First Show of 2021
CYNTHIA BICKLEY-GREEN

City Art Gallery is honoring Cynthia Bickley-Green, a 27 year professor of Art at East Carolina University with a special exhibition of her 5’x12’ acrylic painting “Lamentation” which was selected by the North Carolina Museum of Art for reproduction on vinyl to display in the Museum Park. You will be the first to see “Lamentation,” as well as the studies she produced while working on this major piece. The show includes twelve pieces available for purchase including Lamentation, 12”x16” acrylic studies on paper and two 42”x42” canvases.

Cynthia Bickley-Green turned to her canvas for expression while in quarantine during 2020. “Lamentation” is comprised of three panels exploring the major global concerns of racial inequality, the coronavirus and climate change. She explains that the colorful, abstract brushstrokes are meant to look a little chaotic because of the nature and intensity of her subject matter. “I think there are a couple of passages in the Book of Lamentations that are fitting,” Bickley-Green said. She favors the hopeful tone of these verses from the third chapter: “It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness.”

Cynthia Bickley-Green is currently participating in a show at the North Carolina Museum of Art Front Burner: Highlights in Contemporary North Carolina Painting which features some of the most relevant and engaging painting being made in the state. She studied art at La Brera, Milan, Italy, and in the studio of Italian Futurist painter Pippo Rizzo at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. She holds BA and MA degrees in art from the University of Maryland and an MA from George Washington University in Higher Education and Human Development. In 1990 she finished her PhD in Art at the University of Georgia and has been teaching art for almost three decades. Her research and many publications explore the biology of art and the interaction of visual media and pedagogy and the development of social identities. She is the author of Art Elements: Biological, Global, and Interdisciplinary Foundations, 2011.