Main Gallery Exhibition
December 6th, 2024 – January 29th, 2025
opening Reception:
Friday, December 6th, 2024
From 6 — 9 PM
ARTalk with ARDEN CONE:
Tuesday, January 14th, 2024
From 6 — 7 PM
In Past is Prologue, Arden Cone delves into the uneasy convergence of individual and collective trauma, using art to reflect on history’s lasting imprint. The exhibition explores the power of memory through two distinct yet interconnected bodies of artwork—each of which contemplates the nature of history and its impact on present-day realities.
In her Creosote Tears series, Cone manipulates worn-out objects salvaged from her family’s farm. These materials, weathered by decades of exposure to the elements, bear the physical traces of time and labor, telling a silent story of resilience and decay. With each dent, crack, and layer of corrosion, Cone reveals the unspoken toll that these objects have endured. Rather than dictating their narrative, she invites viewers to meditate on how memory—shaped by personal and collective experience—fills in the gaps of untold histories. These works speak to the impermanence of memory itself, suggesting that our understanding of the past is inherently incomplete, yet essential to how we navigate the present.
In Congressional Immunity, a series of paintings born out of the January 6th insurrection, Cone confronts the darker side of America’s history and its relationship to democracy. Her works engage with iconic imagery of the U.S. Capitol, capturing both the physical and symbolic damage inflicted that day. In particular, Cone is drawn to two 19th-century bronze doors, sculpted by Randolph Rogers, which depict scenes from Christopher Columbus’s conquests. Through these juxtaposed renderings—of historical myths and modern-day rebellion—Cone calls attention to the persistent presence of authoritarianism, cloaked in the guise of patriotism. These paintings serve as a reminder that America’s past, far from being an unchallenged narrative of democracy, is fraught with conquest, oppression, and division.
Cone encourages us to reconsider how history is remembered and reinterpreted. By investigating trauma through the physical and the symbolic, she offers a powerful commentary on the malleability of memory and the vital role it plays in shaping our collective future.
ARDEN CONE – ARTIST INFORMATION
Biography
Arden Cone, an artist born and raised in South Carolina, unpacks the historical narratives that inform the varied identities, viewpoints, and experiences framing contemporary American culture. Through her paintings, sculptures and installations, she seeks to excavate core truths and fallacies from the accepted narrative of American history.
In 2012, Cone received BA degrees in Studio Art and Spanish, graduating summa cum laude from Hollins University with induction into the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society. In 2018 she earned an MFA from Boston University’s Painting Program.
Cone was recently selected as an artist in residence for Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center’s 2024 Active Archive Residency. She has also completed residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Pike School of Art, and Chautauqua Institute School of Fine Arts. She has exhibited her work widely across the U.S. and was named a finalist for the 2017 $10,000 Arthur & Dorothy Yeck Award at Miami University.
She has written for art publications including BURNAWAY, The Brooklyn Rail and her own One South Contemporary.
Artist Statement
Across the two bodies of work in this exhibition, Arden Cone demonstrates an apprehensive longing to investigate trauma, both individual and collective, from the once-removed vantage point of history.
Through her prints and wall-mounted sculptures, she resuscitates nearly discarded farm materials from various states of decay, asserting their significance by elevating them to the realm of art. The objects’ deteriorated exteriors point to decades of trauma, but Cone leaves the stories of such omitted. As they transcend from object to artwork, evermore-abstracted assumptions of their histories take hold.
Historical memory within America’s socio-political culture is similarly obscured. Cone’s paintings, like her sculptures, employ history to buffer between past traumas and present states on a collective level. America’s biased, incomplete, and highly contested historical record has become divisive rather than shared, accounting for much of the chaos in contemporary politics and beyond. Cone’s works, windows into past and present moments of trauma, compulsively consider memory as an ever-changing archive, always up for reevaluation.
curriculum vitae
ARDEN CONE
Education
2018 MFA, Painting, Boston University, Boston, MA
2012 BA summa cum laude, Studio Art and Spanish, Hollins University, Roanoke, VA
Awards
2023 Artist Quarterly Project Grant, Metropolitan Arts Council, Greenville, SC
2021 Fletcher H. Dyer Award, Reece Museum, Johnson City, TN 2021 THE PROJECT- 2021 Finalist, Honorable Mention, Kroger Center for the Arts, Columbia, SC
2016 $10,000 Arthur and Dorothy Yeck Award Finalist, Miami University, Miami, OH
20015-18 Constantine Alajalov Scholarship, Boston University, Boston, MA
2012 Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society
2012 Janet MacDonald Fund Grant, Hollins University, Roanoke, VA
2012 Best in Show, Feast on This, Nelson Gallery, Lexington, VA 2008-12 Manchester Grant for Studio Art, Hollins University, Roanoke, VA
2008-12 Hollins Creative Talent Scholarship, Hollins University, Roanoke, VA
Residencies and Workshops
2024 Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Active Archive Residency, Black Mountain, NC
2017 Burnaway Art Writers Mentorship Program, Atlanta, GA 2016 Pike School of Art, McComb, MS
2014 Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT
2012 Chautauqua Institute School of Fine Arts, Chautauqua, NY Solo and Two-Person Exhibitions
2024 (FORTHCOMING) Past is Prologue, Greenville Center for Creative Arts, Greenville, SC
2023 Time’s Witness: Work by Arden Cone and Millicent Kennedy, Upstairs Artspace, Tryon, NC
2018 Looking Away: Arden Cone and Glen Miller, Upstairs Artspace, Tryon, NC
2017 Hell and Half of Georgia, Commonwealth Gallery, Boston University, Boston, MA
Group Exhibitions
2025 (FORTHCOMING), Dream, America, Eleanor D. Wilson Museum, Hollins University, Roanoke, VA
2024, Thornback Gallery, Greenville, SC 11th Annual International FL3TCH3R Exhibit: Social & Politically Engaged Art, Reece Museum at East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN
2023 New Language: Contemporary Abstraction, Gallery 263, Cambridge, MA
2023 G.R.I.T.S.: Girls Raised in the South, The Bells Gallery, Dothan, AL
2022 38th Annual International Exhibition, The Medows Gallery at UT Tyler, Tyler, TX
2022 Art of the South, Zeitgeist Gallery, Nashville, TN 2022 Looks Good on Paper, Pyramid Atlantic Arts Center, Hyattsville, MD
2022 35th September Competition, Alexandria Museum of Art, Alexandria, LA
2022 THE PROJECT, Kroger Center for the Arts, Columbia, SC 2022 Fourth La Grange Southeast Regional, La Grange Museum of Art, La Grange, GA
2022 2022 International Juried Exhibition, Center for Contemporary Art, Bedminster, NJ
2021 9th Annual International FL3TCH3R Exhibit: Social & Politically Engaged Art, Reece Museum at East Tennessee State University , Johnson City, TN
2021 The Fall of Civilization, Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, Lubbock, TX
2021 ReNew, Sulfur Studios, Savannah, GA
2020 Still Life: Contemporary Interpretations, Upstairs Artspace, Tryon, NC
2019 Convergent Narratives, Rockford University Art Gallery, Rockford, IL
2018 Map, 1969 Gallery, New York, NY 2018 MFA Thesis Exhibition, 808 Gallery, Boston University, Boston, MA
2017 President’s Annual Art Exhibition, Sloane House, Boston, MA 2017 Miami University Young Painters Competition for the $10,000 Arthur and Dorothy Yeck Award, Miami University Art Galleries, Oxford, OH
2017 Spring Show, Tryon Painters and Sculptors, Tryon, NC 2017 Artfields 2017, Art Fields, Lake City, SC
2015 Will’s Creek Survey, Saville Gallery, Cumberland, MD 2015 Storytellers, Upstairs Artspace, Tryon, NC
2015 Contemporary Visions of the Old South, North Charleston City Hall, North Charleston, SC
2012 Exchange 81, Liminal Alternative Art Space, Roanoke, VA 2012 Senior Majors Exhibition, Eleanor D. Wilson Museum, Roanoke, VA
2012 Chautauqua Institute Annual Student Exhibition, Fowler- Kellogg Gallery, Chautauqua, NY
2012 Feast on This, Nelson Gallery, Lexington, VA
Related Experience
2017 Special Projects Graduate Assistant, Boston University School of Visual Arts, Boston, MA
2015 Art Gallery Assistant, Boston University Art Galleries, Boston, MA
2012 Curatorial Intern, Historic Charleston Foundation, Charleston, SC
2012 Contemporary Art Gallery Intern, Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Bibliography
Mark Jenkins, “In the galleries: Paper pushers: Artists stretch creative limits,” The Washington Post, September 16, 2022,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts
entertainment/2022/09/16/art-gallery-shows-dc-area/
Madeline O’Keefe, “808 Gallery, Stone Gallery Host MFA Thesis Exhibitions,” BU Today, April 20, 2018, http://www.bu.edu/today/2018/mfa-thesis exhibitions/
Bevin Valentine Jalbert, “Q&A: Artist Arden Cone,” Paprika Southern, October 25, 2016, http://paprikasouthern.com/2016/10/25/q-a-artist-arden cone/
Publications As Author
Arden Cone, ”Julie Mehretu: A Mid-Career Retrospective at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA,“ One South Contemporary, (blog), January 31, 2021.http://onesouthcontemporary.com/blog/2021/1/31/julie mehretu-a-mid-career-retrospective-at-the-high-museum-of-art closing-january-31st-2021.
Arden Cone, “Samsøñ | September 8 – November 11, 2017,” The Brooklyn Rail, November 2017.
Arden Cone, “Southern Self-Taught Artists Take the Stage at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,” Burnaway (blog), August 10, 2018, https://burnaway.org/southern-self-taught-artists-metropolitan museum/
Preview of Creosote Tears series:
Preview of Congressional Immunity series:
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