In Conversation with Scott Avett

$36-$40

MCA Denver
1485 Delgany St.
Denver, CO 80202
United States

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About the speakers

Internationally recognized as the co-founder of the Grammy-nominated band, The Avett Brothers, Scott Avett has been a working artist since he earned a BFA in studio art from East Carolina University in 2000. Until now, his art-making has largely been a solitary creative pursuit in comparison to his life as a musician, singer, and songwriter.

Avett’s large-scale canvases reveal an intimate look at growing up and now raising a family in the rural south. They are infused with the personal moments and inspiration Avett draws from his family and their surrounding North Carolina farmland, yet nuanced with the cultural and artistic influences he has encountered through years of life on the road.

The majority of Scott Avett’s paintings and drawings, created over the past twenty years, have rarely been exhibited. Unlike his ongoing touring and recording schedule with The Avett Brothers band, the artist’s decades-long visual output has been free of exhibition deadlines or a particular audience expectation. Instead, Avett has worked alone in the quiet confines of his farmhouse studio with the ability to push and refine his work into new areas of artistic exploration, whether it be new mediums, genres, or content.

Avett’s first museum exhibition opened in October 2019 at the North Carolina Museum of Art. This comprehensive exhibition highlighted his work across 20 years and spanned multiple disciplines, including painting, printmaking, and sculptural objects. An extensive hardbound catalog, Scott Avett INVISIBLE, accompanied the exhibition with an in-depth look into the artist’s visual art practice and the parallels to his songwriting and music development.

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Nora Burnett Abrams is the Mark G. Falcone Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Her career began in New York City at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Grey Art Gallery at NYU. Since arriving in Denver in 2010, she has organized over 40 exhibitions and authored or contributed to over a dozen accompanying publications. Recent projects highlighted unusual or unknown episodes in artists’ careers such as Basquiat Before Basquiat (2017), as well as the first survey of Senga Nengudi’s R.S.V.P. sculptures (2014). Her most recent projects included a retrospective of artist Tara Donovan (2018) and a focused presentation of never-before-seen photographs and ephemera by Francesca Woodman (2019). She has taught art history at New York University and lectured throughout the country on modern and contemporary art. She holds art history degrees from Stanford University (B.A.), Columbia University (M.A.), and a Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

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About Hexton Gallery Aspen

Hexton Gallery Aspen opened its doors in 2018 with a solo exhibition and large-scale mural project for artist and activist Shepard Fairey. The gallery moved to its newly-renovated location at 477 E. Cooper Ave in 2021 with an expanded program from today's leading mid-career and established contemporary talent. In addition to its annual exhibitions and art fair participation, the gallery publishes and represents artists and institutional projects in the areas of editioned printmaking, sculpture, and artist books.