A Powerful Story
A solo exhibition by Eric McRay
April 17- June 7, 2026
Allenton Gallery at the Durham Arts Council
Show Openings: Friday, April 17 & May 15 from 6-8pm
“A Powerful Story” features collage paintings by Eric McRay that reflect memory, identity, and place through the shared history of African Americans in the Black Diaspora and his own family’s lived experience. Through cutting, layering, and painting, McRay honors the way memories are carried, remembered, and reshaped. Figures and landscapes surface through rich textures, evoking ancestral presence, resilience, and cultural continuity across generations.
Artist Statement:
Raleigh-based artist Eric McRay, born and raised in Washington, DC, uses collage to explore visual storytelling while addressing the human figure as an entity of change in theatrical narratives. These chronicles are inspired by African-American, Biblical, and art history, as well as pop culture. Yet, at the core are McRay’s familial relationships. This continuum searches for personal and universal experiences.
McRay says, “Collage, one of the major innovations of modern art, is an artist inserting pieces of the real world into a constructed one.” He injects impromptu invention in the construction of his collages, which include such materials as reproductions of his previous works, painted papers, photographic reproductions, snippets of photographs, scraps of fabric, elements from magazines, cut & torn paper, water-media & acrylic paints. The different materials of everyday existence are edited, sliced, and reassembled into new images on paper, board, or canvas.
These constructed worlds pull the viewer into a new reality. Collage empowers McRay to push the boundaries that allow the real world to infiltrate a painting, dissolve the conventions that separate art and life, high art and popular culture.
Biography:
McRay received a BFA degree at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, where he earned a four-year scholarship for his artistic talent. A native of Washington, DC, McRay moved to North Carolina and has been exhibiting since 1987. In November 1998, he was juried into Raleigh’s prestigious Artspace. In 2020, McRay became a founding member of C-MAC: City Market Artist Collective.
McRay’s artistic career has been featured on TV and radio programs, and in numerous newspapers, magazines and websites. The Raleigh News & Observer named him one of the “Artists to Watch”. Numerous times he has been listed among the “Best Local Artist” and “Favorite Local Artist”. McRay has received feature articles in Fortune Small Business, Art Business News, Our State Magazine, Walter Magazine, and Southern Living Magazine.
Some of his collectors include the SAS Institute, American Tobacco Campus, North Carolina Central University Art Museum, Duke University Medical Center, Duke Health Raleigh Hospital, NC State University, UNC – Chapel Hill and Western Wake Hospital, as well as many private collectors locally, nationally and internationally. McRay was also privileged to participate in the Art in Embassies Program, which displayed his works in the US Embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark.
