Events

Emily Caldwell is a pillar of the arts community in Monroe, Louisiana. Her service to Monroe’s Downtown Arts Alliance has contributed to providing area artists with a launching pad for careers in the arts. Caldwell’s artistic practice is as exemplary as her service to the Monroe arts community. She is a skilled draftswoman and a patient assembler of collages. Positing humans as unseen observers and stewards, her drawings and collages speak to the interconnectedness of various species and the roles they play in the delicate balancing act required to have a healthy ecosystem. Taking this into account, Caldwell focuses on the habitats within Northeast Louisiana, using them as specific examples to discuss broader conservation issues throughout the world. Caldwell’s finished works of art vacillate between stripped down drawings that feel slightly somber and scientific to lyrical pattern-driven collages full of contrasting, sometimes otherworldly colors. All told, her work is like the artist herself: an improbable mixture of joie de vivre and seriousness that coalesces into beautiful, thought provoking activism.

The Masur Museum of Art and CenturyLink Security Systems Proudly Present:

The 52nd Annual Juried Competition
About the Competition
The Masur Museum of Art’s Annual Juried Competition showcases contemporary artists throughout the United States of America working in any medium. This long running juried competition also showcases some of America’s best curatorial talent. Recent jurors include: Kelly Shindler, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; George Shackelford, Kimbell Art Museum; Liza Simone, Phantom Galleries, Los Angeles; Alison Greene, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; David Houston, currently Bo Bartlett Center; and Miranda Lash, currently Speed Art Museum. Enter to get your work seen! Go to masurjuried.org to enter!

Sandra Firmin, Juror
Director and Chief Curator, Colorado University Art Museum Sandra Q. Firmin was Curator of the UB Art Galleries, gallery of the University of Buffalo SUNY, a position she held from 2003 to 2014. She holds an M.A. from Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies (2002), and was awarded a Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative Fellowship at Arcadia University Art Gallery (2003). Firmin co-curated the traveling exhibition Kim Jones: A Retrospective (with Julie Joyce). The exhibition was accompanied by the catalogue “Mudman: The Odyssey of Kim Jones” (MIT Press, 2006), co-edited with Joyce. In 2010, Firmin organized Artpark: 1974–1984, an exhibition and publication (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010) chronicling the seminal years of an innovative residency program located in Lewiston, New York, just north of Niagara Falls. At the UB Art Galleries, Firmin established an annual residency program in which artists are presented with an empty gallery to transform over time while open to the public. These commissioned projects aim to forge meaningful interactions between artists and diverse groups of people while acknowledging a turn toward research-based and ephemeral site-specific approaches in contemporary art. In 2014 Firmin co-chaired (with Julian Cox) the Association of Art Museum Curators’ annual conference in Detroit, and moderated the panel Urban Ecologies and Cultural Exchange.

The Masur Museum of Art is proud to exhibit renowned photographer Birney Imes’ series Whispering Pines. The series documents the life and times of Blume Triplett, the late proprietor of Whispering Pines, a roadside bar and restaurant in Crawford, Mississippi. Two women played integral roles in his life: his wife Eppie and Rosie Stevenson, his cook and business manager. Eppie was the love of Blume’s life and when she died in 1973 Whispering Pines became a shrine to her. The restaurant was slowly overrun with ephemera that documented the trajectory of the Triplett’s lives and the American South. While the newspaper clippings and knick-knacks scattered throughout the restaurant provide the chronological and geographical context for audiences of Imes’ photographs, it is the comings and goings of the Pines’ regulars that are most important when thinking about the South in the twentieth century.

By the time Imes began photographing Blume Triplett, the abovementioned ephemera became such a presence in Whispering Pines it overwhelmed the whites only side of the restaurant. Even though integration was the law of the land well before Eppie’s death, segregation was still informally enforced in many places like the Pines. It was out of necessity that integration became a part of Blume’s life. When he began having health problems Rosie Stevenson, his African American cook, became his caretaker and took on expanded duties at the Pines. She became like family to him. This coming of age story of integration took a natural, glacial course. Rosie eventually inherited the Pines when Blume died in 1991. Imes’ images of this story possess genuine warmth and a hardscrabble honesty that parallels the South’s political, cultural, and business ascendancy in the twentieth century. For better or worse, it also illustrates how many Americans continue to deal with issues of race by slowly building relationships that change the nature of our society.

Imes has exhibited his work at The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona; the Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, Louisiana; the Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, Florida; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York. His work has also been collected by several of these venues including The Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art as well as many others too numerous to list. Imes is also broadly known for his three books of photography Juke Joint (Jackson, Mississippi, University Press of Mississippi, 1990); Whispering Pines (Jackson, Mississippi, University Press of Mississippi, 1994); and Partial to Home (Smithsonian Press, 1994). Whispering Pines will include audio recordings of Blume Triplett and other Pines regulars. There will also be a project gallery featuring mixed media art by Elayne Goodman created using Imes’ prints and objects from Whispering Pines itself.