Rhodes College Department of Art & Art History

Join us on Zoom tonight for a talk by David R. Harper!

https://rhodes.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2dmmgVDESj66rUvW-BC9pw?fbclid=IwAR3QVHM6jYyf17n5mBs-oLZMbqfeOrlaoyO6iccdtUT7T95CMCXOYdcq-OU

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Artist Talk: David Harper. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Artist Talk: David Harper. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.

Join us on Zoom tonight at 6:00 for a lecture by Assistant Professor Raina Belleau!

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Raina Belleau: Enchanted Forest Fire. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar. Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Raina Belleau: Enchanted Forest Fire. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.

HUGE congrats to Art Department alum Sophia Mason for inclusion in the 2021 New Public Sculptors Fellows!!!!

https://www.facebook.com/urbanartcommission/posts/10159376561514479

Happy Friday !

Please join us in congratulating our 2021 New Public Sculptors Fellows🥳

Artists selected:

Amber George
Brittney Bullock
Kenneth Alexander
Khara Woods
LaAndrea Deloyce
Sarah Cornejo
Sophia Mason
Tracy Treadwell

Over the next few weeks this fellowship, in partnership with and , will provide these artists in-depth training and professional development resources in the field of sculptural arts. Topics covered include writing proposals and statements, budgeting, fabrication techniques, community engagement, and modeling and 3D design visualization.

Click the link in our bio to view other current opportunities ✨

The students of Art 260: Curation in Context created virtual exhibitions featuring Memphis-based artists, and they're sharing them all week on the Clough-Hanson Gallery page!

Melissa Dunn, Alexander Paulus, Emily C. Thomas, Mary K VanGieson
curated by Katie Clark

Take a few minutes and look around. Have you really seen your surroundings? The place you’re in, the people, objects, pets around you? Time alone has required us to wonder: what are we looking at? And are we really seeing it? When people look at us through Facetime and Zoom, are they seeing us the same way as they would in person? How do we look at ourselves? How do we look at art? Do we see ourselves, or the art we look at?
Looking meaning the sense of sight, and seeing meaning letting the things we look at to truly impact us, are different. Eyesolation: Seeing and Looking in Quarantine presents artworks by four Memphis artists, Melissa Dunn, Alexander Paulus, Emily C Thomas, and Mary K VanGieson. Their pieces come together to ask us new questions in this unfamiliar pandemic context. Through painting, sculpting, humor, storytelling these artists inspire seeing rather than looking, with deep attention to how we are changing the ways we use our eyes in quarantine.
The sarcasm in Paulus’s figures and titles reveals that humor is often healthy, and VanGieson’s She holds an omni-applicable downward gaze that requires viewers to wonder how we express emotion subconsciously. We can all look at these artworks, but actively seeing them gives the artists the agency to change us. Our worlds have shrunken physically, broadened technologically, and we have begun to rely on our eyes as a window into a world of communication. Eyesolation: Seeing and Looking in Quarantine demands us to be vulnerable with these artists, and start seeing when looking, at art, ourselves, and our sometimes scary and always changing world.

Melissa Dunn’s studio is in her house in Memphis, TN, where she was born and has spent most of her life. She’s exhibits locally and regionally, and teaches drawing and painting at Flicker Street Studio. She regularly volunteers at Carpenter Art Garden, an afterschool art program in Binghampton, and was a founding member of the Artist Advisory Council at ArtsMemphis. She was recently chosen by the Urban Art Commission as a finalist for the Memphis International Airport Concourse B Project.

Alexander Paulus, from Missouri, has been living in Memphis since 2007. He earned his MFA from the Memphis College of Art in 2009 and has been exhibited across the United States as well as in London, England. He currently is an Assistant Professor at Southwest Tennessee Community College, and has been published in Studio Visit Magazine, the South 2017 edition of New American Paintings, and more.

Emily C. Thomas graduated from NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development with a BFA in 2009 and in 2015 received her MFA from the University of California Santa Barbara. Some of her awards include the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC) Visual, Performing and Media Arts Award, the Florimbi- Simon Award, and also a doctoral travel grant to the Middle East. Emily is from and is currently working in Memphis, TN.

Mary K VanGieson lives and works in Memphis, TN as artist, educator, storyteller, and “sometime writer.” After receiving her BAE from Oklahoma State University, she completed her MFA at the University of Memphis. Among her artistic awards, she has received five teaching awards including Teacher of the Year in Shelby County twice. She has made many generous art donations and her work has been shown in New York, Nashville, and throughout Memphis, notably at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens.

The students of Art 260: Curation in Context worked remotely with Memphis-based artists to think about what art can do during quarantine. The result is a group of virtual exhibitions that help us see the landscape, the home, personal relationships, and our own bodies with the clarity and insight that only art and artists can offer. Exhibitions will premier here on Facebook throughout this week, and then be archived on our website.

This is Quarantine Couple, featuring work by Lacey Mitcham Veteto and Gregory Allen Smith, curated by Ben Aquila.

Lacy Mitcham Veteto and Gregory Allen Smith

curated by Ben Aquila

Extreme isolation is a daunting task for one person. There is nothing but time to get lost in thoughts and feelings that, outside of unending alone-ness, might be avoided. If this exercise brewing within one person seems difficult, imagine when its compounded and confused by. . . a partner. Good god what is going on there?

Independent Artists, collaborators, and partners Lacy Mitcham Veteto and Gregory Allen Smith help us understand this wild proposition that is occurring with millions of folks in our current moment. Individually, each has been thrown into a time where they are self-analyzing in a crazy active way. For Veteto, this means exploring the layers of her body physically and theoretically-What does it mean to inhabit sheets of gooey matter with holes and roles, and what does it entail to call these layers she? Smith all the while is preoccupied with his intimate care and frustration for the body and its treatment of the ground that supports it. Are people weeds, weed-makers, or both? And how do these weeds manifest? With two intense thought trains going full steam ahead under the same roof, it feels impossible to fit anything else in the room. However, out of their mutual relationship comes a climactic and collaborative object that represents the exciting and maybe hazardous reality of isolating alone and with another. In other words, being a quarantine couple.

Artist Bios:
LMV: Lacy Mitcham Veteto is an artist who works primarily in three-dimensions. Her practice is rooted in sculpture that uses the fragile condition of the body and nature to consider issues of power and vulnerability. Her work has most recently turned to runway fashion in Memphis Fashion Week to make wearable sculptures that inject a sculptural approach to fashion design, and a different audience. In the past year, she also has curated exhibitions that make suggestions of the impacts of various power dynamics and considers this part of her 3D practice. She graduated with her Master of Fine Arts in 2017, and has been an educator at University of Memphis, Rhodes College, University Middle School, Creative Aging and The Dixon Gallery and Gardens. She was also an Arts Accelerator grant awardee through Arts Memphis, and is co-editor of Number Magazine, which is a submission-based regional art publication.

GAS: Smith earned his Bachelor of Science in Mass Communication with an emphasis in Photography from Middle Tennessee State University in 2006. After moving back to Memphis, he completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of Memphis in 2014. Since then, he has held the fulltime position of preparator at David Lusk Gallery.

The students of Art 260: Curation in Context worked remotely with Memphis-based artists to think about what art can do during quarantine. The result is a group of virtual exhibitions that help us see the landscape, the home, personal relationships, and our own bodies with the clarity and insight that only art and artists can offer. Exhibitions will premier here on Facebook throughout this week, and then be archived on our website.

This is Interiors, featuring work by Paula Kovarik and Sophia Mason, curated by Jenna Gilley.

Paula Kovarik and Sophia Mason
curated by Jenna Gilley

In our current state of global quarantine, interiors are on our mind. Stay at Home orders have made us increasingly aware of domestic spaces as we strive to protect the interior of our bodies. As the days and weeks pass, we become more familiar with the everyday objects surrounding us. Cleaners like detergent and washing machines have become our saviors. We find comfort snuggled between pillows and blankets. But fear and anxiety still lurk and increase with time. Home is our sanctuary, but also a cage.
The domestic sphere has long been associated with women. The activities people now have picked up to pass the time—sewing, cooking, cleaning—are stereotypically performed by women. These activities can be comforting in their repetition and effect, while often born out of an anxious need for control. To many being confined to the home is new and daunting, but it has long been a part of the feminine reality. This exhibition shows the connection between the historic “quarantine” of women to the home and the COVID-19 pandemic through domestic themes and mediums.
Although women have more opportunity than ever, female craft remains underappreciated. This exhibition solely contains work by female Memphis textile artists, who have reinterpreted traditional practices like quilt making into art that is bold, political, and introspective. As you view this collection, consider how each object comments on the global health crisis, as well as reflects the personal worries and struggles of the women who created them.

Artist Bios
Paula Kovarik is a textile artist in Memphis, TN. She received her Bachelor of Arts in graphic design from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. As the creative director and owner of Shades of Gray, Inc., a graphic design studio, she specialized in communications. Now, Paula’s work serves as a balm to worry. Her textile art has been recognized by several national venues. She has been profiled in American Craft, Fiber ArtNow and Art Quilting Studio magazines.

Sophia Mason is a textile artist in Memphis, TN, raised in Wisconsin. She received her BA in Art from Rhodes College. Her sculptures, installations, and performances have been shown in exhibitions internationally and in the United States, including The Dixon Gallery and Gardens and Crosstown Arts in Memphis, Tennessee and at the Fundacion in Comillas, Spain. Her work has hung at the Memphis International Airport. She is the recipient of the Sally Becker Grinspan Award for Artistic Achievement.