Events from the year 1997 in art.
Alma Woodsey Thomas was an African-American artist and teacher who lived and worked in Washington, D.C., and is now recognized as a major American painter of the 20th century. Thomas is best known for the "exuberant", colorful, abstract paintings that she created after her retirement from a 35-year career teaching art at Washington's Shaw Junior High School.
Deanna Sirlin is an American contemporary artist best known for her large-scale installations and paintings. Sirlin's art has been shown all over the world and includes massive installations that dominate entire buildings in Venice, Italy, Atlanta, Georgia, London, England, Antalya, Turkey, New Orleans, Louisiana and Evora,Portugal.
Sergei Isupov is a ceramic artist born in Stavropol, Russia now living in Cummington, Massachusetts, United States and Tallinn, Estonia. He was educated at the Ukrainian State Art School in Kiev and went on to graduate in 1990 from the Art Institute of Tallinn in Estonia with Bachelor of Arts and Master of Fine Arts degrees in ceramic art. He has since exhibited widely in both solo and group exhibitions, received numerous awards and widely collected by museums and private collectors.
Corrina Sephora Mensoff is a visual artist who specializes in metal work, sculpture, painting, installation, and mixed media in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States. Corrina works with universal and personal themes of loss and transformation, within the context of contemporary society. In Corrina’s most recent bodies of work she is exploring lunar images, cells, and the universe as “a meditation in the making.” In a concurrent body of work she has delved into the physical transformation of guns, altering their molecular structure into flowers and garden tools through hot forging the materials. Her work has led her to community involvement with the conversation of guns in our society.
Cornelia H. "Connie" Butler is an American museum curator, author, and art historian. Since 2013, Butler is the Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
Jody Zellen is an American artist and educator. Her practice, consisting of digital art, painting, video art, and drawing, has been showcased by way of interactive installations, public art, and curated exhibitions. She is also known for her art criticism.
Annette Cone-Skelton is a Georgia-based American artist, teacher, gallerist and art consultant. Currently, she is director and president of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. She studied at the Atlanta School of Art, now known as the Atlanta College of Art. Cone-Skelton's work is represented in the collections of various regional museums and galleries, public and private collections. The High Museum, the museums of Louis, Charlotte, Chattanooga, Birmingham and Montgomery and several academic institutions including Cornell University hold her work. She has been included in exhibitions at Le Grand Prix de Peinture and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Andrea Chung is an American artist born in Newark, NJ and currently works in San Diego, CA. Her work focuses primarily on island nations in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean sea; specifically on how outsiders perceive a fantastic reality in spaces deemed as “paradise”. In conjunction, she explores relationships between these cultures, migration, and labor - all within the context of colonial and postcolonial regimes. Her projects bring in conscientious elements of her own labor and incorporate materials significant to the cultures she studies. This can be seen in works such as, “Bato Disik”, displayed in 2013 at the Helmuth Projects, where the medium of sugar represents the legacy of sugar plantations and colonial regime.
Carl Joe Williams is an American visual artist based in New Orleans.
Linda Armstrong is an American artist.
Sheila Pree Bright is an Atlanta-based, award-winning American photographer best known for her works Plastic Bodies, Suburbia, Young Americans and her most recent series #1960Now. Sheila is the author of #1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activist and Black Lives Matter Protest published by Chronicle Books.
Katrina Andry is an American visual artist and printmaker. She is based in New Orleans, Louisiana.
John Isiah Walton was born in 1985 in New Orleans, where he currently lives and works as a fine artist. Walton was the first African American member of the artist collective The Front, and is also a founding member of Level Artist Collective, which includes artists Ana Hernandez, Horton Humble, Rontherin Ratliff, and Carl Joe Williams.
Avantika Bawa is an Indian American artist, curator, and professor of art. Bawa is a multidisciplinary artist who works primarily in site-specific installation, video, printmaking, and drawing. She is the recipient of the 2018 Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts Golden Spot Residency Award, the Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts, and the Oregon Arts Commission Joan Shipley Award.
Sally Heller is an American artist. She uses everyday materials to make large installations that are often site-specific.
Craig Drennen is an American artist based in Atlanta, Georgia. He is best known for his ongoing long-term Timon of Athens project, for which he has produced paintings, drawings, prints, videos, performances, sculptures. His work shows technical agility across a wide range of influences that spans abstraction, representation, and conceptual practices. In a catalog essay, the curator Diana Nawi writes that Drennen's "…multifaceted, dense, and ambitious practice suggests a world of meaning defined by symbols that emerge in different media and coalesce across projects."
Pam Longobardi is an American contemporary artist and ecofeminist, currently living and working in Atlanta, Georgia. She is known internationally for sculptural works and installations created from plastic debris, primarily from marine and coastal environments, as a primary material. Much of her work includes community-based research, such as carbon or plastic audits, as well as collaborative art creation.
Michi Meko is an American multidisciplinary artist based in Atlanta, Georgia. He is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and the Atlanta Artadia Award as well as a finalist for the 2019 Hudgens Prize. His work incorporates the visual language of naval flags and nautical wayfinding, combined with romanticized objects of the American South. Throughout his various platforms, his work engages contradictions and paradoxes that he uncovers through examining his personal history, African American folk traditions, and narratives that confront or circumvent established narratives.
Nancy Floyd, born in Monticello, Minnesota in 1956, is an American photographer. Her photographic subjects mainly concern women and the female body during youth, pregnancy, and while aging. Her project She's Got a Gun comprises portraits of women and their firearms, which is linked to her Texas childhood. Floyd's work has been shown in 18 solo exhibitions and is held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the High Museum of Art. Floyd is a professor emeritus of photography at the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design at Georgia State University.
