CREATIVE ROOTS: QATANUM EXPRESSIONS (BTS Presentation)
Xe’il ech Txumu’n: Xhk’a’tnaquil Qatanum
SUNDAY, APRIL 28, 6 – 7PM
ROOM 3408 – Frank Porter Graham Student Union (UNC-Chapel Hill)

Join Brenda Palacios Rodriguez (BFA Honors 2024), the director and producer of the documentary film CREATIVE ROOTS: QATANUM EXPRESSIONS, for an open discussion about her film in-production and her Awakatek (Qatanum) Mayan community roots. Learn about her documentation process, behind-the-scenes work, and lessons learned in production.

“This project shares the story of my Awakatek community as storytellers of time, where you will learn about the Awakatek Mayan cosmovision, stories of five Awakatek changemakers, and indigenous knowledge that must be preserved. Learn about what being Qatantum means today, and how the lessons learned through these relational realities help us create a more loving, understanding, and respectful world made of advocacy work for BIPOC communities across the world” – Brenda (Docu-film Director & Producer)

Many of you have probably seen a mural of a North Carolina musician in their hometowns across the state. Learn more about them, and their creator, BFA alumnus Scott Nurkin, in the current issue of Carolina Arts & Sciences: If these walls could sing.

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.

Congratulations to the following Department of Art and Art History students who were inducted into Phi Beta Kappa this spring:

Isabelle Lilly Anderson, art history minor
Louise Celeste Covington, art history minor
Lauren Ashley Flach, art history minor
Lauren Sage Guillemette, studio art major
Andrew Robert Knotts, studio art major
Sydney Kates Martin, studio art major
Toni-Ann Ocloo, studio art minor
Glorianna R Tarlton, studio art minor

I’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE…CURATED BY SHABEZ JAMAL

29 MARCH – 5 MAY 2024

• WORKS
• EXHIBITION TEXT

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 Alleyne, Justin Carney, Mark Anthony Brown Jr., Sean G. Clark, Jen Everett, Felicita “Felli” Maynard, Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, Lola Ayisha Ogbara, Kristina 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

Alumnus Michael Bramwell, who is MFA Boston’s Joyce Linde Curator of Folk and Self-taught Art, is moderating a symposium on “New Discourses on Folk and Self-Taught Art.” See below for more details:

Join us for a symposium bringing together leading art experts to explore new definitions for folk and self-taught art in the 21st century. Explore how the equitable integration of art into museums promotes cultural competency by deepening appreciation for art and people from diverse backgrounds.

Speakers

Dr. Gabrielle H. Berlinger, folklorist and associate professor of American Studies and Folklore, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Kinshasha H. Conwill, deputy director emerita, Smithsonian National Museum of American History and Culture
Jori Finkel, New York Times writer and American art critic
Lonnie B. Holley, American artist

Moderated by Michael J. Bramwell, Joyce Linde Curator of Folk and Self-taught Art

Assistive listening system

Wheelchair accessible

Sponsors

Lunder Institute @ the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, was made possible through the support and partnership of the Lunder Institute for American Art, the Colby College Museum of Art.

Generously supported by the Joyce Linde Endowment for Folk Art.

Congratulations to Dominique Munoz and Matthew Troyer, who were both given Student Awards for Innovative Imaging to travel to the Society for Photographic Education‘s annual conference!

Congratulations to Our Scholarship Recipients!

The winners of the Studio Art Undergraduate Scholarships have been chosen.

Congratulations to the following scholarship recipients:

The Alexander Julian Prize
Qiaoan Gu

The Anderson Undergraduate Studio Award
Marin Carr-Quimet

The George and Joyce Kachergis Memorial Undergraduate Scholarship
Isabella Gamez
Isabel Schomburger
Charlotte Allsbrook
Cora Mcanulty
Grace Fei
Hope Mutter

The Johnathan E. Sharpe Scholarship
Timothy Anderson
Lashayla Stephens
Briar Rose
Naari Short

Award Letters will be Forthcoming

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.