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MFA Candidate Dominique Munoz named 2025 Denis Roussel Fellow by Center for Fine Art Photography

November 14, 2024

Congratulations to MFA student Dominique Muñoz on being named a 2025 Denis Roussel Fellow at the Center for Fine Art Photography!

Denis Roussel, 41, was a talented and dedicated photographer who was beloved by his family, friends, and the photography community. Denis was lost to bile duct cancer on July 12, 2017.

This annual award honors Roussel’s memory and legacy. Denis inspired many to take risks in their work, step outside the boundaries of traditional images, and realize the magic of photography.

The fellowship is to nurture artists in their artistic journey and is entirely funded by Denis’s family and friends.


Dominique Muñoz is a visual artist who uses photographic language to engage with personal and collective memory. He examines how we archive ourselves through images and spaces, shaping our sense of being. He challenges traditional ideas of masculinity by unpacking objects from his childhood home, highlighting the undercurrents of matriarchal labor and care. Family blankets become the foundation for weaving new patterns into his work –  a remixing of traditions and culture shaped by migrations to the United States. Working with found objects, images, printmaking, and performance, his practice centers on themes of assimilation, desire, family, and memory.

Dominique is from Falls Church, Va. He received his BFA in Photography and Film from VCUarts in 2015 and was the inaugural Photographer-in-Residence for the 1906 Group, where he highlighted the collective effort involved in construction. In 2017, he had his first solo exhibition at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.

This past summer, Dominique was selected as one of Ox-Bow’s School of Art Summer Fellows and served as a guest curator for The Curated Fridge. His work has been shown in numerous galleries, including Candela Books & Gallery in Richmond, VA., Greenville Museum of Art in Greenville, NC., Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh, PA., and Soft Times Gallery in San Francisco, CA,

Dominique is currently pursuing his MFA in Studio Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Merit Fellow, where he continues his research into family archives, colonial histories, and the lore of his Guatemalan ancestors.

Faculty member Martin Wannam and MFA candidate Dominique Munoz in group show in New Mexico

October 7, 2024

AT FOURTEENFIFTEEN

Mixed Blessings
Bella Maria Varela, Dominique Muñoz, hazel batrezchavez, Martín Wannam, Marlene Tafoya, Roman Gabriel

Opening reception: Friday October 11, 5-8pm

Mixed Blessings is a group exhibition exploring our relationship with domestic spaces and how they relate to forming our identities. Exhibiting artists were invited to critique, redefine, and explore intergenerational tools of resistance, joy, healing, or rituals inherited from the domestic spaces they have navigated throughout their lifetimes.

A selection of images from the 2024 Department of Art and Art History Graduation

June 25, 2024

Congratulations to all of our graduates of the Class of 2024! Here are a few images of the celebrations that were held in the Friday Center in May.

MFA candidate Molly English Awarded 2024 MFA Dedalus Award in Painting and Sculpture

April 11, 2024

Congratulations to Molly English for being announced as a recipient of the 2024 Dedalus Foundation Master of Fine Arts Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture. The MFA Dadelus Awards are given annually to final-year students who are graduating from an MFA degree program in the United States. Four fellowships are awarded every year, each carrying a stipend of $15,000.

Molly English’s tapestries use strategies of narrative tapestry for a reimagining of storytelling through fiber. English refers to Western tapestry’s history of justifying state and religious dominance both in form and content, while rejecting the flattening warp and weft of the loom and embracing the wild textures of the ignoble tufting gun.  In material hybridity, the profusion of candy colors, fiber and glittering evoke a sense of domesticity and historic notions of the feminine, into tactile narratives that portray an ecological antithesis to centuries of human-centric, male domination. From English’s own lived and researched understandings of Irish Catholicism, Anarchism, Feminism, and Animism, the works grapple with the fallibility and necessity of liberatory and salvatory beliefs in a nihilistic world.

Molly English (b. 1993) is an artist from Chicagoland. She received her BA in studio art and poetry from Columbia College Chicago in 2016, and will receive her MFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina in 2024. In her work, English reimagines the traditional flatness of narrative tapestry as a more abundant form—one that positions faith as both a necessary and fallible mode of relating to an increasingly nihilistic world.

MFA Candidate Mark Anthony Brown in group show at Sibyl Gallery in New Orleans

March 26, 2024

I’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE…CURATED BY SHABEZ JAMAL

29 MARCH – 5 MAY 2024

Sibyl is pleased to present I’ve been here before…, a group exhibition curated by multidisciplinary artist and scholar Shabez Jamal (b. 1992, St. Louis,  MO). I’ve been here before is a group exhibition that explores the recursive nature of photography through the lenses of ten emerging Black artists in the United States. The exhibition examines the relationship between the Black community and the photograph and how, through interactions with the medium, Black people have been able to create and recognize language and symbols that are vital to the continued formation of an ever-changing Black artistic canon.

Though many of the artists engage with different media including video, installation, painting, ceramic, sound, and sculpture, all ground their practice in the photographic image. Each artist recognizes the inherent ability of the photograph to conjure simultaneous feelings of loss and restoration. The memorial nature of the photograph allows space for the artist to look back with a knowing eye, and to generate new futures from the images and ideas of the past.

Curator Shabez Jamal directly cites Teena Marie’s song “Deja Vu” for its descriptions of many cosmic returns to both physical and emotional spaces. The photograph has a unique capacity to transport its viewer backwards and forwards through time, as Shawn Michelle Smith notes in her book Photographic Returns. Its potent connection to memory and potential to freeze and capture time makes photography a crucial source for those concerned with engaging the past in service of a better future.

I’ve been here before… features work by John AlleyneJustin CarneyMark Anthony Brown Jr.Sean G. ClarkJen EverettFelicita “Felli” MaynardAmbrose Rhapsody MurrayLola Ayisha OgbaraKristina Kay Robinson, and Darryl DeAngelo Terrell

About Shabez Jamal

Donny Bradfield (b. 1992, St. Louis) better known as Shabez Jamal, is an interdisciplinary artist based in New Orleans, LA. Their work, rooted in still portraiture, experimental video, and performance, interrogates physical, political, and social-economical space by using queerness, not as a means of speaking about sexuality, but as a catalyst to challenge varying power relations. Often turning the lens on themself, Jamal utilizes self-portraiture as a means of radically redefining the parameters of racial and sexual identity. Jamal received their BIS from the University of Missouri – St. Louis in 2019 and received their MFA from Tulane University in the spring of 2022 where they were also awarded a Mellon Community-Engaged Research Fellowship. In 2020 Jamal was also an inaugural member of Harvard Universities Commonwealth: In the city Fellowship.

Image: MARK ANTHONY BROWN JR.WHO CAN SEE FOREVER ON A CLEAR DAY?, 2023

PhD Candidate Emily DuVall presented at the Middle Atlantic Symposium

March 5, 2024

Congratulations to Emily DuVall, who represented the department at the Middle Atlantic Symposium (co-sponsored by CASVA, the National Gallery of Art, and the University of Maryland) this past weekend of March 1-2, 2024. Emily’s talk, “Visualizing Power: François Ier’s Royal Entries,” presented new research that resulted from travel to France in the Fall of 2023, funded by a Stephens Family Award. Her advisor Tania String was also in attendance to introduce her talk and photographed Emily in action at the Symposium.

Emily DuVall presenting at the Middle Atlantic Symposium in 2024

Art History Graduate Students Rachel Ciampoli and Sydney Herrick presenting at FSU Graduate Symposium

February 29, 2024

The Florida State University Art History faculty and graduate students will host the 40th Annual Art History Graduate Student Symposium on March 1–2, 2024, on their main campus in Tallahassee, FL.

Rachel Ciampoli will be presenting on “‘The Indigenous Posey of the Soil:’ Eastman Johnson’s Maple Sugar Paintings and the Aesthetics of Erasure.”

Between 1861 and 1865, American genre painter Eastman Johnson produced roughly twenty-five oil sketches in preparation for an ultimately unfinished master work depicting New Englanders engaged in the harvest and production of maple sugar. Although hailed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a potential domestic cash crop and a wholesome foil to the unsavory politics of cane sugar production, northeastern maple sugar was entangled in contentious Indigenous-settler relationships. Using Sara Ahmed’s theory of “stickiness” as a framework, I argue that Johnson’s sentimental and homogenously White characterization of maple sugaring should be understood in light of the erasure of Native American cultural practices and Johnson’s own relationship to Indigenous communities. Recovering Indigenous associations with the practice of maple sugaring engages in the very process of untangling— perhaps unsticking—historical assumptions and perpetuated myths and undermines the integrity of a single-origin narrative, thereby complicating typical expectations of place and people.

Sydney Herrick will be presenting on “Breaking Chains, Forging Beauty: Redefining African Jewelry Design Through the Artistry of Emefa Cole.”

Within prevailing art historical discourse, contemporary African jewelry remains overlooked, primarily due to long histories of exoticization and jewelry’s association with craft. This paper focuses on the work of British-Ghanian jewelry designer Emefa Cole, examining how her utilization of sticky materials, referential designs, and diverse display methods disrupts these conventional paradigms and position her work as fertile ground for exploring critical theoretical frameworks like Afrofuturism and Black Futurity. This paper positions contemporary African jewelry as a medium ripe for in-depth art historical and theoretical investigation, highlighting a significant void in the field and advocating for a renewed emphasis on jewelry as an autonomous art form capable of enhancing broader understandings of art, culture, and individual expression

MFA Graduate Student Exhibition upcoming at UNC-Pembroke

December 12, 2023

A.D. Gallery
(Remix): Domestic Materiality
UNC-Chapel Hill MFA Graduate Student Exhibition

January 8 – February 23, 2024

Curated by UNC-CH Faculty Member Martin Wannam and UNC-P Faculty Member, and UNC-CH MFA Alumnus, Jessica Dupuis

Reception with Artist Talks and Q&A: Friday, January 12, 2024, from 12 – 2 p.m.

Exhibiting Artists: John Felix Arnold, Mark Anthony Brown Jr., Molly English, Dominique Muñoz, Rebecca Pempek, Matthew Troyer, Vera Weinfield, and Carson Whitmore

The A.D. Gallery is located on the campus of UNC-Pembroke in Locklear Hall, Pembroke, NC 28372. For more information, visit the A.D. Gallery Website.

MFA Candidate Mark Brown Jr in group exhibition as part of the Click! Photo Festival

October 2, 2023

Come see Mark’s work at It Ain’t All Black and White, at the Block Gallery, Raleigh, from October 4, 2023 to February 23, 2024.

It Ain’t All Black and White is a photography exhibition curated by North Carolina-based photographer Leticia Clementina that encourages viewers to consider emotions such as serenity, apprehension, yearning, and more. Captured by 10 dynamic photographers dedicated to documenting the fullness and complexity of Black life, this exhibition offers each of us an opportunity to see ourselves with renewed attention. 

Gallery Hours & Location

  • Date: October 4, 2023, through February 23, 2024​​​​​​
  • Time: Monday – Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. Closed Saturday and Sunday and for City Holidays.
  • Parking: Visitors can park in the Municipal Complex Parking Deck at 201 W Morgan St. Raleigh, NC 27601
  • Where: Block Gallery, 222 W. Hargett St. (inside Raleigh Municipal Building)
  • Cost: Free and open to the public

Artist Reception | October 25, 5:30-7 p.m.

Join us for an artist reception celebrating the It Ain’t All Black and White exhibition and artists on October 25, 5:30-7 p.m.