GROWING TOGETHER: The Lyndon House Arts Center has a total of seven recently unveiled exhibitions to carry art enthusiasts into the new year. Ato Ribeiro’s solo show, “Growing Together,” consists of mesmerizing wall-mounted wooden assemblages with dizzying interlocking patterns. Additional three-dimensional sculptures reveal the complex process behind building these beautiful geometric patterns from small pieces of repurposed wood.
Born in Philadelphia, Ribeiro spent his childhood and adolescence in Accra, Ghana, and much of his work centers near the intersection of his West African heritage and African American identity. His intricate wooden assemblages reference both Ghanaian kente cloth and Black quilting traditions of the American South, further exploring how symbolism can be communicated through textiles.
THE IMAGE MOVES: Spotlighting artists who incorporate time-based media into their creative practice, “The Image Moves: New Film and Video Work by Athens Artists” is an unusual exhibition that illuminates the gallery space with nine works playing simultaneously on loop. Artists include AJ Aremu, Jamie Bull, CC Calloway, Shawn Campbell, Drew Gebhardt, Selia Hooten, Vivian Liddell and Katz Tepper. The exhibit was guest-curated by Keith Wilson, an Athens-based artist and filmmaker who works as an assistant professor in the Entertainment & Media Studies Department at UGA.
Though ranging in subject matter and style, the films share a non-narrative and experimental approach. Liddell’s stop-motion animation, “Panty Raid,” is about “two figures [who] steal lingerie and make a flagpole of their treasure for all to see,” while Bull’s digital video, “Stump Hole,” is described as “interspecies collaborations between the artist and a family of eroded tree stumps on the Florida Panhandle.”
PAPER ART TRIENNIAL: Organized by the North American Handpaper Makers, the “8th Collegiate Paper Art Triennial” celebrates the creativity of early career undergraduate and graduate students in academic paper making programs across the U.S. After a year of traveling to galleries in Pennsylvania, Illinois and Ohio, the exhibition has reached its final stop at the LHAC.
Jurors Mina Takahashi, Karen Kunc and Erin Zona selected 40 artworks by 36 student artists representing 11 different educational institutions from a pool of submissions that totaled 138 works by 83 students from 17 schools. Altogether, the exhibition demonstrates how artists push the medium’s boundaries into innovative new forms.
COLLECTIONS FROM OUR COMMUNITY: Presenting everything from ballet shoes and typewriters to miniature dioramas and tarot cards, Collections From Our Community is an ongoing series that shares the surprising things people collect. The newest display, collected by Peggy Curran, features dozens of 8-inch tall Madame Alexander dolls with an international theme.
MAQUETTES: Following a full career as a research psychologist at UGA, Abraham Tesser turned to woodworking and building furniture in his home studio. Before beginning each new piece, Tesser’s design process includes a two-dimensional sketching followed by a three-dimensional sketching, or a maquette. His exhibition, “Maquettes,” is a collection of these miniature scale models in wood used as preliminary drafts for his larger pieces. Often incorporating unusual veneers and intricate details, Tessler balances functionality with exquisite design to create pieces that feel like distinct works of art.
“At the workbench, I find it hard to beat the feeling produced by guiding the transformation of a piece of rough lumber into an elegant, smooth part,” says Tesser in his exhibition statement. “When things go well, when a hand plane produces the perfect shaving, when a beautiful shape emerges on the lathe, when a piece of wood that has just been surfaced shows a figure or character that is better than expected, it is indeed thrilling.”
TELL ME A STORY: Last March, Flagpole selected “Woman is Smarter than the Devil Himself,” an eye-catching narrative textile work by Jasmine Best, from over 150 works to represent the Lyndon House Arts Center’s 48th annual Juried Exhibition on its cover. Best was also recognized by the center itself with a Choice Award that offers the opportunity to return and present a solo show.
That exhibition, “Tell Me A Story,” includes new wall-bound figurative works that combine traditional mediums like fabric and yarn with digital painting and sewing techniques that add a contemporary charm. Best, a current MFA candidate at UGA’s Lamar Dodd School of Art, is a Southern artist who investigates folk story traditions of the Black South, narratives passed down by her Carolinian family and her own personal childhood memories to find artistic inspiration. Her work reexamines what constitutes Southern art and contemplates Black femme identity.
MEMORY WORKER: Shifting between printmaking, paper making, performance, book arts and textiles, Kelly Taylor Mitchell’s multidisciplinary practice centers oral history and ancestral memory—both real and imagined—as it relates to the African Diaspora. Her exhibition, “Memory Worker,” bridges the past and present through labor-intensive, handmade processes and thoughtful symbolism.
Mitchell is an assistant professor of art and visual culture at Spelman College in Atlanta, where she is also currently a Midtown Alliance Artist-in-Residence and a 2024 Arts & Social Justice Fellow at Emory University. She is the recipient of the Lyndon House Arts Foundation’s BIPOC Fellowship, a program committed to increasing the visibility and contribution of BIPOC artists.
“Growing Together,” “The Image Moves,” “8th Collegiate Paper Art Triennial” and “Collections from Our Community” will remain on view through Jan. 13, while “Maquettes” will remain until Feb. 8. “Tell Me A Story” and “Memory Worker,” which both opened this past weekend, will be displayed until Mar. 12. Artist talks will be held with Ribeiro on Dec. 14, Wilson and the artists of “The Image Moves” on Jan. 11, and Tesser on Feb. 8, all at 6 p.m.
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