Mississippi Arts Commission: News

The rich artistic soil of Mississippi has cultivated some of the most outstanding and beloved artists of all time.  The Mississippi Arts Commission is proud to support the efforts of artists across the state through our Artist Fellowship Grant.  These highly competitive grants are open to artists of many different artistic disciplines to support professional development or the creation of new work. 

 

Rick Anderson

 

 

 

 

Anderson is a nationally acclaimed artist whose career has spanned more than 40 years. A native of the Mississippi Delta, he earned an undergraduate art degree and Master of Fine Arts Education degree at Delta State University. Rick employs a wide range of techniques in his work, from photographic pencil drawings to large contemporary two dimensional mixed media work on both canvas and illustration board. Instilling a love of art in Mississippi’s school children continues to be a tremendous passion for Rick, and he enjoys every opportunity to bring art into the classroom. In recent years, he has found a new artistic outlet in the illustration of children’s books, and he is currently working on his tenth children’s book in which he is both writing and illustrating.

 

Alexander Bostic

 

 

 

 

Bostic attended the high school of Art and Design, received his BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and his Master of Arts Degree from Syracuse University.  He is a practicing artist and has been part owner of an illustration studio in New York called Illumination Studio and, for the last five years, has been part owner of a studio in Glen Allen, VA called Celeste Studio.   Bostic began teaching part time more than 20 years ago and has been at Virginia Commonwealth University as a full time associate professor for 13 years. During his tenure, Bostic taught finish illustration courses that are based in the tradition of the figure. For the past five years he has been a director and instructor of three study abroad programs in Italy and Zimbabwe.  Previous teaching experience includes part- time instructing at the Kansas City Art Institute, Woodbury University and Pratt Institute.  Bostic is a member of The Society of Illustrators of New York and Los Angeles, The Richmond Professional Illustrators Club, The Illustration Club of Washington, DC, Oil painters of America, Portrait Society of America, and The Virginia Museum of Fine Art/ Friends Of African American Art.

 

Krista Bower

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bower, originally from Michigan, is a dance artist, choreographer, director, and teacher.  Bower graduated Summa Cum Laude from Belhaven University in Jackson, MS with a BFA in dance.  As a student, she received the Bezalel Award for outstanding artistic achievement and the Daniel Award for outstanding scholastic achievement.  Bower performed with Living Water Dance Company from 2005‐2006.  She currently serves as Managing Director of Front Porch Dance, a contemporary dance company based in Jackson, MS, which she co‐founded in 2008.  The company, a 501(c)3 non‐profit, has received funding from the Mississippi Arts Commission, the Mississippi Humanities Council, and the Greater Jackson Arts Council.  Bower is the owner and director of the Yazoo City School of Dance, teaching children of all ages.  In addition, Bower serves as an adjunct faculty member at Belhaven University.  She directed the USA International Ballet Competition Dance School and Teachers Workshop in 2010.  The Mississippi Arts Commission granted Bower a Performing Arts Fellowship in 2011, a merit‐based award given to "professionals producing works of high artistic quality.”  Bower is currently pursuing an MFA in Choreography at Jacksonville University/White Oak, and she is a recipient of the Dean’s Award for excellence in dance.

Critz Campbell

 

 

 

 

Campbell earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), in 1990. The SAIC then designated him a post-graduate exchange student at the Arco Centro de Communicao Visual in Lisbon. That assignment was followed by two years at Penland School of Crafts in Penland, North Carolina as a CORE student, and another two years studying furniture design at Parnham College in the UK.  Campbell has served on the faculty of the SAIC and is currently assistant professor of sculpture at Mississippi State University. He has shown in Inside Design Now at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York; Furniture Future Tense at the De Cordoba Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts; International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) in New York; and Seven Days—Seven Nights in the LIMN Gallery of San Francisco.

 

Sarah C. Campbell

 

 

 

 

 

 

Campbell is an award-winning author and photo-illustrator whose specialty is nonfiction for children.  Her latest book, Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature, was named a 2011 Outstanding Science Trade Book for students K-12 by the National Science Teachers Association and the Children's Book Council.  Campbell has served as artist in residence at Davis Magnet School and McLeod Elementary School in Jackson, leading book publishing and photography projects with first, second, and third graders.  Campbell's writing and photographs have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Highlights for Children, and Highlights' High Five.  She is currently an instructor of journalism at Millsaps College.

 

Julie Cantrell

 

 

 

 

 

Cantrell is a speech-language pathologist and literacy advocate.  She was the editor-in-chief of the Southern Literary Review and currently teaches English as a second language to elementary students.  She has been a freelance writer for ten years and has published two children’s books.  Cantrell and her family live in Oxford, Mississippi where they operate Valley House Farm.  She has contributed to more than a dozen books, and her first novel, Into the Free, hits shelves 02.01.2012.  Cantrell was honored to receive the 2011 MAC Literary Artist Fellowship and is working on a creative nonfiction book about her family’s adventures as first-generation farmers.

 

Claudia Cartee

 

 

 

 

 

Cartee is a clay artist who was greatly influenced by her father, a master mold and ceramic slip producer, and mother, a sculptor and surface decorator.  Her parents owned a a slip cast ceramic studio in South Mississippi, near Seminary.  She knew that she was destined to create wheel thrown pottery during her first experience on the potter’s wheel at the age of 15.  Cartee earned her BFA degree with emphasis in clay sculpture at California State University at Fullerton and did graduate work in art education at the University of Southern Mississippi.   Over the years as a professional potter she has supplemented her education with private studies and workshops, including a scholarship award to attend the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina.   She has recently completed a hands-on workshop in clay at the Anderson Ranch in Colorado and has worked with the Craftmen's Guild of Mississippi as Vice President, President, and member of the Standards Committee.

 

Robert Cooper

 

 

 

 

Cooper's Art career took root when he spent an internship at Pearl River Glass Studio learning the craft of stained glass while closing out his last year of high school in 1994. Before dedicating himself to glasswork, Rob studied at MICA in Baltimore, MD in fine arts with a deep interest in painting, sculpture, and printmaking. The impression glass made on him could not be left in the past as Rob brought glass more and more into his painting and sculptural work before graduating. To this day Rob continues to work at Pearl River Glass with the responsibility of bringing scenes of the Bible to life in church windows. This influence and experience carries over into his own work as he stretches further back in time to imagery of mythology and on forward to the depression era circus days. Rob is also not afraid of experimentation with glass and brings many of these narrative images to fused glass that reads more like a painting than traditional stained glass.

 

Lisa Eveleigh

 

 

 

 

 

Eveleigh is a photographer and writer living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.  She has exhibited her work in "Creative Edge" (2010), a group exhibition sponsored by the Mississippi Arts Commission in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, and in Currents 2010, the New Orleans Photo Alliance Photonola juried members showcase.  Her photographs have been published by McClatchy, Beach Blvd, Southern Cultures and Swampland.com and purchased by the Hancock County Tourism and Visitors Bureau and private collectors.  For over a decade, she was the managing editor of Southern Cultures, published by the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  She is currently a partner/owner of Ad Lib Comminications in Bay St. Louis as well as a freelance writer.

 

Erin Hayne

 

 

 

 

 

NunoErin is a collaborative art and design studio led by Erin Hayne, a textile artist from Jackson, Mississippi, and Nuno Gonçalves Ferreira, a sculptor from Lisbon, Portugal. The studio believes in making work that resonates with both the mind and body and is passionate about creating objects and experiences that captivate the imagination and connect people with themselves and each other. NunoErin also creates public art installations and design enhancements that build on the local culture and environment, while fostering a high tech sense of place.

 

Brent Hearn

 

Ian Hominick

 

 

 

 

 

 

A native of Nova Scotia, Hominick studied piano in the United States under the tutelage if the renowned virtuosi Jerome Rose and Earl Wild.  He received a DMA in Piano Performance from Ohio State University where he served as assistant to both the lengendary Earl Wild and Tchaikovsky Competition silver-medalist André Laplante.  An active soloist, adjudicator and teacher, he maintains a busy schedule of concerts and master classes across the United States and Canada.  His latest CD, Off the Beaten Path, was released in 2010 and has received high praise from the critics.  Hominick is President of the Mississippi Music Teachers Association, Director of the Piano Discoveries Summer Camp and teaches on the piano faculty at the University of Mississippi. 

 

Hsiaopei Lee

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lee, renowned violist, has appeared as a recitalist, chamber musician and orchestra player spanning three continents.  She has presented solo recitals throughout the United States and Asia and collaborated in chamber music in such cities as New York, Paris, and Taipei.  As a member of the Dayton Philharmonic, Taipei Philharmonic, and Aspen Chamber Orchestras, Lee has performed under David Zinman, James Conlon, Robert Spano, David Robertson, Michael Stern, and Neal Gittleman, to name a few.  Her successful teaching experience in Taiwan inspired her to continue her education at Columbia University Teachers College in New York, where she received a master's degree.  She earned her Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, where she studied with Masao Kawasaki and Catharine Carroll.  Dr. Lee was a member of the viola faculty of the Starling String Project, and additionally she coached many talented musicians as the long-time teaching assistant to the viola studio at the University of Cincinnati.  Affirming her pedagogical and performing expertise, the Aspen Music Festival awarded Lee a three-year fellowship to mentor the viola sections of the Aspen Sinfonia and Aspen Concert Orchestras.  Dr. Lee joined the string faculty at The University of Southern Mississippi in 2005, where she plays with the Mississippi Chamber Circle and Impromptu Piano Quartet.  She serves as principle violist of the Meridan Symphony Orchestra.  Her first CD, Viola Music Written by American Female Composers, is scheduled to release in 2012. 

 

Ruth Miller

 

 

 

 

 

 

Miller is an embroidery fiber artist who was taught the art of embroidery and other needle arts at a young age by her mother and aunt, both Meridian, MS natives.  At age 16, Miller was inspired to use embroidery as an art form after seeing the abstracted figurative woven tapestries of Papa Ibra Tall (Senegal).  Through his work, Miller said she "recognized an opportunity to bypass the mess and fumes of paint while still 'painting'".  She received her formal training at The Cooper Union School of Fine Art in New York City.  There, she encountered Stefano Cusumano who rigorously erased and corrected her errors in drawing the figure and Bauhaus-trained Hannes Beckman who enforced rules of color and other components in the “Psychology of Perception.”  Miller decided to make a career in art after working as a postal letter carrier and having little time for creation after a long workday.  While she spent most of her life in New York City, Miller finds the the Mississippi Gulf Coast to be an ideal place to create art and is currently where she resides. 

 

Jerrod Partridge

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Partridge is an artist living and working in the Fondren neighborhood of Jackson, MS. He earned his Master's of Fine Art degree from the New York Academy of Art in 2004 with an emphasis in painting. Partridge is the author of the Jackson Art Seen which features art shows around the Jackson, Mississippi area, and is co-creator of the Sketchbook Conversation blog which records visual conversations between artists by way of physical sketchbooks.  He exhibits his work at Nunnery's Gallery 119 in downtown Jackson where he also teaches figure drawing and portrait drawing classes.  

 

James Patterson

 

 

 

 

Patterson has worked as a photographer in central Mississippi for over 20 years.

 

Durant Thompson

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thompson is an Assistant Professor of sculpture in the Department of Art at the University of Mississippi. In 1997, he received a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and in 2001 he earned an MFA in Sculpture from Louisiana State University. After graduate school and a year as the LSU sculpture technician, Durant moved to New Jersey to work at The Johnson Atelier School of Technical Sculpture. He spent most of his days there building monumental bronze statues as well as modern sculptural designs in various media for prominent artists including Beverly Pepper, Mathew Ritchie, the George Segal Foundation, Kiki Smith, and a number of others. He then returned to the South and worked at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Art Department for two years as their technician and instructor before accepting a faculty position at the University of Mississippi.  Durant has been actively showing at exhibitions across the region over the past decade.

 

J. Marcus Weekley

 

Copyright 2006–2011 Mississippi Arts Commission