RALEIGH, NC.- The North Carolina Museum of Art hosted Detroit-based artist Louise Jones, also known as Ouizi, to install a giant floral mural on the side of its East Building as part of the exhibition The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art. A second mural, on the side of Benchmark Autoworks in Raleigh’s Warehouse District at the intersection of Davie and Dawson streets, was also installed to promote the special exhibition.

“Thank you, Raleigh and NCMA, for inviting me to make work in your city,” said artist Louise Jones. “May it be a positive force and encourage everyone to blossom in their own way.”

The mural at the NCMA, titled Summer’s Where You’ll Find Me, is one of more than 50 contemporary works of art in The Beyond. Alongside more than 30 works by Georgia O’Keeffe, The Beyond features works by contemporary artists including Jones, Anna Valdez, Mark Lewis, and Britny Wainwright that evoke and expand upon O’Keeffe’s innovative artistic language. The contemporary artists were selected for their individual approaches to O’Keeffe’s powerful themes, including flowers, bodies, still lifes, cities and deserts, and the interplay between realism and abstraction. The exhibition introduces audiences to a new generation of American artists, providing a fresh look at O’Keeffe through the lens of contemporary art.

Jones visited the NCMA in July to gather flowers and other natural materials from the Museum Park as inspiration for her site-specific mural: St. John’s wort, southern magnolia, black-eyed Susans, cup plants, and swamp milkweed, among others. It took her four days to create the mural, spray painting and painting by hand. The finished mural measures 24 feet wide and 48 feet tall. Jones then completed the downtown mural, Indian Summer, inspired by a book of botanical prints, in two days. The downtown installation was a collaboration with Benchmark Autoworks and Raleigh Murals Project.

“Louise Jones’s monumental flower murals explore color, form, and pattern found in nature,” said Linda Dougherty, the NCMA’s chief curator and curator of contemporary art. “Like Georgia O’Keeffe, Jones reimagines flowers on a massive scale, making you look more closely than you would if they had been painted life size, and reminding us of the undeniable beauty of the natural world.” Dougherty added, “Jones’s vibrantly colorful mural of a gigantic bouquet, Summer’s Where You’ll Find Me, is inspired by flowers found in the Museum Park, including the southern magnolia, and is a great addition to the NCMA campus.”