Professor Imi Hwangbo Featured in Exhibition at Telfair Museum

Professor Imi Hwangbo’s works on paper are on view in the exhibition “Cut & Paste: Works of Paper” at the Jepson Center of the Telfair Museums in Savannah through January 2021. This exhibition focuses on the ways in which contemporary artists manipulate paper to create remarkable drawn, sculptural, assembled, woven, or folded works of art.

Featuring 11 Georgia artists, the work on view not only speaks to the long history of the paper industry in the South, but also to present-day issues expressed through the fragile but versatile medium. From detailed hand cutting to mark making, draping and folding, casting and silhouettes, both wall-bound and sculptural reliefs consider current possibilities of paper and highlight artists using these magical techniques, leading viewers to suspend their belief of a material nature. This exhibition celebrates the vitality of a relatively old material that has been reinvented and reinterpreted through the skill of the artists on view.

“Cut & Paste” has travelled to five venues from 2019 through 2021, including the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking, the Macon Museum of Arts and Sciences, the Albany Museum of Art, and the Lyndon House Arts Center. The exhibition is organized by curator Didi Dunphy and the Georgia Museum of Art.

The Jepson Center for the Arts is one of the three museums of the Telfair Museums in Savannah. Designed by the internationally acclaimed architect Moshe Safdie, the Jepson Center houses the modern and contemporary collections, including the Kirk Varnedoe collection with works by Jasper Johns, Kiki Smith, Frank Stella, and Richard Avedon.

Imi Hwangbo received her B.A. in Studio Art from Dartmouth College, and an M.F.A. in Sculpture from Stanford University. Ms. Hwangbo has received artist fellowships at the American Academy in Rome, the Camargo Foundation in France, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony. Ms. Hwangbo’s work is in the collections of Fidelity Investments, the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong. Her constructed drawings have been exhibited in New York City at the Pavel Zoubok Gallery and the Art on Paper and Volta art fairs. Recently, her work was included in “Paper Routes: Women to Watch,” a show organized by the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Critic Lilly Wei has written: “Hwangbo’s geometric motifs and lacy botanicals are related to traditional designs, filtered through a modernist syntax of diamonds, circles, and squares configured as infinitely expandable systems in which solids and voids are similarly important and mind and dream intertwine.”