Showcases the lifelong focus on rural Alabama by an eminent American artist. With major exhibitions running simultaneously at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Aperture Gallery in New York City, and the Birmingham Museum of Art, William Christenberry is enjoying wide exposure of his artistic body of work. Since the early 1960s, he has plumbed the regional identity of the American South, primarily centering on his early home in the Black Belt counties of Alabama, the same area documented during the Depression years by Walker Evans and James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. 
Christenberry's poetic elucidation of Southern vernacular landscape and architecture using the media of photography, drawing, painting, collage, sculpture, and miniaturization reveals how history, the very story of place, is at the heart of his lifelong project. By exploring universal themes relating to family, culture, nature, spirituality, memory, and aging, Christenberry underscores the continuous thread of revelation of which Eudora Welty speaks. I think, he says, that oftentimes art can make an outsider look back on something he has never been part of and make him feel like he has always been part of it. 
This volume celebrates particularly the semester-long residency in 2005 when Christenberry returned to Alabama as a Weil Fellow in the Arts and Humanities at Auburn University Montgomery. It includes images of actual structures that no longer exist (but which Christenberry documented for decades), Brownie and large-format photographs, K-houses from his body of work about the Ku Klux Klan, dream buildings, pen and ink drawings, and studies for wall sculptures. It is a testimonial to the enduring influence of Alabama’s Black Belt landscape on Christenberry’s singular vision.

William Christenberry's Black Belt

Arts & Photography

Christenberry, William

History & Criticism

University Alabama Press

William Christenberry is an internationally recognized interpreter of the American South. Through drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, and installation, Christenberry reveals a stirring vision of the heritage that obsesses his art. His original imagery and objects form a distinguished voice in American contemporary art. Addressing the experience of migration and the toll of regionalism on personal identity, he specifically describes and considers the social and material culture of the deep South. This volume presents the first comprehensive survey of the artist's expression ever published.

Christenberry Reconstruction: The Art of William Christenberry

Tullos, Allen

Stack, Trudy Wilner

University of Arizona Museum of Art

Individual Artists

Univ Pr of Mississippi

LOTS OF INFORMATION AND IMAGES. GREAT REFERENCE FOR COLLECTORS, DEALERS AND HISTORIANS. BE SURE TO EMAIL US IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS. HAPPY BIDDING!

Christenberry: Reconstruction : The Art of William Christenberry

Southern Photographs

Photography & Video

Aperture

Christenbe

Southern Photographs Paperback by William Christenberry (Author)

William Christenberry: The Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art

The Museum

From the publisher: "Widely known for his work in photography and sculpture, William Christenberry's early career was marked by large abstract expressionist paintings (1954--64). Like many artists educated and inspired by abstract expressionists, Christenberry has consistently produced works on paper that often remained hidden from collectors and curators. W/P, the latest book on Christenberry's work, presents a selection of mostly large-scale (32 x 40), recent works on paper executed with a variety of materials including wax, ink, soil, felt paper and sandpaper. As with much of his work, the last "drawing" touches upon his themes of decay and rebirth, persistence, pathos, regeneration and hope. W/P highlights recent drawings of tree forms, employed by Christenberry as the image by which to portray abstract structures, among which are hidden hanging gourds, a swaying figure, a cruciform shape recalling a burning cross, and house forms recalling abandoned tenant farms. William Christenberry has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, and his work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe. W/P is printed in an oversize format, and limited to 1,000 hardbound copies."

Works on Paper

Drawing

Nazraeli Pr

Working from Memory is a collection of stories by the renowned photographer, painter and sculptor William Christenberry. Based on conversations with author and critic Susanne Lange, these stories elaborate the artist's memories of the Deep South, in whose rich literary tradition they are steeped. In a lyrical but lucid prose, they set personal experience against the backdrop of important political and cultural moments in the southern states, endowing that landscape with a vividness that will be familiar to fans of the artist's photography. Christenberry's own photographs accompany these tales. Born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1936, William Christenberry grew up in the Deep South, where old road signs, deteriorating buildings and dirt roads shaped his boyhood memories. During his early career, Christenberry was primarily a painter, but he soon began to incorporate the use of a Brownie camera into his practice. In 1961 he moved to New York and met Walker Evans, the celebrated photographer of the Farm Security Administration, who had documented the devastating effect of the Great Depression in the South. Evans' photographs--many from Christenberry's home area--particularly influenced Christenberry's work as an artist. In 1968 he moved to Washington, D.C., and joined the faculty of the Corcoran School of Art and Design, where he continues to work as a professor of drawing and painting. Today, Christenberry's international stature continues to grow as his work is featured in many museums throughout the United States and abroad.

William Christenberry: Working from Memory: Collected Stories

Steidl

If Alabama-born artist William Christenberry regularly engages with the countryside of his home state, with the artlessness of the rural idyll, and the local architecture and its relationship to space, his multimedia installation, the so-called "Klan Room," takes this discourse one step further, deeper, and darker. The room, a continuously evolving work-in-progress consisting of a mass of sketches, paintings, sculptures, found objects, and photographs, addresses the subject of violent repression and racist persecution in the United States, and reveals Christenberry's critical reflection on myths and power symbols. Disappearing Places focuses as well on the artist's greater body of work, on his individual photographs, paintings, sculptures, and drawings, as well as his assemblages and material collages, which underline the poetic power of everyday found objects.

William Christenberry: Disappearing Places

Lange, Susanne

Schubert, Claudia

Tullos, Allan

Richter Verlag

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Books by Christenberry, William