Flight of Spirit - Tryon Arts & Crafts School

Announcing Flight of Spirit: The Photographs of Anne Noggle,

the First of a Series of TACS Initiatives to Promote the School’s Forthcoming

New Photography Department

WITH GENEROUS SUPPORT FROM

EXHIBITIONS & PROGRAMS

June 22, 5-6:30

Pilot Photos Preview @TFAC

June 24, 6-8PM

Opening Reception w/ Twisted Fork @TACS

June 29, 6-8PM

Curators’ Dinner Fundraiser w/ Rural Seed @TACS

Click Here to Purchase Dinner Tickets >>

August 17, 5:30-6:30PM

Sip ‘n’ See @TACS

EXHIBITION BOOK

Select Flight of Spirit Events will include a book signings with exhibition Co-Curators, Martha Strawn and Lili Corbus, PhD. Guests may pre-purchase the official hardbound exhibition book, published by New Mexico Press, through TACS’ gift shop and online by following the below link. TACS has limited copies, for pick-up only. Other copies are carried by online retailers.

Flight of Spirit: The Photographs of Anne Noggle, Edited by Martha Strawn, $45.00

Buy now

ABOUT THIS EXHIBITION

Anne Noggle (1922-2005) was a photographer, aviator, and trailblazer. After serving as a WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) during WWII, she became a crop duster and stunt pilot. By the 1960s, after retiring from the military, she moved to New Mexico to study art history and photography. She typically focused her lens on her intimate circle of family and friends, and, later, women pilots in the US and Russia. Noggle also worked as an educator, curator, and earned honors such as three National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She authored three books and her work is now found in many museum and university collections.

Noggle often explored the subject of women and aging, or what she called “the saga of the fallen flesh.” Many of her self-portraits disrupt traditional views and clichés of aging women with her creation of alter-egos and personas. Blending humor, pathos, and irony, her images continue to defy and challenge traditional concepts of beauty, “age-appropriate” behaviors, and bring complex, compelling layers to her subjects. Her portraits are often unflinching views of those pictured, investing them with a lively sense of character and spirit, poignant mortality, or acerbic wit.

This exhibit debuted at The Light Factory in Charlotte NC in 2021. It was curated by Martha Strawn, a widely exhibited and published photographer and Emerita professor of art (UNC Charlotte), and her university colleague, art historian Lili Corbus, PhD. A friend of Noggle’s for thirty years, Strawn serves as president of the Anne Noggle Foundation, from which these photographs were collected. Strawn published a book, Flight of Spirit: The Photographs of Anne Noggle, in 2019 (Museum of New Mexico Press) with additional essays by Corbus and cultural critic Lucy Lippard.