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Exhibits at Cason McDermott Art Gallery
Art Exhibits at the Cason McDermott Art Gallery feature student’s work as well as that of professional artists from around the world. Exhibits are hosted throughout the academic year and featured in local publications. Ranging from photography to painting and metalwork to sculpture, there is a show for everyone.
Sites for Speculation
Dates of Exhibition: January 1 – February 20, 2025
Artist Talk: Thursday, February 20 at 11:30 A.M. in Taylor Center 221-223 (Free and Open to the Public)
For additional information about Aaron Collier’s Art, please visit: https://www.aaronrcollier.com/
To view work from visiting artists at AUM, visit Cason McDermott Art Gallery today.
Our gallery hours are 8:30 A.M. – 4:30 P.M. Monday-Friday.
Previous Exhibits
Disparities
Artist: Celestia Morgan
Dates of Exhibition: February 1 – March 7, 2024
Artist Talk: Wednesday, February 28 at 11:30 am in Taylor Center 221-223 (Free and Open to the Public)
For additional information about Celestia Morgan’s photography, please visit: https://www.celestiamorgan.com/and here.
This project has been made possible by a grant from the Alabama State Council on the Arts.
Picture to the right: Walmart (Fairfield, AL 1972), Archival Pigment Print, 26 x 36”, 2021
Celestia Morgan is an Assistant Professor of Photography at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, AL. Her work has been exhibited at numerous fine art institutions including the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR, at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minneapolis, MN and at the Birmingham Museum of Art.
Alchemical Imagination
Artist: Lauren Evans
Dates of Exhibition: October 5 – October 26, 2023
Artist Talk: Wednesday, October 25 – 11:30 A.M. – Taylor Center 221-223
For additional information about the sculptural work of Lauren Evans, please visit: https://laurenfrancesevans.com/.
This project has been made possible by a grant from the Alabama State Council on the Arts.
Lauren Frances Evans currently lives and works in Birmingham, AL where she is an Assistant Professor of Art and Gallery Director at Samford University. She completed her undergraduate studies at the College of Charleston and received her MFA from the University of Maryland. Evans has participated in residencies at Franconia Sculpture Park, Elsewhere Living Museum, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Stay Home Gallery. Evans is the founder and facilitator of the Artist/Parent/Academic Network and is mother to Agnes Prairie and Edith Moon. Shaped by her own maternal experience, inherent mysticism, and neurodivergent identity, she probes at the visceral tensions of threshold moments, and scratches at liminal flickerings of the beyond. Evans serves on the boards of East Village Arts, in Birmingham, and the Alabama Visual Arts Network. This year, she was awarded a Visual Arts Fellowship by the Alabama State Council on the Arts.
Artist Statement: What do you call that thing that is you, and yet something else entirely, inside of yourself and outside of yourself at the very same time? Questions of origin and existence are constantly shaping how I think about my creative work, and my belief is that the work of the artist, and perhaps especially the mother artist, is primarily ontological. Just as the human belly button marks both a connection to and a separation from our physical origins, the work that I make points to a similar simultaneity of opposites, referencing the body’s attraction and repulsion but also the immaterial void of human longing in us all.
Reaching for, grasping at, embracing, probing and prodding, these hands (both attached to my body and depicted so often in my work), they hold so much. As an artist, again and again, I find myself scratching at the surface of various possibilities, and the satisfaction of fingernails caught under the edge of things sensed (though rarely clearly seen) keeps me picking at, peeling back, and digging for more.
These hands. They hold, they probe, they feel for and pick at the surface of something far beyond the scope of this game. What is it, then, to begin again?
Black Diamonds
Artist: Rich-Joseph Facun
Dates of Exhibition: August 24 – September 28, 2023
Artist Talk: Wednesday, September 27 – 11:30 A.M. – Taylor Center 221-223
For additional information about Rich-Joseph Facun’s photography, please visit: https://facun.com/.
UNSPOKEN PSALM
Black Diamonds is a personal endeavor, an effort to connect with and understand the region I now call home. As a person of color, I define my community based on personal experience, which diverges from the stereotypes of race, religion, gender, and politics that can be attached to the area by outsiders. When violence across the nation is aimed at specific groups of people, my images ask implicitly: Am I accepted in this community? Am I safe here?
It is also a visual narration hinting at life as it once was, sharing the hyper-realism of what it is today and the uncertainty of what it is to become in a post-coal era.
These communities, pieces of a whole, are the former coal mining boomtowns of bygone days. The era of coal-fired prosperity was short lived, lasting roughly 50 years from 1870‒1920. After draining the mountains of their bounty and the people of their power, the industry moved on—but the heritage remains.
Life in Appalachia is fraught with mystery and mis-characterization; it’s marginalized or otherwise stereotyped as little more than “Trump Country.” Yet, in all my interactions, that name has never once been involved—in this place, the simple needs of day-to-day survival loom larger than the abstract issues of politics.
My work is experiential and a visual exploration of place, community, and cultural identity in a polarized political climate and racially divided era in the United States. The images strive for an understanding of people and place through their daily goings-on.
In the rural isolated foothills, pocked with poverty, these facets of Appalachia coexist with one another. A heritage of hospitality, not hate, is an unspoken psalm.
What Has Been Will Be Again
Artist: Jared Ragland
Dates of Exhibition: October 11 – November 10, 2022
Artist Talk: November 10 at 5:15 PM, Goodwyn Hall 110
Jared Ragland’s work also appears at jaredragland.com. Ragland’s work is on loan from the Do Good Fund, Inc.
From Indigenous genocide to slavery and secession, and from the fight for civil rights to the championing of MAGA ideology, the national history written on, in, and by the people and landscapes of Alabama reveal problematic patterns at the nexus of our larger American identity. Photographed at a critical moment of pandemic and protest, economic uncertainty, and political polarization, What Has Been Will Be Again has led photographer Jared Ragland across more than 25,000 miles and into each of Alabama’s 67 counties to survey his home state’s cultural and physical landscape.
Social isolation is both a phrase and experience that has defined the recent past, and What Has Been Will Be Again expressly evokes the alienation that has characterized the moment. Yet the photographs bear witness to sites for which isolation and violence is nothing new—places where extracted labor and environmental exploitation have exacted heavy tolls over generations. Such isolation is less accidental or temporal, and more a product of decades of willful neglect by a mainstream America only now starting to visualize what—and who—has been pushed out of the collective frame of vision. Read more below.
By tracing the Trail of Tears, Old Federal Road, and Hernando de Soto’s 1540 expedition route, What Has Been Will Be Again contends with Alabama’s centuries-long past and present-day issues and strategically focuses on the importance of place, the passage of time, and the visual-political dimensions of remembrance to confront white supremacist myths of American exceptionalism.
Text by Catherine Wilkins, Ph.D., University of South Florida.
What Has Been Will Be Again was initially commissioned as a 2020-21 Do Good Fund Artist-in-Residence project and made with grants from The Magnum Foundation, The Aftermath Project, and Alabama State Council on the Arts, with additional support by Columbus State University, Wiregrass Museum of Art, Coleman Center for the Arts, Auburn University at Montgomery, and Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.
Special thanks to AUM Professor William Fenn and AUM photography students Akeyah Henderson and Grayson McDaniel.
