FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Georgine Clarke Alabama Artists Gallery Presents Sizing Up: Seven Women Sculptors
 New exhibition features Alabama artists who work in three-dimensional art

MONTGOMERY, Ala., (May 11, 2023) — The Alabama State Council on the Arts and the Georgine Clarke Alabama Artists Gallery is currently showcasing an exhibition of works from Alabama artists working in sculpture.

The exhibition Sizing Up: Seven Women Sculptors showcases Alabama artists who demonstrate a dynamic range of possibilities in three-dimensional art through their use of a wide variety of materials and processes to create their sculptures. For many of the artists, working in 3D offers a chance to explore the intersections of deeply personal themes with broader historical, cultural, and societal connections across time and place. This exhibition provides an opportunity to reflect empathetically on diverse experiences of what it means to be a woman and is currently on display at the Georgine Clarke Alabama Artists Gallery in downtown Montgomery.

Featured Artists

Sara Garden Armstrong is a visual artist whose decades-long practice embraces a wide range of scales and techniques, from large site-specific sculpture to artist’s books. Lyrical, nature-based biomorphic abstraction characterizes the work, focusing on life processes and systems. It addresses organic change and transformation, while exploring properties of materials. Breathing is a major concern, as are mechanical support systems of the body. Other recurrent themes are water and time, with its elements of decay, chance, and shifts of reality.

Kimberley A. Brown’s work incorporates process and material combinations to build things that examine the relationships between forms, and trace connections between disparate times and spaces. Simple materials are capable of exploring complex narratives and telling stories about the viewer as well as the maker. To this end, Brown investigates what certain materials have to say in both native and unexpected incarnations, as well as what any one substance might be capable of becoming.

Jennifer Wallace Fields’ artistic practice is a process of emotional archeology: digging through our internal remnants to uncover artifacts that can be pieced together to re-construct a narrative. Working primarily in clay, while also incorporating found objects from thrift shops and the natural world, Fields explores multifaceted concepts of memory; these can take the form of collective, shared-cultural memories or even the forgotten memories embedded into objects she collects for her works as they pass from owner to owner over generations.

Susan Fitzsimmons is from St. Louis, Missouri, but now lives in Mobile, Alabama. She lived in Texas, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, and Illinois. Each new place required adaptations and pushed her creative evolution in new directions. Say Fitzsimmons, “My work has always been greatly influenced by the cultural conditions of a place, the technology available, and the need to approach all creative work with an openness to dialogue with the audience. It has been my belief that creativity often takes place on the fringes.”

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.

Meredith Knight is currently Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Alabama State University. Previously, she was Manager of Studio Programs at the Birmingham Museum of Art. She taught Sculpture and Ceramics at Auburn University Montgomery and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. After graduating summa cum laude with a BFA and then MFA in Sculpture from the University of Alabama, she worked to advocate access to arts and education through her teaching and administrative work at Alabama Prison Arts and Education Project through Auburn University and Black Belt 100 Lenses Photovoice Program through the University of Alabama.

Jayla Poe is a recent graduate of Alabama State University, where she majored in Visual Art and served as the president of the student art club. This group of ceramics vessels are part of a larger collection of works that depicts the African American story. This section of works emphasizes one of the darkest points in African American history, the hundreds of years of slavery. With these works I chose to bring light to these dark times by displaying the feelings of being captured and most importantly the feeling of loss.

For additional information on the exhibit, contact Amy Jenkins, gallery manager, at amy@arts.alabama.gov.

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About the Georgine Clarke Alabama Artists Gallery
The mission of the Georgine Clarke Alabama Artists Gallery is to promote the creative talents of Alabamians through exhibitions, publicity, and educational programs. However, most important to the exhibition schedule is the presentation (and celebration) of the fine work being done by Alabama’s artists. The Alabama Artists Gallery was renamed in honor of Georgine Clarke following her death in 2012. Georgine served as Visual Arts Program Manager at the Council on the Arts for 17 years, and her influence on the work of the Council is still felt.

About Alabama State Council on the Arts
The Council on the Arts is the official state agency for the support and development of the arts in Alabama. The Council works to expand and preserve the state’s cultural resources by supporting nonprofit arts organizations, schools, colleges, units of local government, and individual artists. Arts programs, assisted by Council grants, have a track record of enhancing community development, education, cultural tourism, and overall quality of life in all regions of the state. Alabama State Council on the Arts grants are made possible by an annual appropriation from the Alabama Legislature and additional funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Learn more at arts.alabama.gov.

Notes: 

•         Sizing Up: Seven Women Sculptors is on display now through July 28, 2023.

•         The gallery is free and open to the public Monday - Friday from 8 a.m. - 5 p.m. Visit us on the first floor of the RSA Tower, located in downtown Montgomery at 201 Monroe Street, Suite 110.