Rate My Professor Ron Laboray

Ron Laboray is Professor of Painting and Drawing and Director of the School of Art and Design in the David Orr Belcher College of Fine and Performing Arts at Western Carolina University. He earned his Master of Fine Arts from Washington University in St. Louis and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Residing in Asheville, North Carolina, Laboray leads the School of Art and Design, overseeing its programs and faculty while teaching in his specialized field of painting and drawing.

A multimedia conceptual artist, Ron Laboray is recognized for his paintings, drawings, videos, and sculptures that explore themes of time, popular culture, mass culture, shared histories, globalization, and temporality. His work adopts a pseudoscientific and digitally influenced methodology to build an expansive visual archive of popular culture. Employing the visual languages of abstraction and realism, Laboray's data-based artworks integrate historical subject matter with elements of mass media, including television, movies, comic books, fast food logos, and junk mail advertising. His oeuvre has been exhibited in museums, special project spaces, and galleries in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis, St. Louis, Budapest, Rennes in France, Taiwan, and Japan. Notable venues include the Vincent Price Art Museum, Pacific Design Center, and Raid Projects in Los Angeles; the Navy Pier Exposition and the Suburban in Chicago; Pulse in Miami; the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art; the Hungarian National Academy of Science in Budapest; and a permanent mural installation at Rennes 2 University in France. Beyond his studio practice, Laboray extends his influence through collaborative curatorial projects and public exhibitions that integrate works by other artists and students into community forums, partnering with local historical groups, municipal committees, labor unions, and nonprofit organizations.