NC Arts Council Fellowship Exhibition Features 3 Artists from Guilford County
The NC Artist Fellowship: Escapes and Revelations will be presented at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) from Thursday, Feb. 13 to Sunday, June 7 and features the work of choreographer Duane Cyrus, and visual artists Mariam Azia Stephan and Barbara Campbell Thomas, all from Guilford County.
The exhibition features 60 works of art in a variety of media ranging from video to installation, ceramic, textiles, ironwork, painting, film and dance from the recipients of the North Carolina Arts Council’s 2018–2019 Artist Fellowship.
Duane Cyrus, a choreographer and performer has worked in a range of genres and styles, including concert dance, musical theater, contemporary art, and drama. He creates works that illustrate the interplay between questions and ideas that, in his words, arise from “positioning moving bodies in conceptual environments.” The Director of the Theatre of Movement, he is a 2018 Bessie Award Nominee for Best Performance in Cynthia Oliver’s Virago-Man Dem, which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He is the recipient of the 2017 Provost’s Strategic Seed Grant for Vibrant Communities from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for his choreographic work, Hero Complexities and is the co-author and editor of Vital Grace: The Black Male Dancer. He received his M.F.A. in Choreography from the University of Illinois and is now a Professor of Dance at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Barbara Campbell Thomas combines painting with quilting, overlaying their visual vocabularies to create complex formal dialogues within each piece that resonate with the details of her own life and the history of each media. Thomas’ paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries across the U.S. She received her MFA from the University of California, Berkeley. Barbara Campbell Thomas has been an artist-in-residence at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences in Rabun Gap, Georgia, as well as at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Mariam Aziza Stephan has been an exhibiting artist for thirteen years. She has shown her paintings and drawings in the U.S. and in Egypt. She has worked as an Artist-in-Residence at Ox-Bow, held a residency at the Vermont Studio Center and DRAW international, and received a Fulbright Scholars Award to Egypt in 2010-11 to draw from the collection at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Stephan earned her MFA in Painting from the University of Washington in 2002, and her BFA in Painting from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1995, with a semester abroad at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, Italy. She lives in Greensboro and serves as Associate Professor in Painting and Drawing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Other N.C. artists featured include visual artists Endia Beal, Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy, Andrew Etheridge, Sabine Gruffat, Susan Alta Martin, Mario Marzán, Renzo Ortega, and Montana Torrey, and Christina Weisner; craft artists Seth Gould, Eric Knoche, and Rachel Meginnes; film/video artists Kelly Creedon, Rodrigo Dorfman, and André Silva; and choreographers Anna Barker, and Kate Weare.
An opening reception will be held on Thursday, February 13 from 6 to 8 p.m. Several of the artists featured in the exhibition will be on hand to discuss their work. The exhibition will be displayed in the Main and Potter Galleries at SECCA.
SECCA is located at 750 Marguerite Drive in Winston-Salem and is free and open to the public Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m.
