EXHIBITION STATEMENT

Charles Joyner’s journey in life and art are inextricably connected. His path extends from rural Johnston County, North Carolina to Westport, Connecticut to college in Iowa and Greensboro, to a career at NC State University that leads to Ghana, West Africa. Along the way, the artist, with innate ease, confidence and faith, moved forward to confront one new experience after another. A broad and expansive education fueled Joyner’s identity, vision, and career as an artist and educator who impacted the lives of many throughout communities in the United States and West Africa.

Joyner’s art resides at the intersection of two cultures: cultures that overlap yet are separated by years of falsehoods and misconceptions. His curiosity about African and African American cultures is sparked by his research of their customs and traditions. As a professor at NC State University, he taught and traveled in Ghana, West Africa, for more than fifteen years. His most recent works are a series of multi-layered collages that integrate his own photographic imagery with cultural symbols and patterns abstracted from West African textiles, crafts and architecture. Utilizing the medium of collage, he has developed a personal technique, characterized by the highly sensitive use of composition, and a careful blend of painting and printmaking. The results are the creation of mixed media works that explore cross-cultural connections, ancestry, rituals, religion, and spirituality. Throughout his career, Charles Joyner has looked to Romare Bearden (1911-1988) for inspirations. The visionary chronicler of African American experience once asserted, “If you’re any kind of Artist, you make a miraculous journey, and you come back and make some statements in shapes and colors of where you were.”