Gilded

View of Gilded: Contemporary Artists Explore Value and Worth, installed in Lathrop, Jaffe, and Hall Galleries.
Gajin Fujita, Invincible Kings of This Mad Mad World, 2017. Spray paint, paint markers, Mean Streak, 24k gold leaf, 12k white gold leaf, platinum leaf, and gloss finish on panel. Courtesy of the artist and L.A. Louver, Venice, California. © Gajin Fujita, photo courtesy of the artist and L.A. Louver, Venice, California

About

Across time and cultures, gold has served as a metaphor for what we value most. Symbolically, it stands in for goodness, excellence, brilliance, and wealth. Specifically, the artists represented in this traveling exhibition turn to gilding as a means to reconsider our value systems. Gilding images of graffiti and sidewalks, cardboard boxes and architectural fragments, they ask us to see the beauty in what we so often overlook and honor that which we so often throw away. If, as the saying goes, “all that glitters is not gold,” the artists represented here offer an inverse proposition: perhaps that which does not always shine is most worthy of our attention.

Gilded: Contemporary Artists Explore Value and Worth is organized by the Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNC Greensboro and curated by Emily Stamey.

The exhibition’s presentation at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, is generously supported by the Ray Winfield Smith 1918 Memorial Fund.