Margaret Bowland’s Excerpts from the Great American Songbook explores problematic and provocative issues of race, gender, beauty and individuality in contemporary social thought.

Bowland says, “Beauty makes sense to me…has weight for me, only when it falls from grace. It starts to matter when it carries damage. Sorrow allows [beauty] to cast a shadow.” And what is the shadowy dark side of beauty?

Bowland’s paintings, conceived with a rich tenebrist light seem to punch their way into one’s consciousness through the captivating metaphorical image of a young black girl whose inner awareness looks upon an outer world in which “it ain’t necessarily so.” Portraying her subject matter in a larger than life scale, Bowland issues both an invitation and a challenge to reconsider what writer Siri Hustvedt describes as “the fictions we live by.”

Featuring 16 large-scale oil and pastel paintings, Excerpts from the Great American Songbook opened March 1 and will continue through May 3 at Babcock Galleries. The exhibition will travel to the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina, May 18 – July 17, 2011. The first book on the artist, written by internationally known author Siri Hustvedt and published jointly by Babcock Galleries and the Greenville County Museum of Art, accompanies the show.