The University Art Gallery is delighted to present two honors thesis exhibitions: Kara Adams’ Down Yonder and Bailey Stevens’ The Obscured Finish Line: Once More the Fool.
With the warm photographs of Down Yonder, Kara Adams invites viewers into a deeply personal and intimate experience of rural Southern life, showing us “mothers and daughters and sisters and fathers and lovers, rather than characters.” Looking at Adams’ many small scale photographs in series on the wall, turning the pages of her photo albums, we are invited, for a moment, to join her family, and, in Adams’ words to “see in us, yourself.”
In The Obscured Finish Line: Once More the Fool, Bailey Stevens confronts the viewer with large scale, brightly colored paintings of young men and women caught in the revelry of party culture, using painting to “investigate the journey [she] and her peers have been on.” Isolated against their vivid backgrounds, these figures elicit a complex response from the viewer. They at once look foolish, joyful, and vulnerable, and seem to ask the viewers to identify and to choose. They present specific, recognizable portraits, but are also archetypal. In each painting Stevens represents an experience or personal position - inspired by tarot cards - that we all inhabit at different times in our lives, and that will repeat. In Stevens’s words, “We begin, we learn, we change, we start again. Using my paintings to represent the stages of a universal timeline, I encourage the self-reflection that can help teach us about ourselves and how to move forward.”
To protect the health of those on and off our campus, in-person visits to the exhibition are reserved for students, faculty, and staff of the University already on campus. To view slideshows of their thesis work, please follow the link below.
The University Art Gallery fulfills an essential role on campus. Devoted to exhibitions of contemporary art, the UAG fosters innovation and creativity, and experiential and visual learning. UAG exhibitions encourage conversation beyond the classroom, between all the members of our community, and a welcoming and diverse campus community.
Working together, faculty members and the Director and Curator of Academic Engagement build productive ways for UAG exhibitions and events to support courses across the curriculum. Students contribute to exhibitions and programming, they visit exhibitions to consider course themes and questions, they have conversations with visiting artists, they use artists’ methodologies and work as inspiration for class assignments, they put their foreign language skills to work in a community setting outside the classroom. Use the button below to contact Shelley MacLaren, Director and Curator of Academic Engagement, to discuss possibilities for your classes.
If you would like to receive announcements via email of upcoming University Art Gallery exhibitions and events, submit your email address in the form. Be sure to follow the UAG on Facebook, too.
The Friends of the University Art Gallery was founded to support exceptional exhibition and event programming in the UAG, and to bring together people who believe in the power of contemporary art to foster conversation and community. Please consider renewing your membership, or becoming a new Friend today. If you would like to offer your support as a Friend of the UAG, please follow the link below, select “Visual, Literary, and Performing Arts” for your Designation, and write “Friends of the UAG” under “Specific program or initiative.” Friends will be honored with their names displayed in the UAG unless otherwise requested.
The University Art Gallery was honored to present Allegiance, a quiet and intimate exhibition of complex and beautiful woven textiles by Los Angeles-based artist Diedrick Brackens, on view from Oct. 25 through Dec. 13, 2019.
In Allegiance, Brackens plays with our expectations and associations, turning symbols, lyrics, and materials to new purposes. He refashions American and Confederate flags, he quotes and recasts the lyrics to the minstrel song Dixie and to the hymn Holy, Holy, Holy, he makes the language of advertising both sentimental and subversive, and he - an African American whose antecedents picked cotton in Texas - self-consciously transforms that fraught material into beautiful textiles.
The Annual Campus Gallery Walk brings together art, music, and dance, and gives our students an exciting opportunity to experiment, perform, and reach new audiences. This year, our remarkable students responded to the restrictions required by the pandemic with creativity and resilience, producing performances to be shared with remote audiences.
Sewanee provides funding for an approved summer internship or research fellowship, a semester-long study abroad opportunity at no additional tuition cost, and the ability to graduate with one major in four years. Of course, you will have to do your part. If you meet Sewanee’s academic and social expectations, these opportunities will be provided.
Our small classes mean that your voice will be heard, your contribution will be expected, and your opinion will be listened to (and disagreed with, and challenged, and seen from a different perspective, and pushed in a new direction, and considered—and you know what? Maybe we’re both right. See how it works?).
We're a community where everyone has a place and there's a place for everyone. Group study? We'll bring our notes. Rock climbing? We're geared up and ready. Jam session? Sure, we'll play with you. Whatever you want to do, at Sewanee, you'll never have to go it alone. Unless you need your space. Then, we totally get it.
