Sustenance

A Socially Distanced International Exhibition

March 9, 2021 - April 9, 2021

Sustenance Exhibition Discussion

Sustenance has taken on deeper meaning after 2020. Our communities and social structures changed while the minutiae of daily life became a battle with monotony and chaos. Through the many forces that have been at work during this global pandemic, we’ve found a small group of women that may not have met otherwise. In this group, sustenance is the life-giving force created in human encounters, the strength that we generate when we share our stories and initiate a new path together.

Through the Artist/Mother Critique Group, we six artist mothers came together and discussed art, life, and the extensions of each. Through this exchange and within each other’s work, we found freedom, levity, connection, and support. As a group, we have asked how one sustains themselves beyond the basics of food, shelter, and sleep. We found the answer is within ourselves. We found one another and rediscovered our own work. We found our bodies, our emotions, and our ideas.

Featuring

Barbara Campbell Thomas

Barbara Campbell Thomas lives and works in Climax, North Carolina. Her work combines painting with quilting, overlaying their material vocabularies to create complex formal dialogues within each painting that resonate with the details of her own life and the history of each medium. She came relatively late to quilting, which she learned from her mother, but quickly realized its power as an art form traditionally practiced by women to inform and expand the range of painting.

Barbara Campbell Thomas’s paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries across the United States, at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, The Painting Center, the Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art, The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art and the North Carolina Museum of Art. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture and, in 2021, she will attend the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency. She is a recent recipient of a North Carolina Artists Fellowship.

Barbara Campbell Thomas is an Associate Professor of Art at UNC Greensboro.

Debora Faccion Grodzki

I’m interested in the activities we do in our daily lives that determine how we see and relate with each other and with nature. My artwork transposes the understanding of the constant organizing of reality through the meanings we create. I want to help others live their full creative potentials, and I work to create objects that will help us along this journey.

I’m a woman from Latin America, art historian, mother, and educator working with critical pedagogies.

Jean Gray Mohs

Jean Gray Mohs is a contemporary, abstract artist from North Carolina. She has been drawn to art her entire life. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from Georgia Southern University in December of 2002. Upon earning her Master of Arts in teaching in 2008 she settled back into North Carolina where she is an active artist. Her work has been seen in Southern Living, Walter Magazine, Traditional Home, and featured on Georgia Public Radio.

Kristen Martincic

Kristen Martincic uses swimming pools and objects associated with water to meditate on water's translucency and the act of swimming. She works with traditional print media as well as a hybrid of printmaking, drawing, painting and sculpture. Her artwork has been widely shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout the US as well as in Canada, France and Egypt.

Michele Landel

Michele Landel creates intensely textured and airy collages using burned, quilted, and embroidered photographs and paper to explore the themes of exposure, absence, and memory.
Michele is an American artist. She lives and works in Sèvres, France and out of her art studio in the Paris 9th arrondissement. She is currently represented by the Jen Tough Gallery in Santa Fe, NM, the Muriel Guepin Gallery in NYC, NY, and the Ségolène Brossette Galerie in Paris, France.

Victoria Clarke

Victoria Clarke is an entirely self-taught English artist drawn to themes of being consumed by peace and nature, and the puzzling phenomenon of being a human in the world.