Cole Grant Exhibition 2020-21

 

 

 

 

This exhibition featured recent and new work from three artists-- N.E. Brown, Megan Hinton, and Brooke Henderson Stewart-- who were awarded Alice C. Cole '42 Grants in the 2020-21 academic year. The Alice C. Cole '42 Grant provides support to artists for the development, production, and exhibition of new work in painting and sculpture, whatever those disciplines may mean to the artist. The fund enables artists to set aside time for artistic development as well as to purchase materials, rent studio space, or access facilities for the creation of new projects.

 

The Alice C. Cole '42 Fellowship and the Alice C. Cole '42 Studio Project Grant are awarded semi-bi-annually. 2020-21 was the first year when Wellesley has awarded the Alice C. Cole '42 Grant.

 

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N.E. Brown strives to create work that narrates multiple stories, emotions, and periods of time through woodburning, woodworking, painting, and drawing. She is interested in conveying personal experiences that are microcosms within larger narratives. Often she chooses portraiture in oil on panel, or pyrography (burning on wood) to express those stories; she also creates wood sculptures that contain multiple symbols of race, history, and personal memories. Through making, she interrogates and expresses the questions she has for herself and others regarding identity: social, cultural, and personal. In this current body of work, she seeks to create a sanctuary-- a place of respite during these very difficult times. It is through these objects and images that she asks her ancestors for their strength, endurance, and love.

 

 

Brown was born in Pittsburgh, PA and grew up in the greater Pittsburgh area. Brown pursued a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and drawing at Tyler School of Art: Temple University, then later pursued a Master of Fine Arts in painting and drawing at the University of Iowa. Currently, her work uses a variety of media to map the intersections between personal memory, family dynamics, national history, and racial identity. Brown's work has been shown nationally, including at the Portland Art Museum, the African American Museum of Philadelphia, and the Art Gallery of Widener University.

 

 

 

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Megan Hinton improvises with the materials of the painter, found or from her own making. Through them, a story is revealed and dismantled. Studio clothes, used lumber, photographs of paintings, castaway drawings, printmaking proofs, picture frames, apparel, and sporting goods are joined in assemblage. Ready-mades and ready-marks allude to the everyday world of materials while simultaneously gesturing towards the painterly process. Discarded painting material like easels and trashed paintings are reassembled to show a history of mark-making and the collective engagement of other hands in the work. This cobbling together of material creates a disembodiment of the figure and its environment, resulting in an overhauled approach to figurative painting and sculpture, and a different type of physical presence left over from material expenditure.

 

 

Hinton received her MFA from Mills College in Interdisciplinary Studio Art, where she was nominated by the faculty for The Dedalus Foundation Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture, and won the Hung Liu MFA Prize. Her work has been shown at Farm Project Space in Wellfleet, MA; SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco, CA; and The State University of New York Adirondack Visual Art Gallery. Hinton has received residency fellowships from Twenty Summers in Provincetown, MA; the Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY; Les Amis De La Grande Vigne in France; and Frans Masereel Centrum, an International Printing Center in Belgium. She is also an art writer, curator, educator, and lecturer.

 

 

 

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Brooke Henderson Stewart's recent work reflects on the effects of relationships. Her woodcut prints are autobiographical in nature, speaking to her direct relationships with others. While she sifts through internalizations of formative life experiences, her work is drive by feelings of loneliness. She began to think about her relationships with others and the one-on-one visits that became forcibly normalized during the pandemic. She enjoys sitting with people in this setting, and wanted to push portraiture past mere visual likeness of a person into a cinematic, sensory experience. The work grapples with the resulting effects of these interactions and relationships on her navigation of the present.

 

 

Stewart holds an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, and an undergraduate degree in Art and Art History from the College of William and Mary. Stewart's first solo show, No Potatoes, was mounted at the Distillery Gallery in South Boston, MA in 2020. She has exhibited at venues including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Contemporary Print, Austin, TX; the St. Louis Artist's Guild, St. Louis, MO; and the Jewett Arts Center at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA. She is a member of the travelling collective Picture Stories III, shown at the Edinburgh College of Art, U.K.; the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Boston, MA; the University of Johannesburg/Artists Proof Press, South Africa; and the Tokyo University of Arts (Geidai) in Japan. Her work is featured in editions #41 and #42 of New American Paintings. She has been awarded the Walter Feldman Fellowship for Emerging Artists. Stewart was the Painting and Drawing Teaching Fellow at the SMFA Boston and a Lecturer at Brandeis University's Department of Fine Arts prior to her current position as the post-graduate teaching fellow at Northeastern University's College of Arts, Media and Design.

 

 

 

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The Alice C. Cole '42 2020-21 Grant Exhibition was on display in the Jewett Art Gallery from January 24 - March 11, 2022.

 

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