ALABAMA
November 1-30, 2024
Opening reception on Friday, November 1st; 5:30p-8p
All artworks are available to collect in person or online. See the online gallery to purchase through the Bells Gallery Website.
The Bells Gallery has curated a group exhibition of Alabama-based artists. The show reflects the great talent we have in our state, reflecting artists who are pushing the boundaries of contemporary art and craft. From printmaking and textiles to watercolors and cast plastics, the ALABAMA Exhibition is a cohesive sampling of Alabama’s Artists.
ALABAMA is on view at the Bells Gallery from November 1-30, 2023. The group exhibition has the work of 26 Alabama-based artists: Douglas Barrett (Birmingham), Douglas Baulos (Birmingham), Abigail Brewer (Tuscaloosa), Autumn Darah (Birmingham), Dariana Dervis (Birmingham), Roscoe Hall (Birmingham), Aaron Sanders Head (Greensboro), Will Henry (Tuscaloosa), Janet Hinton (Fairhope), Kyle Holland (Tuscaloosa), Stacey Holloway (Birmingham), Maxwell Hudson (Birmingham), Will Jacks (Troy), C.A. Jones (Birmingham), Rose Kimbrough (Alabaster), Alexa Lee (Birmingham), Anna Lyle (Birmingham), Loretta Lynn (Tuscaloosa), Darien Malone (Birmingham), Hayley Meyers (Dothan), Caroline Myers (Birmingham), Caleigh Parsons (Dothan), Casey Roberts (Greensboro), Sam Roberts (Irondale), Alexandra Rose (Birmingham), and Debanjaly Sen (Tuscaloosa).
ABOUT ALABAMA ARTISTS
Douglas Barrett
As an artist/graphic designer, I am fascinated with the practices of commuting, rural spaces, agricultural processes, and how local visual culture is created through marks left by man. I want to explore, map and re-present found text and imagery in a way that talks about the constructed place. Signage, billboards, graffiti, and ephemera point to the visual culture embedded in our surroundings. My interest in this constructed place is tied to my belief that the spaces we use have a cultural and historic impact on our world.
I am interested in collecting, documenting and exploring evidence of the interaction between people and geography by curating the evidence of commercial occupation. Specifically, I am interested in examining how the hand of man marks, sorts, portions and divides the landscape through the everyday use of these spaces and how evidence of this interaction are left on the land. Many of these marks are found in the form of roadside vectors, railroad spurs, plowing, fencing, planting, and other traces of human interaction on the rural landscape.
My objective is to create visible connections between material culture, place, and the inhabitants that create them. This visual narrative is informed by extensive collection, research, semiotics, mapping and personal exploration. Through the mode of “designer as author,” I am able to create a visual space that uses the powerful ability of images and vernacular ephemera to tell a reflexive story in a visually poetic way.
My work is influenced by a wide-range of artists and writers. I find inspiration in the work of Julie Mehretu, William Anastasi, Eugene Atget, Gaston Bachelard and Michel de Certeau. This inspiration comes from a shared experience of documenting something that is lost. As a southern artist, working in Alabama, I am surrounded by spaces that are imbued with feelings of loss, nostalgia, regret and longing. The images I am creating are ephemeral in nature and the abandoned condition in which many of these spaces are found, confirm and expound the damaged narrative of the southern condition.
Doug Barrett received his MFA from the University of Florida and a BFA from the University of Central Florida.
With over 20 years of professional graphic design experience, his international clients included, Mars, Inc., VISA International and Banco Popular. His award winning work has been featured in many design publications, including LogoLounge No.7, and HOWs Mastering Type. He received an MFA from the University of Florida in 2006.
His research interests include, commuting, space and place, and typography. Fascinated with the practice of commuting, the allure of the roadside and local visual culture–he is interested in exploring and representing found text and imagery in a way that talks about the constructed place. Signage, billboards, graffiti, and ephemera point to the visual culture embedded in our surroundings. By examining the details of roadside culture, he explores how meaning is constructed and conveyed through visual and cultural relationships.
Barrett was recognized as one of the University of Florida’s Graduate Teachers of the Year in 2006 and co-directed UF’s Tokyo Study Abroad program from 2008 to 2010. In 2012, he was awarded a prestigious Alabama State Arts Fellowship in Design and was the recipient of a Sappi Ideas That Matter grant.
Douglas Baulos
One of my major goals as an artist is to nurture and evoke a life affirming consciousness as people approach and view my books and installation. I explore the hidden corners of things, the deeper meanings, and reactions we might have to something that affects or instills awe in us. My work is about exploring where spaces are suspended for observation and meet at a crossroads between the temporal (fleeting) and concrete (lasting). I use very visceral and grounded materials to investigate the emotionally heavy concepts of loss, memory and mortality. My research lies at the intersection where scientific understanding, emotional experience, and diverse realities are allowed to exist. I hope to inspire wonder and reference for the natural world as a safe space for everyone.
Holistically, I hope to enrich inner lives, personal mindfulness, and self-care by creating artworks that ask difficult questions, support community, and promote stewardship of the environment. The romantic ideal of a union between the natural world and art processes conflicts with the impact I want to make on the world, so I tend to see my work as a deliberate record to create stories about specific interests I have in the natural world. I want to create works that exude a rich aesthetic space that allows the viewers to be invited to a feeling that allows them the luxury of immersing themselves in cognitive experience and notice subliminal, unremarkable, and overlooked ideas within exquisite emotional landscapes. I express the oscillation of hope and despair while exploring the boundaries and intersections within the nature of identity. I tend to find/use materials that are capable of mending or nurturing, or that spring from inspiration in nature, through themes of mending, creation, and extinction.
Douglas Pierre Baulos was born in Springfield, Illinois. In 1990, they received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In 1993, they received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of New Orleans. They currently are the Associate Professor of Drawing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the co-director of UAB BLOOM STUDIOS and Dye Garden. Their drawings, collages, and books have been exhibited/published both nationally and internationally. His work hopes to create a ladder for interpersonal and collective agency in a space for healing and generative creativity. Doug’s current works are explorations (visual) and meditations (poetry) centering on their ideas of queer identity, love, death, shelter, and hope.
Museum/university collection (Selected)
The Museum of Modern Art. New York, New York
The J.P. Getty Museum and Research Institute. Los Angeles, California
The Birmingham Museum of Art. Birmingham, Alabama
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, San Francisco, California
Birmingham Fine Art Services. Birmingham, Alabama
The Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, Alabama
Vulcan Materials. Birmingham, Alabama
Le Lizard Bleu Foundation, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Children’s Hospital. Birmingham, Alabama
Johnson & Johnson. New York, New York
Abigail Brewer
“My paintings are often born out of self-reflection. Through meditating on experiences from my past – be it fairytales I grew up with, Chinese traditions my mother tenderly passed down, or memories from my experiences as a classical ballet dancer, I reference pieces of myself through whimsical portrayals of nature, culture, and the figure. I love the freedom that mixed media allows and how the combination of different materials reflect the concepts behind my work: combining dynamic materials and elements both physically and conceptually to create a harmonious narrative and image. My favorite materials to use are oil paints combined with fabrics that I collect on my travels to Asia. These satin brocades and silks are not only rich and vibrant in physical beauty, but also rich with history and cultural significance. The patterning and symbology both fuel my creative spirit and connect me to parts of my heritage. My past as a dancer also highly influences how I render the figure, with a focus on subtle expression and movement through the hands, shoulders, and textiles the figure is wearing. My ultimate goal is to honestly and vulnerably bear the intricacies of my individual perspective, while also inviting others to reflect on how their own personal experiences combine to form beautiful and complex tapestries that define our identities.”
Abi Brewer is a mixed media painter based in Tuscaloosa, AL. Growing up, although she did not spend much time drawing or painting, she was still immensely invested in the arts. From the age of 10, Abi trained as a classical ballet dancer and was able to dance professionally with the Alabama Ballet in Birmingham Alabama after high school.
After deciding to switch trajectory by retiring her pointe shoes and enrolling at the University of Alabama, Abi began painting as a creative outlet. Soon, she decided to add Studio Art to her studies at the university, alongside International Studies and Chinese. Abi found that with each of her interests came a new depth to her work, and she still highly values a multidisciplinary approach to her work.
Abi Brewer Fine Art was established in 2022. Abi began by creating and selling her works around the community and at small markets. Today, she participates in numerous solo/group shows and fine art festivals as well as hosting watercolor workshops in Tuscaloosa and Birmingham. Abi also received a grant to support her 2024 workshop project, a project bringing free workshops to underserved parts of the community and has established a partnership with Capstone Village Retirement Living. Abi is also pursuing a Masters in Business at the University of Alabama and working hard to learn and understand how artists can both support themselves financially while also staying true to their work and artistic vision.
She hopes to continue creating work for her collectors and art lovers as well as making art more accessible to the community of West Alabama.
Autumn Darah
The desire to document one’s self is prominent in our current society. I have this affinity and I channel it through documenting myself in my paintings. Via self-portraiture I convey visual metaphors and an exploration of emotionality combined with personal experiences. My work is focused on highly colorful nude figures that are engulfed in vulnerability and self-intimacy. Between the figure and the environment, my paintings explore the idea of home, whether that manifests in the physicality of my body or the literal domestic setting. I fervently invite the audience into both of my places of residences – imploring them to question what makes a home.
Autumn Darah (b. 2001) is a mixed-media painter entranced by self-portraiture. Darah is an Alabama born artist currently based in Birmingham, AL. Her work focuses on themes of identity, self-intimacy, and domesticity while continuing the art historical narrative of female-self portraiture parallel to the female nude.
Dariana Dervis
As a mixed media collage artist, the tactile qualities of making a collage and moving physical pieces on a surface draws me in and sparks my imagination. Placing papers and other collage materials in close proximity allows the magic of textures, patterns, and colors to harmonize. As the pieces begin to work together, the story also begins to unfold. Being in the present moment and in the flow of the creative process involves a lightness as well as a series of micro-decisions – some conscious and others not. Listening, receiving and responding to this stream of information while working with my hands is extremely gratifying.
While I use traditional art supplies, I am continually gathering and collecting things. Nature is an inspiring and steadfast source of materials–leaves, seeds, insect wings, bones, and feathers. A collection of worn, scratched, or broken found objects with stories of their own also find their way into my collage arsenal. Many objects destined for the landfill are reinvented, reconfigured, or paired with other items to lend new context. In our throw-away society, transforming what might be considered trash into a treasure feels like a satisfying and worthwhile endeavor.
Imagining the lives and stories of the people in discarded vintage photos is like being drawn into a moment captured in time. An expression, body language, pose, or landscape stirs my curiosity and sheds light on a new visual story. The concept of home as a physical place and also as an internal dwelling place intrigues me. Themes of connection to one another, how our stories intersect, our relationship to nature and to the homes we inhabit repeatedly arise in my artwork.
Deeply inspired by nature, Dariana Dervis delights in mining beauty from the ordinary to create the extraordinary. Papers, found objects, ephemera and thread are given new life and meaning as they are incorporated into mixed media collages. A visual dialog and juxtaposition of past and present elements creates a piece greater than the sum of its individual parts.
The artist often expresses what she cannot readily find words for. The artist believes art has the power to heal both the maker and the viewer and thinks of herself as a visual storyteller and collector whose artwork explores the ways we are connected to the landscapes in which we live and also to one another. Dervis holds a BFA from the University of Montevallo, and currently works as both fine artist and graphic designer in Birmingham, Alabama.
Roscoe Hall
My name is Roscoe Hall. I create paintings remixing narratives told and placed within the African American’s view of America. Searching for truth in pigment and questioning the unexamined histories across media ranging from food to paint. I mention food due to my life as a chef for nearly 26 years. I have always melded the two worlds because of the intent of research within regions and of course the production of a complete thought through visuals, and texture. My project is always leaning towards how to add objectivity of expression to figurative depictions of brown and black communities all over the place. Consider it a nod to those I admire for knowing how to wait, build a culture and never break that joy.
Born in Chicago in 1978, Roscoe Hall is an American painter pushing narratives of progression within the mediums of paint, and fabric. Working as a chef for nearly 27 years he used art as a life source to cope from working in some of the best kitchens in the United States. Education within the arts was achieved at San Diego State for undergrad focus within Photography and a masters program Art History at the Savannah College of Art & Design. His works combine the culinary and fine art world. Mixing pigments from dried spices, building his own charcoal from oak, and mesquite wood, and using kitchen utensils to apply those pigments on various textured surfaces.
His work speaks to narratives of progression within the world. Most are references to the placement of curiosity of minorities to possibly secure a seat at the table of decisions. Hall’s works have been exhibited at the Bloomfield Art Center, Harvey B. Gantt Museum, NC, SOCO Gallery, Charlotte, NC, Lowe Mill Gallery, Huntsville, AL, Scott Miller Projects, Birmingham, AL, James Baron Art Gallery; Kent, CT, Daisha Board Gallery, Dallas, TX and the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, Birmingham, AL.
Aaron Sanders Head
I create textile works, often in the form of hand-stitched panels and quilts, that explore the diverse and conflicting experiences of living in contemporary rural Alabama. My artistic practice utilizes the agricultural, artistic and storytelling traditions of my family to depict the realities of overlooked communities, while also celebrating and memorializing the bonding traditions that hold communities together and investigating the reasons why people remain.
The compelling action behind my artistic practice is the desire to create work that feels truly endemic; directly rooted in, enhanced by, and in conversation with the place the work was created. One of my primary goals is for the work to look like the place from which it comes. One avenue of creating work in this manner has been using solely natural dyes—primarily indigo, black walnut, sumac, osage wood, goldenrod, among others. I grow or forage all of the dye materials used in my work here in Greensboro, AL, located in Hale County. These materials have complex regional histories, invoking both the powerful, healing traditions of Indigenous, African American and rural medicine practitioners, and the abject horrors of forced labor and enslavement. I use traditional methods of coaxing color from these materials, forging a direct connection between the work, the history of the land, and the material itself. The slyly radical framework of quiltmaking and textiles enables my work to embrace the tension between a recognized traditional craft and something less contained.
My works are a testimony to the generous, fierce natural beauty of Alabama, and a result of the deep but ever-adaptable roots that radical people have fostered in the Black Belt for generations. My ongoing practice explores the unifying and reclaiming abilities of textiles and natural dyes, and uses the familiarity of textiles and quilts as a mode of storytelling.
Aaron Sanders Head is a Southern, Alabama-based textile artist. Aaron was raised in rural Grady, AL and Hope Hull, AL, as the youngest of three children from an artist mother and an agricultural worker father. His grandparents were both rural mail carriers, and the times Aaron spent accompanying them on those trips cemented early on a fondness for rural areas and the importance of connection however it can be found. That learned sense of observation combined with inherited family traditions of textile and agriculture inform the unique visual language Aaron works in today, that exists in the worlds of quiltmaking, handwork and natural dyes. Aaron creates quilts and hand-stitched, naturally dyed textiles that explore the lived experiences of rural Alabamians.
Will Henry
Feelings of displacement, yearning, and angst often emerge when living an intersectional reality in a binary world. I combat this binary by visualizing these experiences and drawing on the body as an element that is inseparable from human experience. My work is a combination of celebration of my marginalized looking as well as a reimagining of my Black, Queer experiences with the use of historical Queer aesthetics, Black cultural tropes, remixed with religious iconography, and ethereal aesthetics.
Through the mystification of the bodily form, through the medium of drawing and photography, I reinscribe a new normal. I use the rigor of traditional, illustrative and photographic aesthetics like a Trojan horse to infiltrate the narrow scope of society’s notion of personhood by examining broad themes of the constructed self, sexuality, intimacy, violence, culture, and the human desire to be seen and heard.
Will Henry is a Black Queer, Alabama based, multidisciplinary visual artist with works that include photography, printmaking, graphic design, drawing, and book arts. They received their BFA in fine arts with a concentration in photography, printmaking, and graphic design, from the University of Montevallo. They received their MA and MFA in studio art in fine arts with a concentration in photography and printmaking from The University of Alabama, and they are currently pursuing an MFA in Book Arts from the University of Alabama.
Their work primarily focuses on themes of constructed self, sexuality, intimacy, violence, their cultural identities, and the human desire to be seen and heard. Their recent work examines ideas of desire, lust, and voyeurism, through photography, in the hopes of dismantling systems of personal internalized shame brought on by an often oppressive society in the pursuit of Queer Salvation.
Janet Hinton
“I have painted landscapes from time to time throughout my career. The design elements of color, shape, line, and texture are important in my paintings. I have painted a series of water paintings where only the water is shown with the reflections. The abstract quality is emphasized even though it is painted realistically. Fly Creek is located in Baldwin County, Alabama, which empties into Mobile Bay at Fairhope. Sailboat masts and the sky are reflected in the water. Even though a specific place is depicted, the water is universal.
After a childhood in northeast Alabama, and college at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, I lived many years in the Wiregrass area while teaching art at Wallace Community College. After retirement I moved to Fairhope, Alabama, where I continue my artwork at a studio in my home and clay work at the Eastern Shore Art Center. I work on original printmaking (linocuts, etchings, etc.), painting, drawing, and clay. I exhibit regionally and do commission artworks. I am represented in Mobile, Alabama by Sophiella Gallery.“
Janet Helene Hinton grew up in Attalla, Alabama, and earned her MFA degree in Art from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, majoring in printmaking with minor concentrations in painting and ceramics. She was on the art faculty at Wallace Community College in Dothan, Alabama, teaching both studio and art history courses.
Hinton lives in Fairhope, Alabama, where she maintains a studio. She works in printmaking, painting, drawing, clay, and photography and occasionally teaches. She exhibits in solo and group exhibitions and her works are included in private and public collections.
Kyle Holland
“Manly men are given to passing adverse judgment, and not only on women but also on other males who do not meet their exacting standards.” —Harvey Mansfield, Manliness
“Who determined the characteristics and codes of behavior that would make one a perfect man? Is this dynamic being enforced due to a collective pressure to conform to this model of masculinity? Why are men marginalized for something as innately human as expressing their emotions? More specifically, how did this prototype come about in the American South, and how long has it been an established part of Southern society? Through my studio practice, I am pursuing answers to these questions by researching the precedents to contemporary Southern masculinity, gaining an understanding of the social workings of masculinity through theoretical frameworks, learning how my relationship with the South has shaped my identity, and attempting to subvert the existence of a dominant form of masculinity in the South while commemorating other forms of manliness. Drawing on Harvey Mansfield’s concept involving a hierarchical social structure in which an ideal, dominant man exists and to which women and other masculinities are subordinate, I make work that explores what I would call hegemonic masculinity.
Through my experience growing up in the South, I began to notice and fall victim to Southern masculine culture which expects a man to be risk-taking and effortlessly exhibit strength, pride, self-confidence, and superiority. Men are pressured to assimilate into this culture not only through standardizing their physical appearance, demeanor, and behavior but also through sharing common interests in hobbies such as hunting or fishing. Judgment is the consequence of opposing this prototype in favor of one’s individuality.
My visual language and carefully chosen materials—animal hides, tree branches, raw plywood—reference the act of hunting, at times positing the viewer as the Southern male archetype and at other times as observer. In my more recent work, the protagonist has been omitted from my images to make the landscape, or place, the force that haunts and shapes the viewer, just as it does me. The landscapes are often depicted at night and the fearful journey through them is the rite of passage to overcome to be reborn as a man. To narrate the pieces is a liminal process as well.
Through my own virtual hunting practice, I observe and gather text within the confines of online hunting forums, with topics often clustered under rubrics such as “Do you ever get afraid in the woods?” The text comprises confessions of fear and public admittance of weakness (e.g., “I don’t care for walking to my stand in the dark. I feel safe usually once I reach my stand and am off the ground.”) The result is that my virtual self emerges along with these other anonymous men, with whom I sympathize, as an aggregate, ambiguous identity.
Kyle Holland is a visual artist who was born and raised in Memphis, TN where he earned his BFA in fine arts with a concentration in printmaking from Memphis College of Art in 2012. He received his MFA in book arts and printmaking from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA, in 2019. Notable group exhibitions including his work have taken place at the Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, GA; Morgan Art of Papermaking Conservatory and Educational Foundation, Cleveland, OH; Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking, Atlanta, GA; The Center for Book Arts, New York, NY; King St. Stephen Museum, Székesfehérvár, Hungary; and Dixon Gallery & Gardens, Memphis, TN. His work is held in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nevada Museum of Art, The Center for Book Arts, Yale University, Rhode Island School of Design, and UC Berkeley among others. His work has been featured in publications such as Bainbridge Island Museum of Art’s Artist’s Books Unshelved video series, Bookforms: A Complete Guide to Designing and Crafting Hand-Bound Books, Hand Papermaking magazine, and the Little Book of Book Making: Timeless Techniques and Fresh Ideas for Beautiful Handmade Books. Holland is currently an instructor and studio manager for the MFA Book Arts Program at The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, AL.
Stacey Holloway
“I am a visual storyteller. The form of the narrative has been used for centuries to entertain, to preserve culture and to instill morals. Stories can be used to bridge cultures, languages and age barriers. Similar to Aesop, my interests lie in the animal realm and I use specific animal attributes to explore how our formative process make up who we might become, or who we are attempting to become. Within the animal kingdom, strong societies are formed within herds, unusual interspecies friendships and adaptation is required, pure instinctual capabilities are necessary for survival, and body language, sounds and scents are used to declare disfavor, profess love, announce dominance, and express pain. Bestial forms, found objects and installations then become the place for metaphors and narratives of uncertainty and longing.
I often fabricate bodies of surreal installations that focus on the idea of mental health as more of a collaboration of the people and objects that surround us rather than just the psychological and/or emotional well-being. Through the combination of found and fabricated objects, I am able to communicate societal ideas of community, heritage, adoption, and the outsider’s perspective.“
Stacey Holloway received her MFA from the University of Minnesota in 2009, her BFA from Herron School of Art and Design/IUPUI in 2006, and has been living and working in Birmingham, Alabama since 2013. She currently serves as the Associate Professor of Sculpture at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In addition to teaching, Holloway is an active national mixed media artist, sculptor, and fabricator that works within a variety of media including drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, and interactivity. Through the exploration of storytelling and ethology, she creates work that communicate a universal societal connectivity. Holloway has received distinguished awards such as the 2021 Visual Arts Fellowship through the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the 2017 SECAC Artist’s Fellowship, and the 2010 Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship through the Central Indiana Community Foundation in Indianapolis.
Maxwell Hudson
“From a young age, I have been atypical in terms of sex and gender. Throughout my childhood I searched for ways to express myself that would allow me to escape the social roles I felt pressured to fill. I ended up lost, withdrawing from reality to an internal imaginary world influenced by the media I was exposed to, online and in my daily life, and severed from my physical body. As a teenager, I experienced intense altered states of consciousness and physicality due to hormone transition, growing up as male and female interchangeably. I have returned to my body’s natural physical state while labeling myself as male socially. This “end result” of my transition is not an identification, but the perspective I have gained. The luck and opportunities life has granted me have allowed me to literally mold myself, both mentally and physically, in whatever way I want. Independent from social roles or restraint while still being fully present in the real world.
My art shows how this commensurate version of myself looks out from the inside at my new body and the new way I see the world, and how it slowly grows out into the way I present myself. I portray this inner perception by combining digital and physical mediums that connect on their malleability. I have a method of warping preexisting digital images into new textures as a form of layered painting, often animated, being warped by hand one frame at a time and simultaneously scrolling across the picture plane. Physically, I build up sculptural materials like foam clay into forms and textures from nothing in a visceral manner. I usually use latex paint because of its thickness and ability to smooth forms down like a layer of skin. I interlink physical and digital forms through inkjet printing onto paper and fabric, each having their own effect on the digital media. The ultimate goal in my work is to progress and reach my fullest potential, become totally connected and functional not only as a member of society, but in my interpersonal relationships, using my perspective to influence the world positively.”
Max Lee Hudson is a mixed media artist, animator, and musician based in Birmingham, Alabama. They recently graduated from the Alabama School of Fine Arts and are now pursuing a Bachelor in Fine Arts at the University of Alabama with a concentration in sculpture and digital media. Max expresses their own personal experience of growing up and in the online world, as well as in the deep South, through abstract storytelling. They have 2 albums of experimental sound art and music, web based and digital artwork, a collection of collage-style animations, as well as interdisciplinary sculptural works, fiber works, and paintings.
They have participated in group exhibitions across Alabama, and they have placed in both the Southeastern Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and the Shelby County Statewide High School Juried Art Exhibit, with work on loan in Birmingham.
Will Jacks
“Photography has a long and complicated relationship with memory and truth. For the last five years I have grown increasingly interested in that fact, while exploring ways to push my own understanding of the medium. The core of my curiosity is relatively simple: What is a photograph and how does that answer affect our collective understanding?
I consider these images to be photographs. They are made with basic photographic materials – silver gelatin paper, developer, and fixer. Light and time are requirements for their making. Photography, by definition, means “writing with light”. It does not mean “framing with camera”.
The technical terms for the prints are chemigrams and lumen prints, and they are made without the use of a camera. They are references to places and moments I have observed. Yet, I acknowledge that they don’t look like photographs; at least what we’ve all come to accept as such. And, that, to me, is the point.
Do we define a thing or person or place or moment by what most of us assume it to look like on the surface, or do we define it by what is required for its creation?“
Will Jacks is a process artist best known for his photographic work. He also incorporates explorations with land, objects, sound, video, and community engagement into his practice. His research examines the blurred areas between art and journalism, individual and collective, and the impact of each on the other.
Will’s first monograph documents the juke-joint Po’ Monkey’s Lounge which serves as a prism for examining cultural tourism and preservation and the complexities prevalent in both. It was published by University Press of Mississippi in October of 2019, and for this work Jacks was recognized by the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters for outstanding achievement in photography. In 2020 he completed an M.F.A. in Studio Art from the Maine College of Art, and in 2021 he completed his MA in Journalism from the University of Mississippi. The Alabama State Council on the Arts named will one of twelve visual arts fellows for 2025.
Currently Will is an Assistant Professor of Art / Photography at Troy University.
C.A. Jones
“The year 2020 was a moment of unravelling. Old ideas crumbled, new growth began, and we were reminded of how elaborately connected we are to each other, our collective past, and the natural world. A year before the pandemic, I had begun my own unraveling. I found myself on a dark night I had never experienced before. What began as the feeling of a deep loss of self eventually became an invitation to a journey that has no end. I wanted to surrender to the unseen cycles that nature offers us in order to embrace the constant flow of change and becoming.
This painting was born from this place. It represents a chapter in the mythic narrative of the hero’s journey when the subconscious is flooded with a new perception of connection. Informed by both alchemical and Southern symbolism, this piece signifies a deep shift from the individual to the collective.
I set out searching for a garden within myself, a place to settle into the stillness of a human experience by infusing the sacred and mystical into everyday life. The Alabama landscape helped reveal this to me.“
C.A. Jones is a songwriter and artist born in Florence, Alabama. Immersed in the musical heritage of Muscle Shoals, Jones was influenced by the sounds and natural beauty found throughout the Tennessee River Valley. Through cinematic compositions, his storytelling explores elements of mysticism, Southern folklore, and the process of transformation. Jones also runs an experimental art gallery in downtown Birmingham called Room 412. This space features local and regional artists, helping to provide a gathering place for the local creative community.
Rose Kimbrough
“My work depicts common scenes from out in the small rural areas surrounding Birmingham. Those small abandoned one-story homes were built cheaply, with square symmetrical walls and sloped roofs. I’ve seen them left, ruined by mildew and the hot southern sun that strips the colors and leaves them washed out. Old Baptist churches on roads emptied for miles. Tangling picket fences. Roads with grass growing through the cracks, gradually changing back into land. These symbols, which represent feelings of curiosity, trepidation, and the abandonment of creation, still stand in Alabaster, Odenville, Springville, Trussville, and even Slidell in Louisiana. All of these places I’ve lived in and they’ve all affected the course of my life. There’s something hazy in those places, still in my mind, where I can see the lingering impressions of life and the implications of forgottenness and abandonment. I find a part of myself laid in the broken floors of those homes, the Alabama soil that holds my feet and buries them in the land. The work is layers of impressions, using the same pre-etched plates’, I create a composition, one that I feel familiar with in some way. Then I use an untouched plate to add color, which leads to the atmosphere. Building on that with details added by hand or fine-tipped paint brush to create the final piece. It reflects the way I grew up and the way I live today, all highly instinctual and fast-paced, just going and going until it eventually finds its end.“
Rose Kimbrough is a recent graduate from the Alabama School of Fine Arts currently attending the University of Alabama. She specializes in printmaking, a combination of monoprinting and etching, and then works in with painted elements. Her work focuses on the layers and emotions of lost or abandoned homes, towns or neighborhoods that make up Rural Alabama. Her achievements include 2nd place in the 2024 7th District Congressional Art Competition, participation in a group exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art, inclusion in the 2023 Shelby County Juried Exhibition, a Senior Exhibit entitled “Neighboorhood Watch” in the Vulcan Materials Gallery at ASFA, a piece in collaboration with Sloss Metal Arts shown in their annual Summer Exhibit, Kansas City Institute of Art pre-college Exhibit, work in private collections in the south east and work on loan at the Alabama School of Fine Arts.
Alexa Lee
“My artwork is centered around memory and how it imbeds itself into the body and mind. I create figurative paintings of everyday moments in which the subjects appear lost in thought or “somewhere else.” The tone of the scene surrounding the figure is dreamlike and gives an impression of deeper emotion than the subject is expressing. I use distortion and lens perspective to emphasize parts of the body that I see as seats of emotion: the abdomen as an area where grief is felt and hands as a place where emotion is involuntarily expressed. My work deals with how the past seeps into our bodies and weaves itself into the present.
The primary source of inspiration is my own mind and memory, of which the artworks are reflections. My experience growing up as a female in the deep south of Alabama continually resurfaces in my work, along with themes of history and religion as these are lenses that color how I view the world. My research involves the study of classic literature, southern culture, and traditionally feminine art forms/artists throughout history. In my practice, I have always been drawn to tactile and physical things, so I work with mediums that respond to my touch. I work with oil paint in a style influenced by art history, particularly the Romantic era. I am also a ceramicist and use clay to create functional vessels and sculptures that imply narrative within their form. I use these works to express what is fragile, the dust and dirt of the human condition.
My artwork represents the conflict between the desire to remember and the longing to forget. I believe that much of a person’s life is determined by the ways in which they experience and carry around what they remember. I depict memory as a blessing and a curse that both the subjects and viewers of my artwork must respond to.”
Alexa Lee is a painter and ceramic artist based in Birmingham, AL. She has been featured in multiple exhibitions across the southeast United States, including the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, The Meridian Museum of Art, and the Gadsden Museum of Art. She studied at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and graduated with a BFA degree in 2024.
Alexa’s work focuses on memory and how it imbeds itself into the body and mind. She primarily works in the genre of narrative figure painting in a style influenced by painters of the aesthetic and romantic art movements, including James Mcneill Whistler and John William Waterhouse. Alexa’s work is also influenced by modern photography, as she employs distortion and lens perspective in the composition of her paintings. She is also a ceramicist and uses clay to create functional vessels and sculptures that imply narrative within their form and express the fragility of the human condition.
Anna Lyle
“Metaphorical imagery of fabric interacting with unattached anatomy describes the process of deconstruction and rebuilding of thought and worldview. This tends to be a sensitive yet important topic in the Deep South. Many are raised in a society where free-thinking outside of organized religion, particularly Southern Christianity, is discouraged, sometimes even thought of as dangerous. The process of performing these mental gymnastics is confusing, and along the way reality becomes warped and twisted as one starts anew, eroding a foundation to make way for a new one. My work invites viewers to visualize this idea tangibly through fabric and our physical bodies, blurring the line determining which is which.
My attention to detail and the overall compositions in my work are sourced from my bodily hyper-fixations and the ways in which I feel the inner workings of my body perform. My compositional choices ride the fine line between comfort and discomfort, using fabric as a metaphor for human anatomy, inside and out. I work with both figurative and spatial perceptions, creating ambiguity and tension between the various elements in each painting.”
Anna Lyle (b.1992) is an artist and painter from Birmingham, AL. She received her Bachelor of Architecture from Mississippi State University in 2015 and her Master of Fine Arts from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2023. While having a past professional life as an architectural designer, Lyle exited the architecture industry in her late 20’s to pursue a career in painting and drawing.
Anna mines conceptual inspiration on place and purpose in the world outside of experiences and memories in the Southern Baptist Christian religion in which she grew up, and in the years since leaving. Lyle has exhibited work coast-to-coast in the United States, with works in private collections in the U.S., Canada, and Germany.
Loretta Lynn
“In my work I explore the theme of integrating the Catholic rituals, iconography, and stories from my childhood with my current practice of connecting with the natural world in a way that aligns with paganism. My Catholic school education was heavy with fire and brimstone. Suffering was something I romanticized and even craved. While the divine was out of my reach, self-inflicted torment seemed always to pursue me. As I grew older, I rejected all forms of religion and spirituality in an attempt to heal the wounds of my youth connected to Catholicism, but after becoming a mother I found myself again seeking connection to something universal. Over the past few years I have discovered that the divine is here, everywhere, right now. The natural world sings with spontaneity and life lessons. I spend time in nature and I observe. I notice what I’m drawn to on a given day: spirals, a certain color, animals. I journal about what I notice and then mindfully stitch from the inspiration. It’s a reflective process that allows me to be introspective and deepen my understanding of myself as I connect to the larger world. This exploration has allowed me to resynthesize the parts of the Catholic tradition that I find resonant, archetypal, or poignant, deepening my connection to and joy in the natural world through the act of stitching together the seemingly disparate elements of religious iconography and botanical symbolism.”
Loretta Lynn is a self taught non-traditional embroidery and fiber artist. A native New Yorker, she holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the State University of New York at New Paltz with a double major in Dance and Psychology, and a minor in Philosophy. Loretta performed as a dancer, performance artist, and garage-punk guitarist in New York City, New Paltz, and Albany, NY during the 1980’s and 1990’s. Always expressive, Loretta found art to be inherently therapeutic. The Creative Arts Therapy program at the Pratt Institute, where she received her Master’s Degree in Dance Movement Therapy in 2000, gave her the embodied clinical foundation and theoretical framework to use the arts to help people.
After moving with her family from New York’s Hudson valley to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Loretta continued her work as a Dance Movement Therapist in Special Education. During a particularly rough period of her life, Loretta learned how to finger knit from a four year old at a karate dojo and found that this kinesthetic meditation forced her to be present and focused. She moved from finger knitting to increasingly complicated needle-knitted projects, then began doodling on fabric with embroidery thread and needles. With teaching and encouragement from her friend and mentor, Aaron Sanders Head, Loretta expanded her stitching repertoire and incorporated eco-dyed fabrics, created with his guidance using plants found or grown in Alabama. Her non-traditional embroideries and wearable art often depict images integrating her Catholic upbringing with her current practices of paganism. Loretta has shown work at Kentuck Art Gallery, Arts Revive, the Tuscaloosa Art Center’s annual 8×8 show, Aaron Sanders Head Studio, the Jessie Lavon and Friends Folk Art Gatherings, Magnolia Grove, and at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery in the Puck Building (NYC).
Darien Malone
“Contrary to many historical inaccuracies of the mental and physical health of black people, my work centers around the nuances, positive and negative, of the mental and physical health of Black people, especially Black women. My primary focus is to depict the release of repressed feelings and behaviors, and what destruction that oppression creates within the minds of myself in other Black women.
My intended message for my work is that of bringing light to the often overlooked and undermined mental health of Black women. I also intend to express my own experiences with mental health and how I have been socially conditioned into hiding it. Historically, women have been suppressed by psychological institutions and theories. Women were depicted as “crazy” and or “hysterical” and quickly dismissed into psych wards or even neurologically operated on. This has manifested in people quickly dismissing women’s feelings with the subconscious (or conscious) guise of her being insane.
Black people have been historically depicted as “animals” who cannot feel emotions (only anger) and physical pain to the extent like that of their white counterparts. This has led the health industry to be neglectful, dismissive, and prone to the misdiagnosis of Black individuals. For Black women, the notion of being “crazy” for women and “aggressive” and “harmful” for being black meets at a crossroads. In being a Black woman myself, I and others like me have been conditioned to endure hardships. To continue to be the “Strong Black woman”, or just “pray away” any form of sadness or depression, or to continue to believe the notion that it is better to be seen rather than heard. These things have been detrimental to my mental health. And have also made me ashamed of the emotions I have.
My use of the mediums oil (painting), graphite and charcoal, ink/marbling (Suminagashi and India ink), and sculpture allows my subjects of Black women to be expressive in their emotions, especially the ones that cause them anguish and to not dismiss their feelings. In my journey with oil painting, marbling, and drawing, I have found much appreciation in how lighting can assist with my message of dreamlike/nightmarish states. I’ve enjoyed the fluid nature of Suminagashi because it reminds me of how emotions operate. And from my own experiences, I feel the need, emotionally, to express my feelings because of the pain of holding them in. As a Black woman myself, it is important to me to continually embrace the person I am and celebrate my mental health journey through my lens. I frequently use the motif of nudeness to emphasize vulnerability.
I plan to concentrate my creative work in this program and the future on themes of gender, race, sexual expression, spirituality, mythology, and internal monologue. The ability to express myself has been a long and challenging journey that I am still on, and just now getting started with, but I believe as I continue to express myself through my own lenses and not others’ and create the art that I feel more drawn to, I can continue my artistic expressions of pain and beauty, acceptance, and the embrace of my cultural identity.“
Darien Malone is an artist born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. She graduated from the University of Alabama at Birmingham with a degree in studio art (BFA) and with a minor in psychology. Darien has spent most her life making art. From a young age, Darien has been in the pursuit of artistic expression. Darien’s art focuses on the journey to fully embracing the light and dark aspects of the psyche. The intent is to bring awareness to the mental health of herself and other Black Women suffering with mental illness and life experiences.
Darien has many artistic interests, but most recent ones include Japanese marbling techniques (Suminagashi), cyanotype, working with charcoal, India ink, photography, figure drawing, and sculpture. Darien has worked as an art teacher and camp counselor in Birmingham from 2019 to present day and works as a tour guide at the Birmingham Museum of Art. She intends to continue the pursuit of museum work and studies. Later on in life, she intends to explore the world of storyboarding and cinematography. Darien strives to create music videos, movies, and short films. Darien hopes to be working on a portfolio for the possibility of graduate school, traveling abroad for art education and experiences, and creating the kind of art she is interested in the meantime.
Hayley Meyers
“I create from a personal space, drawing from my memory and childhood experiences. My work is nostalgic and vernacular because I am naturally sentimental. Painting and drawing the familiar allows me to connect with others, reminding them of the past (or present) and resonating with them viscerally. I find that creating is compulsive for me. While making art is a playful and joyful experience for me, it’s also profoundly sentimental and reminiscent.“
Hayley Meyers (she/her) (b. 1986) is a self-taught artist based in Dothan, Alabama, known for her innovative watercolor and mixed media process. Rooted in the culture of the American South, Hayley’s work often features figures many Southerners will recognize as the essence of their landscape and identity.
Hayley’s art comes to life through her meticulous technique. She begins with ink by drawing her subjects and then applies watercolor to enhance color and texture. Then, she uses an X-Acto knife to carefully cut the objects from the paper. By elevating these elements with raised tape, she introduces a three-dimensional quality to what would traditionally be flat compositions.
Since 2021, Hayley has committed to serious studio practice, continually refining her craft through dedicated studio hours and exploration. Her work has been exhibited at notable galleries such as the Bells Gallery in Dothan, Alabama, and the Ann Rudd Art Center in Ozark, Alabama. She has also been an exhibiting artist at The Loop Music and Art Festival in both 2022 and 2023. Hayley’s work is held in private collections across the United States.
Caroline Myers
“My artwork serves as a personal catalog of my efforts to articulate the distorted experience of my everyday interactions due to my hearing loss. Deciphering indiscernible information influences the act of imposing analogous boundaries within my paintings and drawings. Like a technological glitch, these obstructions generate a visually enigmatic experience, with evidence of my process serving as interpretive cues for the viewer.
Utilizing snapshots of my friends and family, I employ motifs such as pixels, blurred backgrounds, jagged edges, and vibrant, saturated colors to evoke the disruptions inherent in our digitally mediated interactions. These visual manipulations probe the efficacy of images in conveying an understanding of another’s identity and the nuances of our relationships.
Incorporating the concept of pentimento – where traces of previous artistic decisions become visible beneath the final surface, I reveal layers of revision and transformation in my work. This technique not only underscores the inherent imperfections and shifts in perception but also emphasizes the evolving nature of our interactions. The pentimenti within my pieces offer a glimpse into the iterative process of interpretation and connection, inviting viewers to engage with the complexities of mediated and analog interactions.“
Caroline Myers is an artist and educator in Alabama. In 2021, Caroline received her BFA from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and in 2023, she earned her MFA from Clemson University. After graduate school, Caroline returned to Alabama where she currently maintains an active studio practice while she teaches at her undergraduate alma mater.
Myers’ work has been exhibited at the Gadsden Museum of Art in Gadsden, AL, the Eastern Shore Art Center in Fairhope, AL, ArtFields in Lake City, SC, the Shelby County Arts Council in Columbiana, AL, Artisphere in Greenville, SC, the South Caroline Festival of Flowers in Greenwood, SC, the New York Academy of Art in New York City, and the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts in Birmingham, AL. Additionally, her work has been featured in publications such as Aura Literary Arts Review, South Carolina Voyager Magazine, UAB News, and the Vulcan Historical Review. Recent solo shows include Temporal Reality, an exhibition at Spring Hill College in Mobile, AL, and her thesis exhibition, Refigured: Separations in Portraiture, at Clemson University.
Caleigh Parsons
“I’m a self-taught artist. I’ve had a passion for art my entire life. In 2022, at 45 years old, I began painting. My work is a reflection of the life I’ve lived: it’s layered and messy and unpredictable and colorful. I have attempted painting many times over many years, but it never resonated for me until I learned that it’s ok, and, in my case, ESSENTIAL to slow down, take it one brushstroke at a time, and throw the plan out the window. I like to call myself an “exploring artist.” I’m still learning what mediums I like best – which will always be the ones that create the most interesting layers. Visually, I’ve always been drawn to contrasting lines and colors. When I paint, I am compelled to combine the unexpected, even if it doesn’t make sense. Because that’s what makes sense to me.
I use acrylic paint, oil pastels, textured paper, and modeling paste to create images formed from layers and texture applied to both canvas and board, frequently framed with vintage and upcycled frames. My first layer is always composed of unexpected color combinations. I apply with energy and allow those colors to lead to the next step. I then create boundaries to contain and enhance the color and give myself something to respond to.”
Caleigh Parsons is a mixed media artist based in Dothan, Alabama. She paints intuitively with acrylics, ink, charcoal, and oil pastels on canvas, wood, and paper. Visually, she’s always been drawn to contrasting composition and colors. When she paints, she is compelled to combine the unexpected, even if it doesn’t make sense, because that makes sense to her.
She is the co-founder of Alabama Roots Fine Arts Show, the co-founder and Vice President of Art in Public Places, and the founder of the former art collective The Untrained Edit. Caleigh has exhibited at the Bells Gallery in Dothan, Alabama, ESOM Gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana, Loyola Art Show in Mobile, Alabama, and Art Room in Charleston, South Carolina, among other galleries and festivals. You can find her work at the Grand Bohemian Gallery in Birmingham, Alabama.
Casey Roberts
“I’m Casey Thomas Roberts, a multimedia artist and poet living in Marion, Alabama. From an early age, I was educated in painting and art history by June Carlton at her home studio in my hometown of Linden, Alabama until the age of 15. My great grandmother taught me the basics of sewing which has cemented my fascination with textiles.
For my most formative years, I experimented with various media, which has become my creative inclination. Photography, wearable art, doll making, painting, writing…there is no one way to share the artistic vision.
Primarily, I am inspired by my past, with my pieces reflecting memories or a continuation of traditions, both familiar and unfamiliar. Art comes from within, and all my art comes from within the very depths of my being.”
Casey Roberts is a painter, textile artist, and poet living in Perry County, yet is originally from Marengo County. Trained by artist June Carlton in painting and their great-grandmother in sewing, they started in visual art before turning to garment-making. Their art is informed by growing up queer and remaining in the rural Black Belt of Alabama. Incorporating antique textiles, painted elements, and doll-making into wearable art and more is of particular interest.
Sam Roberts
“Art has always been something I’ve been drawn to since I was a child. Not specifically art but color palettes, visual balance, and creating as a form of expression. It allowed me to escape into visual sensory experiences, to process my feelings, get out of my head, and conceptualize things I couldn’t and can’t always articulate. Growing up I drew all the time, doodles of random images, portraits of others and myself, observations from life, dreams, studies of animals and flowers, and more. My art still explores those topics and more today, and as an interdisciplinary artist it changes and my materials change based on the needs of each piece, varying from pen observational drawing capturing a moment in time, or an as large as life figurative mixed media painting that has glitter sprinkled in. By imploring the use of color, mark making, texture, various mediums to channel exploring aspects of identity, the figure, processing trauma, and healing. I meld them together to process complex layers of personhood, memories, emotions, dissociation, connection, and their entangled chaos of the human condition.
I have spent most of my life dealing with depression, anxiety, and PTSD. I use my art to process my experiences, capture a moment, and to be a tool for me to deepen my understanding of my experiences, observing myself and the world around, aspects of the mind and body connection, and how moments can impact ourselves and others. Our early lives can play a massive role in shaping how we see ourselves and experience the world around us. As an adult I started learning about neurodiversity and ADHD and started to view my life through another lens. A lens that enabled a little more grace, less shame, and has allowed me to learn about myself in a way I hadn’t been able to before. I continue to learn to adapt and connect with myself and my art in a more authentic way and understand more about the mask I learned to wear. Learning about my neurodiversity and verbal learning differences allowed me to research and implement changes in my personal life, art practices, and interactions with others. By working with the ebbs and flows of my energy, sensory, and creativity needs I can harness my desire to plan, research, and harness spontaneity to create and experience my art in a process that is more authentic to me without being held back by perfectionism or idealism.
My art varies in execution depending on how many layers each needs to feel complete. To create my works, I use a combination of photography for creating references digitally, a variety of substrates like canvas, illustration board, or paper, and a combination of materials, such as charcoal, pen, watercolor, acrylic, gouache, tempera, pastel. I work on pieces as I learn more about the concepts that fuel each piece. By working on multiple works at once I can work on various stages of each depending on my physical and emotional limits at the time. Most of my figurative pieces have a digital reference amalgamation or a page of notes and a sketch as the first step. Then I layer a substrate with a ground of whatever colors or words I feel like matches in the moment, after I put in paper, images, notes, glitter, gold leaf, and other elements to create the narrative or concept I imagine or experience. By building the pieces in layers, I allow myself to work on the piece in phases and it changes and flows as I do through planning when needed and reacting along the way. Art has always been a tool for me to process my understanding of the world and concepts. My multi-figurative self-portraits tend to capture a moment in time, often not a real one but a moment I imagine represents a concept that I am learning in my life or one I hope to find. I have always felt like an observer, of myself and others. My observational pen drawings allow me to connect with the space around me and be in the moment. Drawing has allowed me to capture those moments and create using those feelings, allowing me to react and then take a step away. I aim to continue to create as a means of expression, to facilitate learning, and to create discourse around topics such as mental health, trauma processing, and healing.”
Sam Roberts is a local Birmingham-born artist, educator, and curator. They are a graduate from the University of Alabama at Birmingham with their Bachelor of Fine Arts. With years of unique experience teaching in Birmingham, Sam has gained expertise through leading workshops, personal art tutoring, as a teaching artist at UAB’s Art Play, a camp counselor at the Birmingham Museum of Art, and more recently as Studio By The Tracks’ Youth Program Coordinator. Through their role as Canary Gallery’s Assistant Gallerist and their personal endeavors selling and marketing their art and creations in Birmingham, they have developed their eye for curating and merchandising.
Sam has shown their art locally, regionally, and internationally through galleries, museums, and publications since participating in their first group show in 2009. They have displayed art in the Halls of Congress in Washington DC, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Birmingham Botanical Gardens, Ground Floor Contemporary, AEIVA, the Gadsden Museum of Art, The West Tennessee Regional Arts Center and more.
Through creating, Sam is able to explore and evolve their understanding of their identity, the world around us and to express their feelings, emotions, thoughts, memories, sensory needs, and dive deeper into areas of interest like neurodiversity, mental health, trauma processing, and the mind body connection. By utilizing interdisciplinary practices including drawing, painting, mixed media, textile art, sculpting, and photography, Sam can flow between non-objective expressive art and conceptual art as needed to create, process, and to continue to learn and evolve. Many of Sam’s works examine their understanding of their life experiences, memories, and the journey through life, evolution, and the varied human condition.
Alexandra Rose
“Alexandra Rose is an intermedia artist whose creative process is a therapeutic ritual exploring themes of loss, growth, change, and the perpetual evolution of the authentic self. While Rose’s work spans various disciplines, they are drawn to metal in sculpture and photography, captivated by the transformative qualities inherent in these processes. The interplay of positive and negative within mold-making and photo development holds a particular fascination, embodying a balance of control and surrender that resonates deeply with the artist. Rose is interested in metal’s capacity for metamorphosis—from rigid to soft, invisible to visible, fluid to hardened—and relates to this material’s duality as a genderfluid maker. Their artworks often center on the body as a vessel for understanding life’s experiences, whether through representational depictions or objects evocative of bodily forms. Their work demonstrates the transformative power of self-expression and reflection in shaping narratives of identity and belonging.“
As of 2022, Alexandra Rose is working as an Artist-in-Residence at Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, AL where they have taught three seasons of the summer youth apprenticeship program, participated in almost weekly iron pouring demonstrations, led cyanotype workshops, and assisted in blacksmithing and welding workshops. During their time with Sloss Metal Arts they have participated in multiple group shows, such as Scale, which they helped curate, and Confluence at Lowe Mill in Huntsville, AL, in addition to art fairs such as Magic City Art Connection. In 2023, they were the recipient of the education grant from the Society of Inclusive Blacksmiths and the scholarship for F.I.R.E. at the Metal Museum.
From 2019 to 2021, they worked for Artworks Foundry as the Production Assistant, and in 2021, they also worked at The Crucible in Oakland, CA as the mold-making and foundry TA. During the summer of 2021, they completed a month-long internship at Sculpture Trails, where they installed Stripped in the Outdoor Museum’s collection. Rose served on the 2021 Steering Committee for the National Conference for Cast Iron Art and Practices, co-organizing panels and presentations. In 2019, they received their Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Institute of American Indian Arts where they majored in studio arts with an emphasis on bronze casting and historical chemical darkroom photography.
Debanjaly Sen
“Women are the protagonists in my work, which explores themes of gender, identity, and the objectification of the female body. My works depict a fragmented female form that is sublime, confrontational, and empowered in the face of objectification. Hence, it directly rejects the society-imposed prejudice against femininity and instead presents an honest depiction of the female form by emphasizing the psychological and emotional intensity of self-awareness through intricate postures, distortion, and fragmentation of the figure.
The human body is like a container that holds all lived experiences, leaving their marks. These marks can pile up in the psychological sphere through society-imposed constrictions, limits, or boundaries on women, such as how they should dress or behave, etc. These expectations of maintaining gender roles can develop feelings of suffocation, leading to a relationship with collective memories and embodied experiences that cannot be erased. My work is an attempt to echo these shared gender-specific experiences and explore the interplay of women’s physicality, mental states, and identity to challenge conventions and present empowering perspectives that redefine the narratives surrounding the female body.
My process is as important as the outcome. I often incorporate vibrant colors, particularly dominant red hues, which symbolize energy and the expression of powerful emotions. Layering, gestural mark-making, and digging onto the surface are integral parts of my work that reveal the play between the inner self and the physical body (after interaction with external force). I manipulate the surface, colors, and textures to create a harsh and complex ground that suggests the violence (both somatic and psychic) often experienced by women. A variety of staining techniques are utilized for both their formal properties and more importantly, as indexical suggestions of bodily processes and the residue of implied violence. Leaving stains on the surface represents the enduring effects of memories on the mind.”
Debanjaly Sen, originally from West Bengal, India, is currently based in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she is pursuing her second MFA in Painting and a Museum Studies Certificate with a teaching assistantship at The University of Alabama. She previously obtained an MFA from Sister Nivedita University, supported by the highly prestigious Chancellor Merit Scholarship. Recently, her MA thesis show was featured at the Sella Granata Art Gallery. Sen’s work has been showcased in numerous significant exhibitions, including the Southern Studies Conference at Auburn University at Montgomery, Prototype at Studio 2500 Gallery in Birmingham, and the Susan N. McCollough Fine Arts Initiative at The University of Alabama Gallery. Additionally, her art has been part of the KCC AMI Art Festival, Rabindra Bharati University Annual Art Exhibition, ICAD Annual Exhibition, Academy of Fine Arts, GSP Gallery in Kolkata, and was published in Collect Art’s 101 Contemporary Artists and More, vol. 3.