Selected Profiles of Artists

Artists' Bios & Statements

Dr. David C. Driskel    Richard Hunt    Edgar H. Sorrells-Adewale   

Larry Walker    Sammie Nicely    Suzanne Jackson   Ayokunle Odeleye        

 Dr. Peggy Blood    Ron Bechet    Tosha Grantham    Malaika Favorite    

Adrienne Hoard     Carolyn Zoe Briscoe    Jerome B. Meadows    Amiri Farris

Napoleon J. Wilkerson    Shirley J. Clarke    Talita G. Long     Luther E. Vann

Dr. David C. Driskell
Biography
Dr. David C. Driskell was born in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1931. Educated in the public schools of North Carolina, he received his undergraduate degree in art at Howard University and a master of fine arts degree from Catholic University of America, both in Washington, D.C. He pursued post-graduate study in art history at the Netherlands Institute for the History of Art in Hague and has studied independently African and African-American cultures in Europe, Africa and South America. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including three Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, a Danforth Fellowship and a Harmon Fellowship. He also received a one-year Faculty Research Grant fellowship from the University of Maryland in 1984. In 1995, Driskell was named Distinguished Professor of Art at the University of Maryland.

Driskell began his teaching career at Talladega College in 1955. He has held teaching positions at Howard University and Fisk University and has served as a visiting professor of art at Bowdoin College, the University of Michigan, Queens College and Obafemi Awolowo (previously known as the University of Ife) in Ife-Ife, Nigeria. He joined the faculty of the Department of Art at the University of Maryland in 1977 and served as its chairman from 1978-83. Since 1983, Driskell has maintained an active career in the arts as a teacher, curator, administrator and art consultant while continuing to paint and teach at the University of Maryland. He serves on several nationally known art institutions and organizations, including the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the American Federation of Arts, the Cosby Foundation Scholarship Advisory Committee and the Commissioners of the National Museum of African Arts of the Smithsonian Institution.

Highly regarded as an artist and a scholar, Driskell is cited as one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject of African-American art. He is also the recipient of nine honorary doctoral degrees in art. He has contributed significantly to scholarships in the history of art on the role of Black artists in American society, penned five exhibition books on the subject of African-American art, co-authored four others and published more than 40 catalogues from exhibitions he has curated. His articles and essays on the subject of African-American art are extensive, having appeared in more than 20 major publications throughout the world. He was the recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award in Art from Howard University in 1981 and from the Catholic University of America in 1996. In October 1997, Driskell was awarded the President’s Medal, the University of Maryland's highest faculty honor.

Driskell has lectured in the United States at the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard University, Howard University, the University of Michigan, Spelman College, Harvard University, Haverford College, the University of California at Berkeley and many other colleges, universities and museums in North America, Europe, Africa and South America. His most recent creative project is the execution of 65 stained glass windows for the newly renovated DeForest Chapel on the campus of Talledega College in Alabama. The windows were installed in the spring of 1996.

Driskell is no stranger to television, having seven films to his credit on the subject of African-American Art. He has appeared on NBC's "The Today Show," CBS's "In The News," PBS and on television in 10 foreign countries. In 1977, Driskell was commissioned by CBS Television to write the script for an hour-long television program on African-American art, which he narrated before camera, entitled "Hidden Heritage." It won a CBS award and appeared three consecutive years on national television after its initial airing in 1977.

In 1989 the Arts Council of Great Britain funded a one-hour documentary film, which highlights the contributions Driskell has made to the interpretation of African-American art history. CUE Films of London produced the documentary "Hidden Heritage: The Roots of Black American Painting" for British Television (Channel 4). It premiered at the Princess Anne Theater at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in London on November 8, 1990 to the acclaim of an audience comprised of art enthusiasts from four continents.

Before coming to the University of Maryland in 1977, Driskell was director of University Galleries and chairman of the Department of Art at Fisk University from 1966-76. In 1976, he curated the Bicentennial Exhibition for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art entitled "Two Centuries of Black American Art: 1750-1950." The exhibition was accompanied by a text of the same title published by Alfred Knoff, 1976. Other exhibitions and accompanying books include "Hidden Heritage: Afro-American Art, 1800-1950, Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America," Abrams, 1987; "Contemporary Visual Expressions," Smithsonian Press, 1987; and "African American Visual Aesthetics: A Post Modernist View," Smithsonian Press, 1995. The most recent publication centering on Driskell's career as an artist, teacher and philanthropist was published in 1998 and is entitled "Narratives of African American Art: The David C. Driskell Collection," Pomegranate Press and the University of Maryland Art Gallery, Juanita Holland, editor.

Since 1977, Driskell has served as cultural advisor to Camille and Bill Cosby and curator of the Cosby Collection of Fine Arts. In 1995, Driskell was called upon by President and Mrs. Clinton to select a work of art by an African-American artist for permanent display in the White House. Henry O. Tanner's celebrated painting "Sand Dunes at Sunset: Atlantic City" was unveiled and installed in a ceremony in the Green Room on October 29, 1996. Driskell is now retired after 44 years of teaching art on the college and university levels with the title of Distinguished University Professor of Art, Emeritus, the University of Maryland at College Park.

Driskell and his wife Thelma maintain residences in Hyattsville, Maryland; Falmouth, Maine; and New York City.

return to top of profile page                                    return to schedule of events

Richard Hunt
Biography
Richard Hunt was born in Chicago in 1935. He attended Chicago public schools and the Junior School at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied sculpture from 1948-53. With a scholarship from the Chicago Public Art Society, Hunt entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1953. He received the Institute's coveted Logan Prize three times ('56, '61 and '62). While he was still a student in 1957, the Museum of Modern Art acquired his sculpture Arachne. Upon earning a bachelor's degree in art education, he was awarded the James Nelson Raymond Foreign Travel Fellowship to visit England, Italy and Spain.

Following Hunt's first solo exhibition at the Alan Gallery, New York in 1958, he served in the U.S. Army, where he became an official Army enlist until 1960. He was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962. Three years later, a Ford Foundation Fellowship enabled Hunt to work at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. By the late 1960s, Hunt began to concentrate on large scale outdoor works. He has received more than 100 commissions for public sculpture across the country, including over 30 works in the greater Chicago area. Exhibitions and retrospectives of his art have been held nationally and abroad and include the first retrospective by an African-American sculptor at the Museum of Modern Art.

Hunt has lectured in many prestigious universities across the country. His appointments have included serving on the National Council of the Arts and the National Board of the Smithsonian Institution. He has also served as commissioner to the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution and director of the International Sculpture Center. Hunt continues to live and work in Chicago.

Artist Statement
My career in sculpture began in 1955. It was then, while I was a student, I began to exhibit my sculpture around Chicago in all sorts of places--art fairs, small galleries, local art centers, and the like. During the 12 years that followed, my sculptural development grew as a private, independent, studio-based, self-generated activity that responded to the stimuli I supplied and the skills I could master.

Then in 1967, I began to work on Play, a commissioned sculpture which my studio could not accommodate. I started work on a sculpture for the first time outside of my studio, on a time and material basis in a metal fabrication shop, with the help of other men and machines. Play, as I look back on it, began what has been a second career for me, that of a public sculptor. The dimensions of this second career, which remain inextricably linked with the first, were not clear in that beginning, and have only become apparent to me with time and reflection on its course.

Work in the factory contrasts with work in the studio, where the sculptor's head, hand, and hammer can shape an idea in a spontaneous generation, which is frozen in time as it is fused with the torch's heat. Outside the studio, the sculptor's horizons broaden to the limits of the possible; that is to the extent the sculptor can conceive of, and master, the interactive possibilities. These possibilities are often realized through the creative interaction of the artist with patrons, or patron groups in their conception, and with engineers, technicians, and tradesmen in their execution. Outside of the studio, the sculptor's internal dialogue gives way to the dialogue that a sculpture sets up with the environment the sculpture is created for.

Public sculpture responds to the dynamics of a community, or of those in it, who have a use for sculpture. It is this aspect of use, of utility, that gives public sculpture its vital and lively place in the public mind.

The challenges utility brings to the sculptor's mind and art are as varied as the people and the sites encountered with each commission. As sculptors in our time respond creatively to the challenges that the opportunities for the greater utilization of sculpture impose, we establish links with the greatest traditions in sculpture, and with the largest and most diverse audience sculpture has ever had. -Richard Hunt

return to top of profile page                                    return to schedule of events

Edgar H. Sorrells-Adewale
Artist Statement
Creating work that engages and inspires the viewer to consider things in some different way, if just for a moment, is satisfying and intentional. I draw a great deal of pleasure from finding and configuring various articles of textural information into an architectonic whole generally symbolic in nature. Sometimes the whole of the symbol is informed by either cultural or personal intent; other times notions of beauty prevail. Its format may be installation, collage or assemblage. In either instance, however, when working with different materials, I'm mindful of a quote that reads "every master knows that the material teaches the artist." -Edgar H. Sorrells-Adewale

return to top of profile page                                    return to schedule of events

Larry Walker
Biography
Larry Walker was born in Franklin, Georgia, but moved to New York where he spent his formative years. He graduated from New York’s renowned High School of Music & Art. After graduation, Walker headed to Detroit, Michigan, where he received a bachelor of science degree in art education and a master of arts degree in drawing and painting from Wayne State University.

Walker began his teaching career in the Detroit Public School System. On the college and university level, he has taught at University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, and Georgia State University in Atlanta, where he continues to serve as a professor in the university's School of Art and Design. He served as the School of Art and Design's director for 11 years.

Over the past 30 years, Walker has had more than 39 solo exhibitions and has participated in over 80 invitational and group exhibitions. He has been included in over 100 exhibitions and has received more than 75 awards and prizes, including the Purchase Award at the 18th Southwest Black Art Exhibition at the African American Museum in Dallas, Texas, in 1997.

Walker serves on the College of Fine Arts Advisory Board at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is president of the Board of Trustees of Hammonds House Galleries and Resource Center of African American Art.

Walker's work is featured in numerous public collections, including Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta, and private collections, including the Barbara Burrell collection in Chicago, Illinois.

Artist Statement
Whether there is a clearly definable Black aesthetic or whether my work adequately or approximately reflects a kinship with same is not an issue toward which I direct conscious energies. I am most concerned with spatial constructs, layered information and imagery which symbolically connects, interconnects, and/or transcends the varied perceptions which comprise our shared existence.

The dialogue that transpires from my work is one which searches for, comments on or raises questions about spatial dualities, differences/similarities, spirituality, ancestral links and about a number of diametrically postured issues such as: life/death, reality/imagination, oppression/freedom, positive/negative self images and other considerations relative to physical as well as imagined constraints that affect human potential. -L. Walker 2000

return to top of profile page                                    return to schedule of events

Sammie Nicely
Biography
Tennessee artist Sammie Nicely is from the rural community of Russellville in East Tennessee. Nicely, who considers himself a contemporary folk artist, works in a variety of mediums including sculpture, drawing and clay ceramics. In his pit-fired clay masks, Nicely fuses African and Southern Appalachian art traditions to create visual images based in ritual and everyday life.

Inspired by African fetish objects and the craft of traditions of Tennessee, mask making is a direct source of empowerment for Nicely. Through his creative process, he becomes more aware of his African heritage as well as his experience as an African-American male. Nicely's organic and high ornamental masks encourage us to look at the diversity within our culture, as well as become more aware of African culture.

Nicely's two-dimensional clay masks are created from an ancient pit-firing process developed by African and Native American cultures. After completing the form of the mask, the artist applies slips and glazes to the greenware. The first firing of the clay takes place in an electric kiln, reaching temperatures of 1800 degrees. The pieces are removed and stacked on the ground for the second firing. A wood fire is built to cover all the pieces. Once the fire attains a high flame, the wares are fired for one hour, then smothered with sawdust for 40 minutes or longer. It is during this second firing that each piece receives its individual color and character.

Once the firing process is complete, Nicely applies found objects to the masks, including buttons, bottle caps, metal objects, costume jewelry and treasures he finds in antique and second hand stores, flea markets, and on the streets. Through incorporation of these found objects, Nicely not only taps into the aesthetics of popular culture, but also translates and expands it.

Nicely has studied at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts and is a member of Moving Spirits, the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild, the Foothills Craft Guild and Morristown Art Association. He is co-founder and director of the From Africa to Appalachia Foundation, an organization dedicated to sharing the cultural, creative spirit of African-Americans in Appalachia. Mr. Nicely's Work can be seen in several collections including the Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta; Carroll Reese Museum in Johnson City, Tennessee; East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tennessee; Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee; the Tennessee Valley Authority in Knoxville, Tennessee; Beck Cultural Center in Knoxville, Tennessee; BellSouth in Nashville, Tennessee; Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia; the National Afro-American Museum in Wilberforce, Ohio; and many private collections throughout the Southeast.

Artist Statement
As an artist, my work is an extension of myself and helps me to better understand my cultural heritage. It is a crucial means of self understanding. I see art as the medium through which such understanding can be attained.

I create art for self satisfaction and as a way of communicating with others. My art serves as a common ground for communication where each person has to bring their own identity into play in order to appreciate my work. -Sammie Nicely

return to top of profile page                                    return to schedule of events

Suzanne Jackson
Biography
Suzanne Jackson was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1944. Graduating in 1961 from Monroe High School in Fairbanks, Alaska, she earned her B.A. in painting from San Francisco State (College) University in 1966 and an M.F.A. in theatre design from Yale University's School of Drama in 1990. She is a professor of painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design. In 1996, she was chosen in the first group of Cave Canem Poetry Fellows and has been a working member of United Scenic Artists, Local 829, since 1990.

Jackson's paintings and biography have been featured in numerous publications, including the University of California at Los Angeles' Oral History Program; "St. James Guide to Black Artists," St. James Press/Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, 1997; "Gumbo YaYa, Anthology of African-American Women Artists," Midmarch Arts Press, 1995; "I Hear a Symphony, African Americans Celebrate Love," Anchor Books, 1994; "Black Art, an International Quarterly," Vol. III. No 4, 1981; "Contributions of Women - Art," Dillon Press, 1977; "Contextures," New York, 1977; and "Black Artists on Art," Vol. II, Ward Ritchie Press, 1970.

Jackson was the recipient of two Idyllwild Associates Fellowships for Etching/Bookmarking and Dance at the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts in 1982 and 1983. In 1981, she was nominated for the first National Awards in the Visual Arts and was artist-in-residence at the Savannah College of Art and Design and at the Gibbs Museum and Art Gallery in Charleston, South Carolina. During 1978 and 1979, she completed two large-scale outdoor murals in Los Angeles as part of the Brockman Gallery Productions CETA Public Art Program. In 1977, two limited edition lithographs were produced while in residence at the Normal Editions Workshop at Center for the Visual Arts at Illinois State University at Normal.

Among many museums and galleries, her work has been exhibited at Ankrum Gallery, Los Angeles; Bomani Gallery, San Francisco; Laguna Beach Museum of Art; Fashion Moda; Just Above Midtown Galleries; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the New York Cultural Center; the Oakland Museum; the California Museum of African-American History and Culture; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Palm Spring Desert Museum; Joseph J. Hirshhorn Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Miami Dade Public Library; and the Library for Performing Arts at the Lincoln Center, New York.

Jackson's works can be found in public and private collections throughout the nation, including the Indianapolis Museum of Art; Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building, New York; Museum of African American Art, Los Angeles; Palm Springs Desert Museum; Savannah College of Art and Design Jen Library; and Mann, Johnson and Mendelhall Corp, Los Angeles.  

return to top of profile page                                    return to schedule of events

Ayokunle Odeleye
Biography
Ayokunle Odeleye was born in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he attended high school. He began college at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, and later moved to Washington, D.C., where he received a bachelor's degree in 1973 and a master's degree in 1975 from Howard University.

Odeleye has held teaching positions at Dunbar High School, the Duke Ellington School for the Arts and Howard University in Washington, D.C. He has also taught at Spelman College and Georgia State College in Atlanta, Georgia. He is currently an associate professor of art at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia, where he has been teaching for the past 11 years. Odeleye teaches courses in sculpture, drawing, three-dimensional design, art appreciation and African-American art history.

Odeleye has been involved in the creation of art for over 30 years. He currently maintains an active studio in Atlanta, Georgia, producing large and small scale sculpture in a variety of media. He specializes in large scale environmental sculpture for public environments.

Artist Statement
My work is a means through which I attempt to communicate ideas which evolve from my life's experiences. Through a variety of media, techniques and processes, I engage in the creative act of giving tangible form to my thoughts and ideas. I am particularly interested in the human experience and the relatedness of things. Formal aspects of my work deal with a dynamic interplay between shape, form and space in an effort to energize the surrounding environment. -Ayokunle Odeleye

return to top of profile page                                    return to schedule of events

Dr. Peggy Blood
Biography
Dr. Peggy Blood, chairman of the Fine Arts Department at Savannah State University, studied art under John Howard, art chair of Agricultural Mechanical and Normal College in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Howard was a product of the Harlem Renaissance and a protegee of Hale Woodruff. In 1971, she received an M.F.A. degree in painting and drawing from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, making her the first African-American to receive such a degree from the institution. In 1974, she moved to California and studied administration and art education while teaching and administering college/university and school programs in the Bay area. Before moving to Savannah, Blood was the executive director for three satellite campuses, Fairfield, Petaluma and Travis, under the auspices of Chapman University in Orange, California. In 1998, Blood accepted the position of chairman of SSU's Fine Arts Department. Blood has won numerous awards and has exhibited in galleries throughout the United States. In California, she was voted "Most Outstanding Bay Area Artist" by the Bay Area Arts Commission. She is listed in "Who's Who Among American Educators." Blood's life struggle has been in the promotion and advocacy of the arts.

Artist Statement
Life is an everlasting struggle full of beauty and challenges.
Beauty is nature that surrounds the bounties of God's people.

The wondrous life is filled with negative and positive challenges that are embraced by the beauty of life. Smiling and sad faces, young and old faces; tragedies and good times; fluttering and prancing animals, insects and sea life caressing the land and the sea; colors in nature changing from one hue to another; rain, snow and the almighty sun, all full of life and love while absorbing the fruits of the universe.

My art feeds on the spiritual food of nature.
It is reminiscent of days gone by and life experiences.
It reaches within my soul and the spirituality of life.
It gives me hope in the continuation of life and its challenges.
It embraces love and beauty. -Peggy Blood

return to top of profile page                                    return to schedule of events

Ron Bechet
Biography
Ron Bechet is a native of New Orleans, Louisiana. He is the eldest of four children born to Yvette Bechet and the late Ronald Bechet Sr. In the fifth grade, Bechet was fortunate enough to have a teacher stimulate his facility in visual art. He attended Brother Martin High School.

His skills in athletics earned him an athletic scholarship to Mississippi State University. He soon found that the rigors of collegiate athletics interfered with his commitment to making art. He returned New Orleans and enrolled in the University of New Orleans where he received his bachelor's degree in fine arts in 1979. Bechet was recognized as the Outstanding Studio Artist in his senior year at the University of New Orleans.

Wanting to continue his formal education, Bechet was accepted into the Yale School of Art, Yale University, where he received a master of fine arts degree in painting in 1982. Bechet returned to New Orleans after completing his studies at Yale. He accepted a position working with adolescent youth at the St. Bernard Group Homes in St. Bernard Parish. There he utilized his skills as an artist combined with his commitment to the youth of the community to help children overcome past problem behaviors through the utilization of the visual art.

Bechet has taught on the college level at many universities in the New Orleans area. He is currently an assistant professor of fine arts at Southern University at New Orleans. Bechet has shown his work nationally in galleries and institutions. He is represented by Gallerie Simone Stern in New Orleans.  

Artist Statement
As a young man, I often found that I was comfortable outdoors in uncleared natural places. In that comfort I augmented many of my values and beliefs that later became a source for my work in content and subject. I was blessed with a large extended family. Almost weekly we shared joy, excitement and pain together at large gatherings. Music, dance, loud voices and traditional food were all part of my young life. Often those experiences and my interaction with natural forms mesh together in my work. These natural forms often become the "voices" and emotions of important events in my past. They have become part of a personal visual dialogue. As Paul Klee said, "Art does not reproduce the visible: rather it makes visible."

The more I grow as an artist, the more I find excitement in the properties of paint and visual perception. The work must reveal itself slowly and quickly. Light gives definition to all things, and can be said to confer life and even death. The experience of the paint or charcoals pushed onto a surface has a spiritual sensation. Color I believe has and takes on spiritual and emotional meaning. It affects all our senses known and unknown. Scale is important because it forces one to experience illusionistic space on several levels. The space must be close and confronting and miles away: as I remember my family. I feel that all things are cyclical. Natural forms force us to take a closer look at ourselves as they constantly change. Change is constant through life, growth and death and rebirth. -Ron Bechet

return to top of profile page                                    return to schedule of events

Tosha Grantham
Biography
Tosha Grantham, a native of Richmond, Virginia, studied art history and Spanish at Georgetown University and began her studies in painting at the University of Barcelona in 1990. She received a B.A. in 20th century art history in 1991 from Georgetown. From 1992-95, she worked on the Smithsonian Institution's American Festival Japan, which included a large-scale exhibition and music programs in Markuhari, Japan, in 1994. After completing this project, Grantham started in the graduate program in African-American art history at Howard University, focusing her research on late 20th century arts of the Diaspora. She received an M.A. in 1997. In 1998, Grantham attended the Spelman Summer Art Colony in Portobelo, Panama, and continued her studies in painting with Dr. Arturo Lindsay. She has continued to work with Lindsay and will return to Panama on an Ahijada Fellowship in May 2000. Within the past year, Grantham's paintings have been shown in Brooklyn, New York, in the exhibition "Size Matters" and in a Women's History Month exhibition.

Artist Statement
My paintings record the significant impressions of changing urban landscapes where I live, as well as reflecting the time that I spend working in a coastal art colony in the village of Portobelo, Panama. My work is process-related and synthesizes my observations within such distinct places. I combine color, textural elements, and mixed media experiments to create a collage of "environments" on paper and canvas. My work also includes an element of mystery and play. The compositions are abstract representations of transformation over a period of time. They represent temporality, memories, journeys, chance, and unlikely combinations that become real in the space of my work. I use the paint media to create an illusion of geographical locations, with waterways and imagined communities, in two dimensions. I also use old maps, blueprints, and natural elements (sand, rust, water, leaves and coffee) to build and "age" the surfaces, and to heighten this effect. My attempts at building, decaying, and combining become commentaries on the places or environments that I have experienced and their lasting impact on my life and my artwork. -Tosha Grantham

return to top of profile page                                     return to schedule of events

Malaika Favorite
Biography
Malaika Favorite is a self-employed artist and writer residing in Atlanta, Georgia. She received her B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Favorite has taught at various educational institutions including Grambling State University in Grambling, Louisiana; Episcopal High School in Baton Rouge, where she was artist in residence; Louisiana State University; and Augusta College in Augusta, Georgia. She was also the artist in residence for the Baton Rouge Arts Council.

Among her many accomplishments are her published collection of poems and prints. The title of her book is "Illuminated Manuscript," published by New Orleans Poetry Journal Press.

Favorite has exhibited throughout the nation. Some of her creative collections are held at the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia; the Alexander Museum of Art in Alexandra, Louisiana; the National Ecumenical Museum of Art in St. Louis, Missouri; the River Road African American Museum in Burnside, Louisiana, the Coca Cola Museum in Atlanta, Georgia; and at Absolute Vodka in New York. In 1998, Favorite was commissioned by the Fulton County Arts Council to create 28 paintings for the Harriett G. Darnell Multipurpose Facility. 

return to top of profile page                                     return to schedule of events

Adrienne Hoard
Artist Statement
The life of an artist is lived on the edge. The edge of creativity, the edge of a new color mixture, the wing's edge of a new culture uncovered and discovered through direct experience. There is always the thrill of risk, the invitation of the feeling of the next unknown adventure, waiting to be accomplished, then brought from artistic subconscious into tangible form, for the emotive pleasure of the form, for the viewing of sojourning spirits, for pleasure, Peace, Joy, Love and security.

As artists, we feel all the passions of humanity. We are not spared the pain nor the ecstasy; but the EXPRESSION of it all becomes, and is our duty. In form and substance, we are creating the balance and harmony we desire, that feeling which each personality needs, and has to have in order to live life in the fullness of Light and Oneness, as completely one's self, not separated, but Whole.

Abstraction allows me the freedom of total emotional expression, but keeps my secrets. Only the colors, authentic and bold, give any indication of the depth of my feelings, the intensity of my Truth, or the Joy in my passion. -Adrienne Hoard

return to top of profile page                                     return to schedule of events

Carolyn Zoe Briscoe
Biography
A native of Baltimore, Maryland, Carolyn Zoe Briscoe received her B.A. degree from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1979. She moved to Washington, D.C., to study printmaking at Howard University and received a master of fine arts degree in 1982. Feeling printmaking too restrictive, she began an independent study of various crafts such as batik, tye-dye, silk painting, jewelry making and soft sculpture. Through these media, she was able to explore her love of color, a more spontaneous and intuitive approach to creating. She began teaching and conducting workshops around the Washington, D.C., area at places such as the Capital Children's Museum, St. Anthony School, Artworks D.C., G Street Fabrics and the Smithsonian Institute Museum of American History.

To further her exploration, she received awards in 1982 and 1983 to study surface design and paper making at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle, Maine. Working in a variety of media, Briscoe has exhibited in many venues including the Columbia Museum, Washington Project for the Arts, School 33 and University of Pennsylvania, Altoona Campus. In 1991, Briscoe was awarded a D.C. Commission grant for her soft sculpture. Presently, she has been assisting Jerome Meadows in the creation of public art around the country.

Artist Statement
"Dancing Home" is based on my concept of dancing spirits which constantly surround us. The guardians of color, light and wisdom, who know all our pasts and the potential of our futures, are always ready to whisper in our ears or nudge us in the direction of our highest good. It might be comfortable to perceive them as angels, but I find that image confining as the dancing spirits are too colorful and hip for that label. Comprised of pure energy, they vibrate at a frequency too intense to be seen by the human eye. Only in certain enlightened states can they be glimpsed by us mortals.

My depiction of these beings is a combination of wood, metal, shells, beads and other materials. The media was carefully chosen for color, energy and symbolic meaning. Each figure carries a hidden message for the viewer about how the past is informing our future. -Carolyn Zoe Briscoe

return to top of profile page                                     return to schedule of events

Jerome B. Meadows
Artist Statement
During the last 20 years, I have had the opportunity to design and create a number of site-specific installations and outdoor, public art projects throughout the United States. My work covers a wide range of materials and imagery, thus allowing me to specify my design decisions with respect to the unique requirements of each undertaking. 'Site Specific' provides a far more effective solution than 'off shelf'.

The scale of my work varies as well, from small, intimate garden pieces to large scale projects involving site relationships and landscape design. I also enjoy working with water as an artistic medium.

I prefer a hands-on approach when it comes to the creation of my work. The force and vision of the creative process should flow from the initial point of conception through to final completion. One should never overlook an opportunity to adjust and refine in serving the dictates of the Muse.

I view art as providing a passageway between the objective and the subjective: between our factual understanding and our fanciful perceptions. Art has the capacity to transport us from the narrow reality of our physical surroundings to a realm of expansive and liberating possibilities. -Jerome B. Meadows