Art on 16 Contemporary Gallery, in Marion, Va., is celebrating Native American Heritage Month in November by exhibiting the landscape paintings of Jenean Hornbuckle, an EBCI tribal member. (Photo contributed)
Art on 16 Contemporary Gallery, in Marion, Va., is celebrating Native American Heritage Month in November by exhibiting the landscape paintings of Jenean Hornbuckle, an EBCI tribal member. The work will be on exhibit from Saturday, Nov. 3-28 with an opening reception on November 3 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.. The public is invited to come and meet the artist.
Hornbuckle attributes her extraordinary ability to capture the beautiful Western North Carolina mountains to “a genetic memory (that) exists on a cellular level and is passed down from generation to generation,” a connection honored by her ancestors. Her mother was a Cherokee Nation citizen from Oklahoma, and her father was Eastern Cherokee from the mountains of North Carolina. They were raised in the Indian Boarding School system and had austere beginnings, living close to the earth and learning gratitude for all that the earth provides.
“I’ve lived my life in western North Carolina and there’s no place I’d rather be than on a creekside or mountain top. I paint to entice the viewer to go out and find these places and to experience the land. To listen to the quiet. I heard a quote once that inspires my work: ‘I can not leave here, the land knows me.’ ”
While she was pursuing a business degree at Appalachian State University, Ms. Hornbuckle took an after hours drawing class. That led to a degree in Design at Western Carolina University, and then a Fine Arts Degree with a Concentration in Painting from Western Carolina University in 1984. She likes to say, however, that she “really studied art in the woods of western North Carolina.”
In addition to her expressive landscapes, she has produced a number of public art projects, including a series of three fifteen-foot murals at the entrance of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, a series of five fourteen-foot murals for Harrah’s Cherokee Resort, and she worked with Roy Moose to create a nine-foot tall bronze statue of Selu, the mythical Corn Mother, at Harrah’s in Cherokee.
For more information, Art on 16 Contemporary Gallery: 324 S. Commerce St., Marion,VA, (801) 318-8419, visit www.arton16.com, Instagram: @arton16gallery, or Art on 16 on Facebook
– Special to the One Feather
