Durham.

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