Artists Talk with LVA: October 24, 2024

Kris Thompson & Mary Newton join us this week to talk about the work they will be exhibiting at Moremen Gallery. Tune in to WXOX 97.1 FM/Artxfm.com each Thursday at 10 am to hear Artists Talk with LVA.

Kris Thompson is a fiber artist living and working in Louisville, KY. Recent group exhibitions include an all woman show which she co-curated and exhibited in and a show at Moreman Gallery. In 2024 she had her first solo show at Capacity Contemporary Exchange in Louisville, KY. She is the recipient of a grant from the Great Meadows Foundation in which she traveled to Venice, Italy for the 2024 Venice Biennale. Her work is in private collections in Louisville including the Shapin Nicholas Project Foundation.

Mary Newton is a painter based in Louisville, KY. Recent group exhibitions include H20 at The Painting Center in New York City and 21C Museum Hotel in Louisville, KY. In 2024 she had a one person exhibition at Kleinhelter Gallery in New Albany, IN and in 2022 exhibited at the Suny Art Center in London, UK as a finalist for the Suny Art Prize. She is the recipient of grants from the Caroline Lowndes Foundation, Great Meadows Foundation, Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. In 2023 she was awarded, through the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a fellowship residency in Salzburg, Austria at the Kunterhaus as part of a cultural exchange with the U.S. Her work is in numerous private and public collections including Wright State University in Dayton, OH, Churchill Downs, Kentucky One Health, Brown Forman, Kosair Children’s Hospital, and Norton Hospital in Louisville.

Artists Talk With LVA: July 14 2022

Multi-disciplinary artist Colleen Toutant Merrill’s work examines the simultaneously personal and social history of textiles. Her adorned, embellished, and sometimes garish composite forms scrutinize the beauty and tension of our most interdependent relationships

She has exhibited her work here in Kentucky in  Lexington & Louisville but also in New York, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh, and at the International Textile Biennial in Haact, Belgium. Merrill has received grants from the Kentucky Federation for Women and the Great Meadows Foundation. She has been awarded fellowships for the Byrdcliffe Artist Residency in New York, and the Pentaculum Textiles Residency at the Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts in Tennessee. 

Merrill is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Bluegrass Community & Technical College and a part-time Instructor in Fiber & Material Studies at the University of Kentucky.

Her latest body of work, Day In & Day Out, opens at  WheelHouse Art  Saturday, July 16, 3:00 - 5:00 pm. The exhibition continues through September 3, 2022.

Artebella On The Radio: April 8 - Open Studio Weekend Artists

Fiber artist Pat Sturzel joined us this week to talk about Open Studio Weekend https://www.openstudioweekend.org/. Tune in to WXOX 97.1 FM, or stream on Artxfm.com each Thursday at 10 am to hear Keith Waits talk with artists.

Pat Sturtzel has been a fiber artist for over 35 years and has been teaching fabric dyeing and surface design techniques for 15 years. Pat has taught fabric dyeing at the national level, most recently at AQS QuiltWeek Paducah in April 2020.

Pat was presented the 2015 Teacher of the Year award by the International Association of Creative Arts Professionals, this weekend she will be participating in the LVA/Hite Institute Open Studio Weekend.

Vignette: Dobree Adams

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“These photographic mosaics are my way of making sense of and giving form to images captured in brief encounters with these ancient towns.” – Dobree Adams

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"Sant'antimo One" by Dobree Adams, 24x32in, Composite; Archival Inkjet Print (2017), $535

When an artist shifts from one medium to another, it is always tempting to see elements of the first medium in the second, and often there is a foundation in such observations. In the work of Dobree Adams, we can see the pattern and textures of her weavings reoccur in her photographs, and as she often has chosen historical architecture as a subject for her camera, we might also connect the fundamentally earthy tones of her textile palette with the aged, dusty surfaces found in much of her photography.

That palette also runs to a spectrum of greens, and in Adam’s most recent work she juxtaposes images of ancient architectural forms with lush gardens and mazes, connecting and contrasting the mortality implicit in the modern occupation of structures built thousands of years ago with the verdant arrangements of shrubbery and garden design. The “photo mosaics” are drawn from sixteen towns in Umbria, Tuscany, and Le Marche.

"Assisi Two" by Dobree Adams, 24x32in, Composite; Archival Inkjet Print (2017), $535

“I captured strong yet intimate images, often weirdly dissimilar,” explains Adams, “gargoyles, fragments of stone work and frescos, colors, light patterns, and landscape jewels. These photographic mosaics are my way of making sense of and giving form to images captured in brief encounters with these ancient towns. The images in each mosaic, although from a single geographical location, may be from different places, different times, different materials, and are sometimes reproduced at different scales.”

"Sweet Summer" by Dobree Adams, 62x32in, Felted by hand and on the FeltLoom; Silk, Merino and Lincoln Wool (2016), $950

“The energy or movement perceived in the mosaics works like the optical mixing of colors so important in impressionistic painting. Your eye is trying to make sense of the relationship between the images, perhaps trying to deal with that weirdness, looking for perspective or perhaps trying to argue whether a line is straight or crooked.”

Adams wants her compositions to communicate a sense of place through the subjective lens of her camera, as well as the unique and sometimes unorthodox juxtaposition of locations. There is an aspect of assembling a puzzle using pieces that aren’t a natural fit, yet there is an association that we only discover through the artist’s perspective; one we almost certainly won’t discover anywhere else.

Dobree Adams has been long recognized as a contemporary fiber artist. Most recently she has been creating felted landscapes using the FeltLoom in the University of Kentucky Fiber Studio. is also an accomplished photographer who began actively exhibiting her photographs with her woven work in 2003. She has had collaborative shows of her tapestries and photographs intertwined with the poems of her husband Jonathan Greene since 2009, including the Albrecht-Kemper Museum in Saint Joseph, Missouri, the Headley-Whitney in Lexington, and the Evansville Museum.

Her felted piece ‘Homage to Jasper Johns’ was included in the New Editions Gallery exhibition MIX IT UP. She is also in three current or upcoming exhibits:

"La Foce Nine" by Dobree Adams, 24x32in, Composite; Archival Inkjet Print (2017), $535

Way of The Land: The Farm Story, an invitational exhibition designed to document the region’s agrarian culture, will run through October 22 at the Owensboro Museum of Fine Art.

Italia Con Amore, a solo show and premiere exhibition of photographic mosaics from Umbria, Tuscany, and Le Marche will run September 22 through October 27 at Crafts(s) Gallery, as part of the 2017 Louisville Photo Biennial.

Lexington Camera Club: New Work, work by 32 members curated by Paul Paletti, will run October 6 through December 15 at the Lyric Theatre Gallery, Lexington.

Hometown: Frankfort, Kentucky
Education: BA, Mathematics, Wellesley College. Over 25 years in the scientific arena before becoming a full time artist/farmer; has studied at the Penland School of Craft & Santa Fe Photography Workshops
Website: www.dobreeadams.com/dobreegallery/

"Montepulciano One" by Dobree Adams, 24x32in, Composite; Archival Inkjet Print (2017), $535

"Umbertide One" by Dobree Adams, 24x32in, Composite; Archival Inkjet Print (2017), $535

Written by Keith Waits. Entire contents copyright © 2017 Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved.

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