Meet the artists behind the exhibition, The Red Clay Survey: 2020 Exhibition of Contemporary Southern Art. Each week we will be featuring five of the artists included in this year’s exhibition. A major recurring regional competition sponsored by the Huntsville Museum of Art , the Red Clay Survey “takes the pulse” of contemporary Southern art through a selection of work in all styles and media. This year’s exhibition includes 85 works by 67 different artists.
Stacey Holloway
Birmingham, AL
Id, Ego, and Superego, 2019 cast iron, cast porcelain, mixed media, 24 x 10 x 8 in.
Stacey M. Holloway received her MFA from the University of Minnesota in 2009, her BFA from Herron School of Art and Design/IUPUI in 2006, and became the Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2013. From 2009 to 2013, Holloway was employed by Herron School of Art and Design as their Sculpture Technician and Instructor of Sculpture, 3D Design, and Sculpture Foundry Methods.
Holloway is an active national installation-based artist and sculptor that focuses on the transformation and growth on individuals as they mature. Through the exploration of storytelling and ethology, she constructs sculptural stills that represent anxieties and fears that collide with a world of ambiguous subconsciousness. Her work takes the viewer on a journey to discover the idea of “home.”
Holloway has exhibited throughout the Midwest, South and East Coast in galleries such as Wayfarers, Brooklyn, NY; FM Gallery, Chicago, IL; Gallery 924 at the Arts Council of Indianapolis, IN; Huntsville Museum of Art, AL; and the South Bend Museum of Art in Indiana. Holloway has received distinguished awards such as the 2017 SECAC Artist’s Fellowship; the 2010 Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship through the Efroymson Family Fund: Central Indiana Community Foundation in Indianapolis and the Juror’s Choice Award at the “Red Clay Survey: 2014 Exhibition of Contemporary Southern Art” at the Huntsville Museum of Art.
Jed Jackson
Memphis, TN
Deserter, 2019 oil on panel, 20 x 20 in.
Jed Jackson received his MFA from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, 1980 and his BFA from Memphis College of Art in Tennessee, 1977 and was awarded a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, 1974. He has taught Painting, Art History, Art Theory and Criticism and Humanities courses at the University and College level for 40 years. He is Professor of Painting at The University of Memphis. He was Chair of the the Art Department there from 1999-2006. Jackson is the author of the book Art: A Comparative Study.
His beautifully rendered landscape and figurative oil paintings embody realism with a distinctive twist. Gleaning inspiration from fashion magazines, movies, the literary world and a plethora of other twentieth century cultural sources, Jackson incorporates these images and ideas with a keen sense of color to create paintings that are simultaneously rich in content and aesthetically dynamic.
Carrie Johnson
Brewton, AL
Echo in the Firmament II, 2020 acrylic, graphite, Alabama clay, rust on cradled panel, 30 x 48 in.
born in 1978, Milton, Florida
lives in Brewton, Alabama
2012 MFA Painting, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA
2002 BFA Graphic Design, Auburn University, Auburn, AL
Recent Exhibitions
2020 Alabama Artists Roots and Wings, Gallery 905, Selma, AL
Seeing the Unseeable, Atlantic Gallery, Chelsea, NY
2015 Local Artist Exhibition, Jefferson Davis Community College, Brewton, AL
2011 Bare Essentials: MinimalisM in the 21st Century, Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, IL
Privacy Please, A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
Kathryn Jill Johnson
Huntsville, AL
Trigger Point, 2019 graphite, oil, silver leaf on panel, 24 x 36 in.
Artist Statement
I am the worst sort of detective. I just like to pile up clues and rearrange them into melancholic jokes, farcical calamities and occasional moments of grace.
When I am drawing, I am teasing out a knot or banging on a drum. My drawings have paint, of course, but they are not really paintings—the drawn line is what tells the tale. The pops and veils of color and the stained surfaces just hang around it like groupies. They provide a ragged sort of embellishment. The line is what makes the edges and directs the characters and each marks provides a kind of unstable punctuation.
My drawings have a cast of characters, images and elements, which live in flattened landscapes or ambiguous spaces that are flooded with intimations.
I think about thrownness, the ridiculous set of circumstances that make each person’s own horizon line. In these drawings, horizons are not there to separate earth and sky. They are a thing for standing on, ducking under or tripping over. They provide for points of appearance rather than vanishing.
We are perpetually in a state of medias res, the middle of the action. It feels like our lives are a story, but the past is soft and indistinct, the climax can’t be recognized and the denouement is necessarily unknowable. So the little world of my drawings is peculiar. The figures, the marks, even the little shiny spots are talking to themselves and each other. The viewer gets to listen in, and take a peek—even put in their two cents.
The way we travel, who shows up, the near misses and the head on collisions, are what make and unmake us. These little stories are the moment before a divination— the tea leaves have settled, the alomancer has flung the salt; the bones have clattered to the ground. But the signs don’t point to the future, they are this moment right here: a sort of prophecy of the present.
Kim Keats
Okatie, SC
Visceral Vessel, 2018, white pine bark, hemlock twigs, waxed linen thread, 17 x 11 x 6 in.
Kim Keats holds a BFA from Augusta State University, pursued graduate studies in fibers at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts and received an MFA from Georgia Southern University. Kim’s fiber works have been exhibited in museums including the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, SC, the Museum of York County in Rock Hill, SC, the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia, and the Wiregrass Museum of Art in Dothan, AL. She has received merit and best of show awards in a number of juried exhibitions and her works have been included in the traveling exhibits, Palmetto Hands, Craft of the Carolinas, and Material Objects. Her sculptures are in the Mark B. Coplan Collection of Art at the South Carolina State Museum, City of North Charleston Public Art Collection and the Medical University of South Carolina’s Contemporary Carolina Collection at the Ashley River Tower. She is the recipient of the South Carolina Arts Commission’s 2010 Individual Artist Fellowship Award in Craft. Kim Keats is a visiting assistant professor and teaches Three-Dimensional Design, Sculpture and Studio Arts for Non Majors at the University of South Carolina Beaufort and is a part-time Foundations Studies professor at Savannah College of Art and Design.