About the Exhibition

Bonnie Melton lived her life as a true creative. The Durham Art Guild was honored to have hosted a solo exhibition of her works in 1993 and now 30 years later will be once again hosting a solo exhibition of Bonnie Melton’s work. Her brother Dennis Melton invited the Durham Art Guild into her home studio to explore the wide variety of her art made throughout her life. Her thoughtfulness in her work, experimentation and humor shines through every piece she laid her hands on. Her medium of choice was painting but she was also talented and recognized for her ceramics and charcoal drawings. Bonnie’s work has transcended time. Her artistic spirit lives on through her work and the Guild is honored to be a part of recognizing and commemorating a lifetime of her art.

We invite our community to read more about Bonnie through her words below. A small selection of her work can be viewed below and are for sale, benefitting the Durham Art Guild on behalf of the Melton Family.

A live in-person exhibition will be held in one of the Durham Art Guild’s galleries in 2024.

About Bonnie Melton

According to Bonnie Melton, she painted to let an inner dialogue surface. Sometimes the conversation was direct, more often than not elliptical. Associations arose, become thwarted, sank, and then re-surfaced through the paint. Mostly she was looking for the nerve within each painting. Her nerve, the nerve of the paint.

Bonnie was born in Lexington Kentucky but her family was neither from there, nor did they stay there. She grew up in North Carolina. Her mother was from Long Island, her father from rural southern Georgia. They ended up living in the eastern seaboard. A middle of sorts.

Bonnie’s first studio class was with James Gadson at UNC, who thankfully for Bonnie exhorted everyone in that summer morning drawing class that a drawing of a chair is not a chair. It was all abstract.

James encouraged Bonnie to take classes with Martha Zelt during her senior year at Guilford College, which she did. Martie in turn encouraged her to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. She applied, was accepted for study, and moved from the Piedmont of North Carolina to Center City, Philadelphia.

Bonnie drove her Ford Falcon to Center City, lived on the first floor of an in-process rehab with an artist landlord and worked her way through the Academy program. The month she got her certificate from the Academy, she found a loft to rent on Jeweler's Row and started her career as a waitress, bartender and artist. Bonnie lived for nearly a decade in that wonderful loft and then came back to the Piedmont of NC when the owner of the loft sold the building and her rent doubled.

As Bonnie stated, it broke her heart to leave Philly but by moving back to NC she was responding to a growing need: around this time she was painting a lot of landscapes and wanted more access to open spaces and vistas. The first year that she moved back her studio was located in a field on a dairy farm outside of Chapel Hill. It was a strange year of loneliness and ecstasy for Bonnie - missing her Philadelphia friends but working directly from the landscape in her paintings, rather than imagining such. Typesetting and then title research would become means of income and means to continue her studio work.

Eventually her painting focus would shift - from external landforms to an inner geography, always checking in and finding markers which become paintings.

Bonnie Melton Awards/Fellowships

1996  Presidential Purchase Award, Guilford College Art Museum. Greensboro, NC.1994

1994  Foundation Grant, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc. New York, NY.

1993  Fellowship, North Carolina Arts Council. Visual Arts: Painting.

1987  Painting Residency, Millay Colony for the Arts. Austerlitz, NY.

1983  Fellowship, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Painting.

1981  Hobson Pittman Prize for Experimental Painting, PAFA.

Exhibitions

2020   Front Burner:  Highlights in Contemporary North Carolina Painting, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC. March 7 - July 26, 2020. Show extended until January, 2021 after Museum was shuttered due to COVID restrictions.

2020   Book Cover:  Joseph Donahue, The Disappearance of Fate, Sputen Duyvil, © Joseph Donahue

2019   MiddleLost, Online Literary Journal. Editor:  David Norton Need. Five painting images included.

2017   Lute & Drum, Issue 9. Online Literary Journal, Editors:  Ken Taylor and J. Peter Moore, Seven painting images included.

2014  Loaded Objects  The Carrack Modern Art. Durham NC. Curator: Chris Vitiello. October 2014.

2014 Artspace Satellite Inaugural Exhibition. HQ Raleigh. April/May. Raleigh, NC.

2013  Paintings: Bonnie Melton  Horace Williams House. September 2013. Chapel Hill, NC.

2013  Independents | Paintings by Brett Baker, Mark Brown, Ashlynn Browning, Philip Lopez & Bonnie Melton examines the recent work of five of North Carolina’s most accomplished abstract painters. April 5 - June 2, 2013. Greenhill, Greensboro, NC.

2007  Land Work: Forms in Tempera, Oil & Clay Flywheel Design Gallery, Durham, NC.

2006  New Work  Gallery A, Louise Jones Brown Gallery. Duke University. Durham, NC.

2001  Homegrown  Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. Winston Salem, N.C.

1996  Critic’s Choice  Duke University Museum of Art. Durham, NC. Critic: Kate Dobbs Ariail, Art Critic for The Independent.

1995  Bonnie Melton: Paintings  Raleigh Contemporary Gallery, Raleigh, NC.

1994  North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowships 1993/1994, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. Winston-Salem, NC.

1993  Individual Exhibition, Durham Art Guild. Central Carolina Bank Gallery. Royall Art Center. Durham, NC.

1990  New Situation Paintings, Hanes Art Center Gallery. University of North Carolina. Chapel Hill, NC.

1984  Solo Exhibition, Nexus Gallery. Philadelphia, PA.

View Bonnie Melton’s website here

Indy write up for NCMA Exhibition in 2020 here

Bonnie Melton’s Obituary here