COLUMBUS, Miss. – “Intersections of Gender and Place,” an exhibition now on view at the Mississippi University for Women Galleries, features artwork by Teresa Cole, Shawne Major, and Amy Pleasant.
This exhibition series looks at women artists who live in the South and whose work, in some way, relates to gender issues and issues of (the Southern) place/culture. A reception and artist panel will take place Thursday, Oct. 19 from 4–5:30 p.m. as part of the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium.
Cole is a New Orleans-based artist known for printmaking. She earned her MFA in print media from Cranbrook Academy of Art and has exhibited work nationally and internationally. She currently teaches printmaking at Tulane University. Her artwork in the exhibition investigates the concept of pattern relationship to cultural identity. “I am interested in pattern and ornament in order to call attention to it as a language,” she said.
Pleasant, a resident of Birmingham, Ala., earned her MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. She was named a recipient of The Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award for 2015. Her paintings in the exhibition explore the fragmented figure as sign or symbol. Describing her achromatic minimalist figures, Pleasant likens her images to the act of writing a letter “documenting essential, universal motions and human behavior.”
A riot of color and textures mark Louisiana native Major’s mixed media “drawings.” She sews real objects into her constructions “in part because this action [the sewing] mirrors the binding of experiences and expectations that humans perform to produce meaning.” The objects, such as plastic bracelets, dog collars and even spent shell casings, serve as markers for life’s experiences. Major earned her MFA from Rutgers University, and her work is in the collections of the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute of American Art; New Orleans Museum of Art; the Ogden Museum of Southern Art; the Hilliard Museum of Art, Lafayette; and Art in Embassies program, Brazzaville, Congo.
The exhibition, located in the Mississippi University for Women Galleries in Summer Hall, runs until Wednesday, Nov. 1. The reception, artist panel and exhibition are free and open to the public. The Galleries are open Monday–Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Oct. 13, 2017