Holly Spruck

October’s Featured Artist

Artist Bio:

Holly Spruck’s paintings have been featured in solo and group exhibitions in galleries across the United States and abroad, including the Merrill Jennings Gallery, ArtWorks On Main, Dialect Design, and the Green Rice Gallery in North Carolina, and the Blue Moon Café in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Her solo exhibitions at the Radost FX Gallery, Hairline Studios and the Ouky Douky Cafe in Prague, the Czech Republic were sold out on opening night.

Her paintings have been featured in publications including THINK magazine, Creative Loafing, and on the cover of The Main Street Rag. In the ART IN HAND project, her painting is featured as the joker in a deck of 53 cards by regional artists in North Carolina.

Holly was born and grew up in Westchester County, New York State, just north of New York City.

Artist Statement:

“Charlotte’s Dirty Little Secrets”

While pontooning on Lake Norman I could never imagine the town below me. Houses, churches, cotton mills, bridges, graves. To make the community better we flooded the town to build a lake. Who were the people that had to relocate?  There are worlds and neighborhoods under us. Destroyed. To be “revitalized”. But for whom ? 

Floating on a noodle that hot summer day, 18 years ago, I was inspired to create this show.  “Charlotte’s dirty little secrets,” is merely a sample. Researching this show and interviewing natives, I have come to a conclusion: Charlotte is really dirty. Filthy. 

The more stories I learned the more questions I had. Why was the first black hospital torn down? So Charlotte could build a football stadium? In the painting called, “Stadium vs. The Good Simarittitan,”I show the viewer that  the stadium is engulfing the hospital. Destroying a history that may have been able to be moved.

I could spend the rest of my career exploring this subject in my work and fail to tell the whole story.