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Paul Jeanes
Paintings and Drawings
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Jeanes, a native of Mount Olive and graduate of the University of North Carolina at Asheville, is currently pursuing a graduate degree in painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Jeanes’ work has been seen at the Black Mountain Center for the Arts and the Sawtooth Center for Visual Art. His exhibit featured a selection of his Night Paintings, in which he examines the “residual landscapes” of various construction and building sites at night, as well as his newer works.
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Gina Fuentes Walker
Abstract Architecture
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Gina Fuentes Walker has had a camera in hand for as long as she can remember. After early work with documentary photography and film, she gradually turned to urban architecture, which caused her to shift to more abstract interpretations of the landscapes around her.
Fuentes Walker’s examination of urban architecture grew out of her graduate studies in anthropology and ethnographic film at New York University. Her initial work was culturally based, focusing on creating a narrative of different geographic regions through exploration of architecture, landscape and portraiture. She then began to look at the urban architecture
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surrounding her in New York City, noticing that people often make compromises in living conditions in exchange for the cultural and social benefits of urban centers such as New York.
Fuentes Walker currently works as a freelance photographer in New York City. Her work has been exhibited in Washington, DC, North Carolina, New York and Massachusetts. Fuentes Walker is also involved in the locally based Art*O*Mat/Artists-in-Cellophane collective, with work featured in machines located at The Whitney Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art/Los Angeles, and The Cleveland Museum of Art. She received Smithsonian fellowships in 1991 and 1993 to develop documentary media projects.
Digital photographs by Fuentes Walker are currently available at the gallery.
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Natalie George
Vignettes: Still Life Paintings on Paper
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Natalie George was born in Scotland Neck, NC, and currently resides in Greensboro, NC. She is a graduate from Guilford College, where she studied visual art with a concentration in painting. George has exhibited in various museums, galleries, institutions and arts festivals across North and South Carolina, including the Fayetteville Museum of Art’s Annual
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Competition for North Carolina Artists, the Atalaya Arts and Crafts Festival and the Moore County Arts Festival. Her work has most recently been seen at Two Art Chicks Gallery in Greensboro.
Prints and note cards of George’s work are currently available at the gallery.
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Nicole Arnold
Landscapes and Florals
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A native of Charlotte, Nicole Arnold currently resides in High Point, NC, where she is active in organizations such as the Women’s Artist League of High Point and the Theatre Art Galleries. Arnold is a graduate of Duke University, where she studied extensively with Ginna Davidson. Her work has been featured in various North Carolina galleries, institutions and alternative spaces. In addition, Arnold illustrated the children’s picture book The Reel Thing, published in 2002. This beautiful book is currently available at the gallery. Arnold is also available for portraits by commission. For more information, contact the gallery.
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Weston Hammond
Lost and Found
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Hammond is a familiar presence in Winston-Salem. He received the Emerging Artist Grant from the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County in 1993, and has exhibited his work at such places as SECCA, the Sawtooth Center, the Vintage Theatre, Art Gallery Originals, the John Snow Gallery, the Rainbow Café, and the Chamber of Commerce. However, several years ago, Hammond began to feel both spiritually and emotionally lost in his life and art. This prompted him to journey to Spain to launch a form of journey of self-discovery.
“When I left for Spain, I had every intention of continuing with impressionistic landscapes. When I arrived, I was so taken by the juxtaposition of the old and the new,
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and of man and nature, that my work truly took on a new form. I was especially fascinated by man and nature and the influences that each has on the other. Before I knew it, my work had become more abstract,” says Hammond.
A selection of Hammond’s work is available at the gallery.
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Regarding his work, Scott says, “In my work, I search for a visual poetry influenced by nature and how we interact with nature; I see my art as a natural process of time and matter.”
A selection of Scott’s work is available at the gallery.
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“My creations seem to fall into two general categories. Much of my art glass and metalwork is quirky, attempting to amuse. Other pieces have their roots in anthropology, depicting ancient decorative motifs. I try to create each work with a personality that its owner or collector will enjoy living with and using every day,” says Brooks of her work.
Visit www.sleepindog.com to for more of Brooks’ work.
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Carrie Dickey
Pages
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Dickey’s new works are inspired by her experiences with teaching art to children of all ages. For more than a year she introduced her students to different styles and techniques of art. The children were then given opportunities to experiment on their own. Dickey challenged the children to be thoughtful in their marks and to observe how the different media interacted; the results, she says, were “bold and fresh.”
Dickey graduated from Salem College in 2000 with a degree in Studio Art, with a concentration in Oil Painting. While at Salem, Dickey took additional courses in Printmaking and Book Arts. The exhibit will also feature several of her hand-crafted books. Dickey’s smaller versions of these books are featured in Art-o-Mat machines located in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, along with additional locations. Dickey’s work has most recently been seen at SECCA’s 2001 exhibit, Tongs on Fire: Visions and Ecstasy: an artist and the community project with Leslie Dill.
A selection of Dickey’s work is available at the gallery.
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Faces: A Celebration of Black History Month
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Faces: A Celebration of Black History Month, the gallery’s first juried show, featured artists from across the country. Selected artists came from as far away as California and as close as Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem. A unique theme emerged in most of the submissions. Almost all focused on the faces, and thereby the stories, of African Americans past, present and future. The idea of the face of the African American family was also explored, and several works will be featured that highlight this exploration. A third theme, the face of the African American artist today, is also captured and will be examined not only through the exhibit, but with further discussions throughout the month.
Artists and works include: Tom Block (Silver Spring, MD), Shaka Sankofa; Jessica Burke (Greensboro, NC), New American Family; Douglas Butler (Crumpler, NC), Songhai Villager and Mosque Attendant; Keina Davis Elswick (San Francisco, CA), Sarah’s Family; Tosh Fomby (Atlanta, GA), A Family; Lorrie Guess (Durham, NC), Roscoe Holcomb; Jonathan Mason (Atlanta, GA), Our Future and Singing Her Song; Michael Pendergrass (High Point, NC), Gelee; Gailene McGhee St. Amand (Hoboken, NJ), Memorial Altar for my Elders; Danae Tilghman (Winston-Salem, NC), Untitled.
Artist Tom Block’s work Shaka Sankofa is part of a larger collection called the Human Rights Painting Project, organized in support of Amnesty International. The project highlights the struggle for human rights across the world and the important work of Amnesty International. The work was inaugurated at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, DC in April 2002. Since then the works have been exhibited across the country and highlighted in national media and publications. Block will bring the entire exhibit to Tessera Gallery in late summer for a solo exhibit.
The exhibit includes Atlanta-based artists Tosh Fomby and Jonathan Mason. Fomby began her art career as a portrait artist, and today the self-taught painter’s subjects are reflective of her southern roots, yet reminisce cross-cultural themes with colorful figuratives, landscapes and abstracts. Mason, who lived in Winston-Salem for a brief time, practiced law until early 2004. He began his love of photography while taking pictures of sunsets from his office building in Atlanta. It was through this relatively simple pleasure that he realized his true passion.
Keina Davis Elswick, a San Francisco-based artist, describes her work as “Urban Folklore” and creates artwork centered around an individual’s journey to Sivad. Elswick explains, “In my work, Sivad represents not only a fictitious urban village where all the people portrayed are traveling to physically, but an internal, spiritual journey. Each painting reflects a pivotal moment in an individual’s journey.”
Gailene McGhee St. Amand divides her time between New Orleans, LA and Hoboken, NJ, and has exhibited everywhere in between. Her work was created as “Sacred Space,” with the box holding two images representative of two worlds, the Physical and the Spiritual.
The exhibit also features works by local artists, including two Triad college students. Jessica Burke, of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and Danae Tilghman, of Wake Forest University, both submitted works addressing issues facing African Americans in the 21st century. Burke, in her work New American Family, expresses her “reaction to issues about gender and sexuality, specifically on the idea of femininity within the context of lesbian stereotypes.” Tilghman, meanwhile, focuses on the struggles that African Americans continue to face in the professional arena with her work, which is painted on a crisp, white lab coat.
Additional North Carolina-based artists featured include Michael Pendergrass, a largely self-taught artist who began his interest in art as a young child growing up in the South. He was discouraged from pursuing his passions, saying “When I told my friends and family of my plans, all I heard was that there weren’t any "colored" artists and I might as well forget it. After all this was the old South of the early 60's. Quite frankly I hadn't heard of any artist of color either.” Pendergrass was determined to succeed as an artist and has exhibited around the country.
Artists Douglas Butler and Lorrie Guess complete the North Carolina artists. Crumpler-based Butler is an accomplished mountain climber who has been traveling the world for more than 20 years. He has visited five continents, exploring areas of the Amazon and Arctic, Africa and Asia, taking his camera on each trip. Butler says, “I wish to photograph native cultures, wildlife and landscapes in a sensitive, realistic style, trying to show the beauty, wonder and essence of the scene.” His articles and photographs appear in numerous regional and national publications, and he has also published Ashe County: Discovering the Lost Province, a guidebook about his home county in North Carolina.
Guess, based in Durham, graduated from the University of Chapel Hill with a degree in Visual Communication. Her work is heavily influenced by her graphic design training and emphasizes the “luminosity (brightness) of colors, rather than hue.” Guess says that she uses her work to explore her notions of vision and ways of seeing, “not unlike how Impressionist artists strove to redefine visual perception.”
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Charles Walker
The Washington Park Paintings
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Walker graduated from Wake Forest University in 1993 with a degree in studio art, and then completed a Master of Fine Arts in studio arts at the University of Georgia. He has exhibited in Winston-Salem and additional cities in North Carolina, as well as in Georgia and California. Walker has worked in various art-oriented capacities with numerous institutions in Winston-Salem, including the Enrichment Center, Sawtooth Center for Visual Art, SECCA and Wake Forest University. He has also served as an assistant to Winston-Salem based artists Donald Lipski and Karen Kunc, and New York based artists Andrea Callard and Ron Gorchov.
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Andy Jay
New Works
Jay entered the Graphic Arts field in its infancy and was, as a result, able to acquire a vast knowledge of the merging of traditional photography and Digital Arts. This leading edge knowledge on Digital Image printing won him a spot on Adobe’s web site as a “success story.”
In addition to his passion for photography, Jay is an avid biker and event photographer, published in several magazines nationwide. His experience and notoriety as “photodude” allows him access to events and aspects of the biker community that most people will never see.
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Tessera Gallery welcomed artist Tom Block and his Human Rights Painting Project, which benefits and celebrates the work of Amnesty International, from July 8-August 27.
Regarding the project, Block states, “The Human Rights Painting Project highlights the struggle for human rights the world over – and the important work that Amnesty International does. Using a personal artistic voice, I interpret different aspects of the struggle for human rights… The paintings themselves capture the range of emotions exhibited in this battle. Fear, destitution, pain, hope, joy and even sanguinity form themselves in these faces. Ultimately, the paintings bring together man’s best and worst impulses – the heroes of the images are a counterpoint to the authorities that forced them into that role. We are left with the uncomfortable question of which group is more typical of our human race and which the exception.”
The project has been exhibited at the AFL-CIO (Washington D.C.), A.R.C. Gallery (Chicago, IL), Ratner Museum (Bethesda, MD), the Pearl Conard Gallery of Ohio State University (Ohio), the Eckles Gallery of George Washington University (Washington D.C.), the Olin Fine Arts Center of Washington and Jefferson College (Washington, PA), the Phillips Museum of Franklin & Marshall College (Lancaster, PA), the Puffin Room (New York, NY), ArtSpace (Richmond, VA), and Saville Gallery (Cumberland, MD).
The project has been highlighted by National Public Radio, as well as the Copley News Service, Gazette Newspaper (MD), Washington Times, Chicago Reader, WMFD TV (Mansfield, OH), Maryland Living, Cumberland Times-Union and Sojourners Magazine. The Human Rights Painting Project received a Puffin Foundation grant and a proclamation of support from the Tacoma Park City Council (MD).
Block has shown his art in museums and galleries in New York City, Chicago, Washington, and Detroit. Internationally, Block has shown in Madrid, Spain; Lisbon and Port, Portugal; and Venice and Florence, Italy. In addition to appearing on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation, he has conducted symposiums on his art and thought at the University of Maryland, Michigan State University, American University, Vassar College and the Jewish Study Center. Mr. Block has taught art at the Longview School for the Handicapped, Dwelling Place Homeless Program, Montgomery County Alternative Program for at-risk adolescents, National Children's Center for physically and emotionally disturbed children and the Summit Art School.
His writing, general features, art reviews and historical work have appeared in such publications as the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Boston Herald, San Diego Union, Dallas Morning News, Washington Review, Sufi Magazine, Detroit Jewish News, L.A. Jewish Times and the Denver Post. He is currently writing a book entitled Shalom/Salaam: The Untold Story of a Mystical Entanglement, detailing the little-known influence of Sufism (Islamic mysticism) on the development of Jewish spirituality.
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