At last! After weeks of preparation artCentral’s Annual Membership Exhibition (AME) opens at noon on Friday, June 4, 2021, and will continue through July 17. The Annual Picnic and Awards Presentation will be 6:00-8:00 p.m. on the lush Hyde House campus at 1110 East Thirteenth Street in Carthage. Weekend Gallery Hours during the Membership Exhibition are Saturdays and Sundays, 12:00-5:00 p.m. and other times by appointments made at (417) 358-4404.
The McCune-Brooks Healthcare Foundation is the gracious underwriter for artCentral’s Annual Membership Exhibition. Believing art is an essential and vital dimension of any healthy and vital community, we are thankful that McCune-Brooks supports artCentral as one of the programs, organizations and initiatives that directly contributes to better health and healthy lifestyles for the citizens of Carthage.
Beth Simmons, Director of McCune-Brooks Healthcare Foundation, and Nancy Dunaway, art educator and practicing professional artist, two highly qualified women, have enthusiastically served as jurors for this outstanding collection of multi-media works by forty-two artCentral artists.
Recently Beth has very deservedly been named the Chamber of Commerce 2020 Carthage Citizen of the Year. Her years of experience, joie de vivre and dedicated leadership in our community set the bar high for all of us hoping to make a meaningful contribution to this hometown we love. Beth, an avid collector of art, is a longtime patron of artCentral and artCentral artists.
Artist Nancy Dunaway, of North Little Rock, Arkansas, has pulled off an amazing feat—many years working and mentoring young artists-in-the making while developing her own impressive body of work. We knew each other first as students in the art labs at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, where we both majored in studio art. I love the Oliver Wendell Holmes quote and favorite duck adorned childhood photo Nancy offers as the introduction to her website: “A mind that is stretched by new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” This is certainly the creed that has guided Nancy’s creative life. Following the trajectory of her artistic career, I am wowed by her accomplishments!
Be sure to check out Nancy’s well-organized website representing the diversity of her portfolio at http://www.nancydunaway.org. There you will learn her art “is a reflection of her own life, very eclectic—a curious combination often inspired by a glimpse of something natural and taking a leap somewhere else. It tells stories of her journey, that, while specific to her in the making, hopefully connects somewhere with each viewer and touches their own story, too. She works in a variety of media including painting, mixed media, printmaking, assemblage and book art.
For fifteen years, Nancy served as Chair of the Art Department at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, where she taught classes in Drawing, Illustration, Book Arts, Experimental and Contemporary Media and Art Education. She has exhibited her work regionally and nationally in many venues including the Delta Exhibition and Toys Designed by Artists, both at the Arkansas Arts Center, the American Drawing Biennial in Williamsburg, Virginia, the Peninsula Fine Arts Center in Newport News, Virginia, the Schneider Museum in Ashland, Oregon, St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Nabisco World Headquarters in East Hanover, New Jersey, and the Albuquerque Museum, to name a few. Her work, ‘Drifting toward Dawn’, was exhibited in the American Embassy in Brassaville, the Congo, as part of the US State Department’s ‘Art in Embassies Program’.
In 2001, Nancy received an Individual Artist Fellowship Award in Book Arts from the Arkansas Arts Council. She received her MFA, Summa Cum Laude, from Savannah College of Art & Design in Illustration, and has illustrated two children’s books, ‘The Old Lady Who Lived in a Vinegar Bottle’, authored by Margery MacDonald, and ‘I Scream, You Scream’, authored by Lillian Morrison. Nancy’s work is in many private and corporate collections. One of her artist’s books, ‘Hildegarde of Bingen’, is a part of the permanent collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. Another of her artist’s books, “Feathers & Findings”, can be found in Lark’s ‘500 Handmade Books’.”
Beth Simmons and Nancy Dunaway, the outstanding jurors for artCentral’s Annual Membership Exhibition have made fine choices of those artists and their works selected to receive 2021 awards. Do come see these award recipients and all the diverse talents that now fill the galleries of Hyde House!
