New Magic in a Dusty World: Making Matt Baumgardner in 1980s New York
April 3rd – May 27th, 2026
Greenville Center for Creative Arts
Greenville, South Carolina
artcentergreenville.org
Matt Baumgardner’s early-career artworks from the 1980s are large, imposing, and expressionistically wild—vivid alien topographies created from layered paint, tar, and cloth. But these early works look almost nothing like the small, subtle, metaphysical abstractions that later brought him renown in the 1990s and 2000s.
“New Magic in a Dusty World” explores that transformation. Spanning the period from Baumgardner’s 1982 MFA graduation from UNC–Chapel Hill to his 1993 National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship, the exhibition follows an artist navigating the pressures, uncertainties, and stylistic experiments that shaped his early career.
Find out more: https://artcentergreenville.org/events/newmagicinadustyworld
[Image: Matt Baumgardner, Visit from Vincent, 1989. Photo credit: Stephen Mandravelis & B. Davis Fleming.]
