Stone, Mesh and Metal: Prints by Beauvais Lyons, Althea Murphy-Price and Koichi Yamamoto is the featured exhibition in the Clayton Center for the Arts’ Blackberry Farm Gallery at Maryville College through September 1.
A reception will be held in the gallery from 6 to 8 p.m. Friday, September 1, as part of downtown Maryville’s Friday Night Lights event. Both the exhibit and reception are free and open to the public. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.
Stone, Mesh and Metal features prints by faculty from UT’s School of Art in the school’s nationally ranked printmaking program. Beauvais Lyons, Althea Murphy-Price, and Koichi Yamamoto are pursuing their art using a variety of printmaking methods including lithography, screenprint and intaglio, reflecting the materials and processes of their chosen media. This exhibition offers a sampling of some of their recent investigations.
Read more about exhibits at Maryville College’s galleries.
For more than three decades, Lyons has been making various forms of academic parody. For this exhibition, he is presenting a suite of color lithographs titled Ornithological Quadrupeds, which depict imaginary four-legged birds rendered in the style of the British naturalist John Gould. The prints are part of his larger Association for Creative Zoology project, which is a commentary on the evolution vs. creationism debate. Lyons, who is a graduate of Arizona State University (MFA 1980), has taught printmaking at UT since 1985. He has presented over 80 one-person exhibitions in the United States and abroad, and he is a 2014 recipient of the Santo Artist Award.
Murphy-Price’s prints explore the aesthetic, cultural, and social aspects of hair, particularly the importance of forming and styling hair for African-Americans. Her prints, which employ both lithography and screen print, investigate hair and its various accoutrements to comment on our conceptions of beauty and identity. Murphy-Price is a graduate of Temple University (MFA 2005) and has taught at UT since 2010. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. Since 2016, her exhibits have included a solo exhibit in Newburg, Oregon, and group exhibitions in Tidaholm, Sweden; Louisville, Kentucky; Raleigh, North Carolina; Houston, Texas; Tucson, Arizona; and Atlanta, Georgia.
Yamamoto’s recent prints reflect the process of printmaking itself, exploring the potential to use printing to create new and variable forms. Using intaglio methods, including etching and engraving, Yamamoto prints on thin sheets of folded gampi paper, which are refolded and re-printed to create elaborate and often evocative symmetrical designs. These prints are often used in a variety of contexts, including making kites. Yamamoto, who is a native of Osaka, Japan, is a graduate of the University of Alberta (MFA 1999) and has taught at UT since 2007. In 2016, his work was selected in national and international exhibitions, including the Pacific States Biennial North American Print Exhibition, University of Hawaii, Hilo; the International Biennial Print Exhibition 2016 ROC, Taichung, Taiwan; and ŁODŻ PRINTS International Print Biennale, Łodż, Poland.