The SECAC Juried Members’ Exhibition is an annual celebration of the creativity, innovation, and talent of our members. Always an exciting element of the conference, the Members’ Exhibition is open to the public during the day with an evening reception for all conference attendees. The juror for the 2024 SECAC juried Exhibition is Alice Stone-Collins, an Atlanta-based artist and curator, and a faculty member at Georgia Gwinnett College. Her intricate hand-painted collages highlight the tensions between the mundane, the everyday, and the apparent dead. Alice earned her MFA in studio art from the University of Tennessee and has exhibited her work regionally and nationally. She has been a resident artist at Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft and the David and Julia White Artist Colony in Ciudad Colon, Costa Rica. Alice has been featured on Studio Break and The Artists Mother Podcast and her work published as the cover art for Aurora, The Allegory Ridge Poetry Anthology.
With over 300 submissions from many different mediums, Alice selected fifty works to represent this year's exhibition.
Juror Statement:
Run? Hide? Seek? Work. To make work is to expose a side of yourself that otherwise would remain hidden. To make work is to reveal. To make work is to communicate a part of you that is impossible to express any other way. I admire all the artists who submitted to the 2024 SECAC Juried Members Exhibition for allowing me to take in these works. To admire the technical skill, thoughtful compositions, and overall quality and care that went into each of these works.
The jurying process is both exciting and complicated. When looking through the works, almost all context Is removed. Because of this I make decisions based on what I can gather or understand visually or conceptually. Many of the pieces are visually remarkable, instilling a sense of wonder. Others are compelling due to their reflective conceptual depth. It was wonderful to learn about the perspectives of each fellow artist through this process.
It is not easy to make work in any circumstance. But in the current age of academia where to make work we must work more and more at teaching, in committees, navigating the nuance of student mental health concerns and our own, reacting to changing academic structures, to make work requires soul force and a true dedication to your craft. These pieces will fill the gallery with a great energy that reflects the beauty and ugliness of the world we inhabit and work in today.
It has been an honor to be here with these pieces. To really sit and see how they could speak to a viewer based on what the artist might have intended and my own viewpoint. To sit on the opposite side of the artwork is such a poignant and sharp pleasure that inspires ideas for my own work.
Thank you to Dr. Tracy Stonestreet, Rebecca Parker and SECAC organization for the opportunity to be a part of this process and to have my own horizon on what work can be opened again.
Participating Artists:
Adewale Adenle
Amirmasoud Agharebparast
Damon Arhos
Nina Bellisio
Alexia Benavent-Rivera
Katina Bitsicas
Harry Boone
Crystal Brown
Jessica Burke
Chung-Fan Chang
Kat Chudy
Heather Coker Hawkins
Kevin Curry
Tessa Dallarosa
Meaghan Dee
Erin Dixon
Cynthia Farnell
Houston Fryer
Sara Gevurtz
Lindsay Godin
Daniel Hale
Travis Head
Raluca Iancu
Mary Johnson
Joseph Kameen
Meredith Knight
Stephanie Kolpy
Kimberly Lyle
Beauvais Lyons
Natalija Mijatovic
Ann Moody
Luiza Nascimento Barbosa
Neill Prewitt
Max Puchalsky
Sandra Reed
Christopher Reno
Herb Rieth
Mark Russo
Thomas Schram
Jennifer Seo
Kat Spears
Bethany Springer
Anne Stagg
Jayne Struble
Julia Townsend
Clifford Tresner
Jessie Van der Laan
Ting Wang-Hedges
Shane Ward
Lauren Woods
About SECAC and the 2024 Conference:
SECAC (formerly the Southeastern College Art Conference) is a non-profit organization that promotes the study and practice of the visual arts in higher education on a national basis. SECAC facilitates cooperation and fosters on-going dialog about pertinent creative, scholarly and educational issues among teachers and administrators in universities, colleges, community colleges, professional art schools, and museums, and among independent artists and scholars. Membership includes individuals and institutions from the original group of southeastern states that founded the conference: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. Over the decades, however, SECAC has grown to include individual and institutional members from across the United States, becoming the second largest national organization of its kind. SECAC is an affiliated organization of the national College Art Association and participates in its annual conferences.
Under the guiding theme of "Wayfinding," SECAC 2024 will be designed by artists, designers, scholars, and educators from across the Atlanta region. Wayfinding, a term originally coined in the realms of environmental design and navigation, has evolved into a generative concept that extends far beyond physical spaces. Our conference seeks to unravel the intricacies of wayfinding across intersections of technology, cognition, culture, and design. Through presentations, discussions, exhibitions, and more, we will consider the nuanced ways in which we navigate intellectual and creative landscapes.