Bio-Statement

After earning an MA in Applied Art History and an MFA in Painting from the University of South Carolina in 1980, I served on the faculties of Lyon College in Batesville, AR, and Barry University in Miami, FL. In 1985 I became director of the Waterworks Visual Arts Center in Salisbury, NC and five years later the director of Winthrop University Galleries in Rock Hill, SC. I served as chair of Fine Arts for 10 years before leaving Winthrop in 2017. I currently live in Durham, NC, where I have established a studio.

Early in my career I was inspired by the work of self-taught artists who I interviewed during a graduate school project. This led to the first exhibition I organized, Worth Keeping: Found Artists of the Carolinas, that opened at the Columbia Museum of Art in 1981. This project was revisited and expanded with the exhibition Still Worth Keeping:: Communities, Preservation and Self Taught Artists in collaboration with the South Carolina State Museum that opened in 1997. My most recent curatorial project was True Likeness, a diverse exhibition of portraiture co-curated with Lia Newman, Director of Davidson College’s Van Every/Smith Galleries where it opened in 2020. True Likeness went on to travel to the Gregg Museum of Art and Design at NC State and university galleries in Fl, AL, Pa and MI.

I continue to catalogue the drawings of self-taught artist Gene Merritt (1936-2015) who I worked with for 13 years. Merritt’s 1998 one-man show of methodically drawn and highly labelled portraits at the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland, helped establish Merritt in the world of Outsider Art.

My own art is produced in series that share size, color, or imagery. Recurring shapes like triangles and visual symbols like houses and boats appear in the work. I use acrylic on canvas and paper and graphic stategies like mechanical drawing, silhouette and sgraffito. Working in series fits my desire to find visual and conceptual solutions from one group of paintings to the next. Beyond techniques, another common thread is my interest in how line, symmetry and asymmetry work in balance. My recent drawings are small. There is an intimate experience in their making. At this point in my journey, that is move important than ever.

I am fortunate to have had opportunities to exhibit my work as noted in the attached CV. I am still reflecting on the work from two recent exhibitions that are pushing the work in new directions. The series Uncharted Water at Hampton III Gallery in Taylors, SC, lacked representational imagery. Colors were applied intuitively. The November 2024 exhibition Moving Onward at the George Gallery in Charleston, SC, continued to explore color while arranging blue, red, and predominately black symbolic shapes on the surface.

Selected collections include Nebraska Medical Center; Lander University; College of Charleston; Johnson Collection; Greenville County Museum of Art; Gibbes Museum of Art; Asheville Art Museum; South Carolina State Museum; Weatherspoon Art Museum; Ashley River Tower, Medical University of South Carolina; Davidson College; South Carolina Arts Commission; Carolinas Medical Center, Charlotte; and Affinity Health Center, Rock Hill, South Carolina. 

See CV here.