The debut artist in the 12 x 12 exhibition series, Endia Beal is a Winston-Salem based photographer whose work addresses race, gender and power.

*Photo above: Endia Beal, Am I What You're Looking For?, Kiara, 2016. Image courtesy the artist.

March 1- April 1, 2016

SECCA is pleased to launch 12 x 12, a new juried salon series of twelve intimately scaled solo exhibitions accompanied by artist talks with artist Endia Beal. Winston-Salem-based photographer Endia Beal's current body of work, "Am I What You're Looking For" is presented as a photo installation. Through a series of striking portraits, the project explores aspirations and challenges faced by college-age African-American women hoping to enter professional and corporate space.

About Endia Beal

Endia Beal is a North Carolina-based artist, educator and activist whose photographic narratives and video testimonies examine the personal, contemporary stories of marginalized communities and people. Beal currently serves as the Director of the Diggs Gallery at Winston-Salem State University and Associate Professor of Art. She holds a dual baccalaureate degree in Studio Art and Art History from UNC Chapel Hill and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography from Yale University. Her work has previously been exhibited at the Charles Wright Museum (Detroit, MI), the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Art +Culture (Charlotte, NC), the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts (Boone, NC), and Aperture Foundation (New York, NY).

About 12 x 12

12 x 12 artist salon series presents 12 artists from North Carolina, the 12th State. Each Salon is a pop-up exhibition and conversation with the artist. The series schedule consists of three exhibitions per spring and fall seasons in 2016 and 2017, beginning March 1st, 2016. At the end of the salons, a group exhibition in our Potter Gallery will bring together all twelve artists.

The twelve artists in the series represent a diversity of artistic practices and cultural backgrounds. At salon events, each artist will share ideas and processes of their studio practice in the midst of recent, new, or site-specific work presented in SECCA's Preview Gallery. Each artist will discuss their experience first-hand, inviting the public to ask questions and to engage in conversation. Like a studio visit, these salon events are a social space for the discovery and discussion, providing invaluable feedback to artists and insights to those who come to experience them.

12 x 12 gives artists from across North Carolina a public platform for continued artistic development and recognition in the place where they live and work, and beyond. At the same time, the series aims to push conversation around contemporary art forward and to consider the significance of localism as a curatorial framework. What does it mean to these artists to be working in the South and Southeast today, especially after the Internet and Globalization?

The 12 x 12 artists were selected by Cora Fisher (Curator of Contemporary Art, SECCA) and four guest jurors: Linda Dougherty (Chief Curator & Curator of Contemporary Art, North Carolina Museum of Art); Lia Newman (Director and Curator of the Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College); Marshall Price (Nancy Hanks Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University); and Mary Anne Redding (Curator, Turchin Center for the Visual Arts).

An arts initiative sponsored by the Flow Foundation