Meet the Artists of the Red Clay Survey Week 13

Meet the artists behind the exhibition, The Red Clay Survey: 2020 Exhibition of Contemporary Southern Art. This 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.

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Larry Walker

Lithonia, GA

Walker utilizes painting, drawing, collage, and mixed materials as the primary processes for his work. His career spans 50+ years and includes an extensive exhibition record: more than 200 invitational and juried group presentations and sixty solo exhibitions in galleries, museums, and art centers in various parts of the country. Walker, the youngest of eleven was born in Franklin, GA. Following the death of his father in 1936, Walker’s formative years were spent in New York City. There, he graduated from the High School of Music & Art before relocating to Detroit, MI for college. He has a BS in Art Education and an MA in Drawing and Painting from Wayne State University. Now retired as a Professor Emeritus, Walker continues to add credits to his substantial accomplishments as an artist, visual arts supporter, juror, and curator.

Walker explores existential truths as they would be found on the walls and doors of urban environments, indicative of his Harlem upbringing. Walker describes the conversation his work sparks as “pseudo-reality, socio-cultural, and humanistic”. While a portion of his works are rendered with charcoal on paper, Walker’s mixed media collages provide additional context to his dialogue, featuring magazine and newspaper clippings, partial promotional posters for movies and events, and other symbolic elements such as chains and shackles, earphones, and microphones. His references to pop culture and current events maintain an authentic relevance within his work. Walker envisions urban surfaces as an interaction that occurs within a shared, common experience. The variety of realities and narratives found upon the metropolitan message boards of cities around the world serve as a representation of human life, not just within our local communities, but around the world.

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Collin Williams

Montevallo, AL

Collin Williams is an Professor of Art and director of New Media concentration at the University of Montevallo. He received his MFA and BFA from the University of Houston, University Park. His teaching expertise spans a range of topics including digital photography and printing, animation, 3D animation, web media, mixed media and digital video.

Williams’ personal work investigates a multi-disciplinary approach to art exploring installation, motion graphics, printmaking, sculpture, and sound based works. Williams has a long standing interest in language and his most recent work is an exploration of the artificiality of historical linear narratives in contrast to the fractured narratives of personal experience.

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Jammie Williams

Ashland City, TN

Jammie Williams is a professionally trained oil painter and sculptor who lives and works in middle Tennessee. He attended both Watkins College of Art and Design as well as Tennessee State University as a painting major and has studied with nationally known artists Juliette Aristides and Greg Decker.

He is trained in figurative sculpture and has sculpted 15 portraits for the Country Music Hall of Fame including Jerry Reed, Charlie Daniels, Randy Travis, The Oak Ridge Boys, Jim Ed Brown and the Browns, Alan Jackson, Don Schlitz, Grady Martin and Fred Foster. He is also a member of the National Sculpture Society and the Portrait Society of America.

He is a portrait artist and figurative artist in painting, drawing and sculpture. Jammie teaches figure drawing and sculpting privately as well as in groups. His paintings also include landscapes and still lifes as well as imagery and compositions drawing inspiration from various sources.

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Leslie Wood

Lacey’s Springs

Leslie has been creating art ever since she can remember. She has a bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering, but after working for a few years, decided to go back to college and take art classes. She enrolled with the University of Alabama in Huntsville and studied photography, sculpture and painting. Over the years she expanded her creative skills with numerous master led classes. Her work varies from mixed-media and art journaling to sculpture and jewelry making. Her recent solo exhibitions include ‘Dreams and Reality: The Artwork of Leslie Wood’ at Carnegie Visual Arts Center and Evelyn Burrows Museum, Visiting Artist Exhibition at the Huntsville Art League and an exhibition at Lowe Mill ARTS & Entertainment in Huntsville Alabama. An avid art journaler, her journal work has been published numerous times in Somerset Studio’s ‘ART Journaling’ magazine including a feature in the 2016 Winter and 2017 Spring editions. You can find her work at local shows such as Montesano Art Festival, and Panoply Arts Festival.

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Lain York

Old Hickory, TN

Artist Statement

The paintings are influenced by documentary photography found in museum/auction catalogues and archeological sites. The surfaces carry the record of the many stages the paintings go through and follow a tradition of burying and applying elements in order to activate their potential. The image exists somewhere between the excavated surface and the added elements. This is an attempt to deal with the intangible through physical and ordered means.

I like the idea of the lost or misinterpreted cultural record.