Business as Usual

For the last ten years, Bob Trotman has titled his exhibitions Business as Usual – a catch phrase that reflects the implacable force of profit-making which lies at the heart of corporate culture and much government policy. Whether with enthusiasm or reluctance, Trotman’s anonymous figures seem to be operating in a darkly familiar system that favors power, privilege, and greed, above all else. Through his work, the artist reflects onto us problems he perceives in our society, yet his sculptures are not direct representations of specific current events. Further, his characters, though familiar, are not based on real people. The artist’s interests are wider than politics or simply today’s news headlines, and the excesses his works emphasize are certainly not new. Trotman’s works, finely crafted, primarily of wood, but at times utilizing sound, light, movement, resin, clay, and more, represent everything the artist has been resisting for the last forty or so years in pursuit of a focused life in rural North Carolina.

Trotman was born in 1947 in Winston-Salem, NC, and received a B.A. in philosophy from Washington and Lee University. His works have been widely exhibited nationally and he has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, four fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council, and was a finalist for the 1858 Prize from the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, SC. His work is included in several important collections including the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; Weatherspoon Museum of Art, at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC; The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; Museum of Art of the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, among others. Check out our bookstore for a hard copy of the Bob Trotman: Business as Usual book.

Bob Trotman: Business as Usual was curated by the Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College, in cooperation with the Projective Eye Gallery at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the Gregg Museum of Art at North Carolina State University, and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston. The exhibition would not have been possible without the support of the N.C. Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, Lewis-Butler Foundation, Herb Jackson and Laura Grosch Gallery Fund, Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Malu Alvarez ’02, and the Davidson College Friends of the Arts.