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New Magic in a Dusty World: Making Matt Baumgardner in 1980s New York

📆  April 3, 2026 📍 Main Gallery, First Floor 💰 Free open to ages: All

Main Gallery Exhibition
April 3rd - May 27th, 2026

Opening Reception:
April 3rd, 2026 5-8PM

Curator Walk Through:
April 3rd, 2026 at 6:30pm

Gallery Hours after Opening
Wednesdays-Fridays 9AM - 5PM
Saturdays 11AM - 3PM

Images of artwork and the artist (c) Estate of Matthew Baumgardner, Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Matt Baumgardner, Visit from Vincent, 1989.
Photo credit: Stephen Mandravelis & B. Davis Fleming

New Magic in a Dusty World: Making Matt Baumgardner in 1980s New York

Exhibition Description

Matt Baumgardner’s early-career artworks from the 1980s are large, imposing, and expressionistically wild—vivid alien topographies created from layered paint, tar, and cloth. But these early works look almost nothing like the subtle, metaphysical abstractions that later brought him renown in the 1990s and 2000s. He seemed to finish the decade as a completely different artist. What happened? Why had his early style changed so dramatically as he entered his mature period? When did Baumgardner become the Baumgardner so many viewers know today? 

New Magic in a Dusty World explores that transformation. Spanning the period from Baumgardner’s 1982 MFA graduation from UNC–Chapel Hill to his 1993 National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship, the exhibition follows an artist navigating the pressures, uncertainties, and stylistic experiments that shaped his early career. Through large-scale works, rare studio studies, video, and selections from his personal writing, visitors witness Baumgardner in the midst of discovery—testing materials, reassessing influences, discarding directions, and slowly constructing the foundations of a mature voice. 

Centered on Baumgardner’s decade of reinvention, the exhibition also illuminates something broader: the often unseen, deeply human labor of artistic development itself. It invites emerging artists and curious visitors alike to recognize the necessary, messy, and universal process of becoming that underlies every creative life.

Baumgardner Archives Website
Preoccupied Territory (1989) -
Preoccupied Territory (1989) -

Matt Baumgardner, Preoccupied Territory, 1989.
Photo credit: Tim Barnwell

Matt Baumgardner, New Magic in a Dusty World, 1988.
Photo credit: Stephen Mandravelis & B. Davis Fleming

Matt Baumgardner, Guarding an Empty Tomb (diptych), 1987.
Photo credit: Stephen Mandravelis & B. Davis Fleming

Matt Baumgardner, Spirit Chamber 1987.
Photo credit: Stephen Mandravelis & B. Davis Fleming

Matt Baumgardner, Stained Glass Eye, 1988.
Photo credit: Stephen Mandravelis & B. Davis Fleming

Matt Baumgardner, Flirting on the F Train, 1984.
Photo credit: Stephen Mandravelis & B. Davis Fleming

Artist Information

Matt Baumgardner

Biography

Matthew Clay Baumgardner (1955–2018) was born in Columbus, Ohio. After beginning his undergraduate studies in Greenville, South Carolina, he earned his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1982 and moved to New York City in 1983, where he had a series of studios including Red Hook and the East Village. In 2006 he relocated to Travelers Rest, South Carolina, where he built a dedicated studio space in 2009.

Baumgardner's paintings, drawings, and sculptures have been shown since 1978, and during the 1980s and 1990s exhibited at internationally recognized galleries including Charles Cowles (New York), Edward Thorpe (New York), Jeffrey Coploff (New York), Wessell O’Connor (New York), Bentley Gallery (then Scottsdale), Carrie Secrist (Chicago), and LewAllen Contemporary (Santa Fe). From November 2011- January 2012, the Greenville County Museum of Art presented the major solo exhibition Made for Another World, surveying his work from 1986 to 2010. Select exhibitions are listed through 2025 at baumgardnerart.com. Since his passing, Baumgardner's archives have been studied, documented and curated by the Furman University Art Department through an ongoing collaboration with his estate, as reflected in their website BaumgardnerArchives.com.

His work has been reviewed in publications including The New York Observer, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Chicago Tribune. In 1993, Baumgardner received a $20,000 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for his birch plywood series.

Baumgardner's Website

This exhibition was curated by the Furman University Department of Art and coordinated with the Matthew Baumgardner Estate.

Exhibition Curators

Stephen Mandravelis, Ph.D

Stephen Mandravelis is an art historian and Assistant Professor of Art History at Furman University. He is a specialist in the art of the United States and has research interests in contemporary Southern self-taught art, popular taste and vernacular objects, self-identity and geopolitical standing. His work has been supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, SECAC, the Royster Society of Fellows, and others. His writing has appeared in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Nineteenth-Century American History; Southern Things: A Place, Its People, and Its Things; and Not About Face: Identity and Appearance, Past and Present. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2018.

B. Davis Fleming

B. Davis Fleming is a sophomore Art History and Classics major at Furman University. Davis is interested in Southern Gothic art and the preservation of memories and histories through art. He will present materials from his work on this exhibition at the Hunter Museum of American Art’s 2026 Student Symposium in April. Davis aspires to a career in museum education.

Exhibition Sponsors

This exhibition is sponsored by Flavio Varani