English born artist Adam Fuss has been one of the leading experimental practitioners of early photographic techniques in contemporary art since the 1980's. Abandoning the camera altogether, he has expanded upon the foundations of the medium with inventive photograms and daguerreotypes that explore the mystery, complexity and transience of life. Originally trained as an advertising photographer, Fuss’ decision to eradicate modern technology from the photographic process was a reaction to the mass-production of generic images.

collection type = AsArtist01

Alec Soth's series Niagara is a sobering examination of one of America and Canada's most mythologized tourist landmarks. Photographing on both sides of the falls, Soth employs romantic and nostalgic motifs that juxtapose with a bleaker and more alienating reality that exists there. This tension, magnified by the restrained formality of a large format camera, casts Niagara Falls in a distinct light. The result is a shift away from stereotypical romanticization and toward a darker and more complex portrait of a place that is often only seen through an iconic lens.

collection type = AsArtist01

Anoka Faruqee's virtuosic Op Art paintings exist in the lineages of Bridget Riley and Josef Albers. Her visually stunning and destabilizing works, painted in abstract circular waves, achieve a spectral and photographic quality, while remaining firmly anchored to the medium of painting. Faruqee's meticulous works induce a distinct and bodily experience, foregrounding the perceptual operations of the brain and forcing us to contemplate how we perceive and process visual information. 

collection type = AsArtist01

New York, NY

Anthony Goicolea is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist whose work ranges from photography, sculpture and video to multi-layered drawings on Mylar and large-scale installations. He holds an MFA in sculpture and photography from Pratt Institute of Art. Goicolea’s art is held in many public collections, including those of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, as well as the Hirshhorn Museum in D.C., the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; 21C Museum in Louisville KY, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in NY. He was selected to create the first LGBT Memorial in the United States unveiled in NYC’s Hudson River Park in 2018.

collection type = AsArtist01

Greensboro, NC

Barbara Campbell Thomas's work combines painting with quilting, overlaying their material vocabularies to create complex formal dialogues within each painting that resonate with the details of her own life and the history of each medium. She came relatively late to quilting, which she learned from her mother, but quickly realized its power as an art form traditionally practiced by women to inform and expand the range of painting.

collection type = AsArtist01

Carrboro, NC

Ben Alper is an artist based in Carrboro, NC. He received a BFA in photography from Mass Art in Boston and an MFA in Studio Art from UNC - Chapel Hill.  Alper’s work has been shown widely, including in exhibitions at the Nasher Museum in Durham, NC, at Glass Box in Seattle, Transmitter Gallery in Brooklyn, S1 Gallery in Portland, OR, Higher Pictures in New York, Schneider Gallery in Chicago, the Luminary Center for the Arts in St. Louis, Osnova Gallery in Moscow and Camera in Cluj, Romania. Additionally, his work has been published in Time Magazine, The British Journal of Photography, California Sunday Magazine, The Wire, Conveyor Magazine and Dear, Dave.  Alper has also published six books in the past six years and is the co-founder of A New Nothing, an online project dedicated to hosting visual conversations between artists. He is also ⅓ of Sleeper Studio, a publishing project working with photography, design and text.

collection type = AsArtist01

Durham, NC

Currently the Professor of the Practice of Art at Duke University, Beverly McIver is widely acknowledged as a significant presence in contemporary American art.  Charting a new direction as an African American woman artist, she is committed to producing art that consistently examines racial, gender, social and occupational identity. McIver’s autobiographical paintings are richly colorful and chronicle her life struggle with her African-American identity. Her 2020 self-portraits and paintings of family and friends confront her feelings and fears of the chaos and isolation brought on by a pandemic while battling racial injustice.  Her voice in these works is loud, unapologetic, brave and bold and the different interpretations by white and black viewers highlights the collision of the worlds that she straddles daily.

collection type = AsArtist01

Kinston, NC

Brandon Dudley grew up and currently works in Kinston, NC where he specializes in portraiture. Inspired by Hip Hop, Urban Fashion, and Art History, Dudley's work explores the issues of race, gender, and equality.  Through his portraits, Brandon strives to construct empowering representations of black culture and black history educating people by showing an appreciation for a culture that is negatively perceived.  Dudley attended Miami International University of Art & Design and Pitt-Community College and his work has been in North Carolina group exhibitions in Charlotte, Raleigh, Kinston, Greenville and Winterville.

collection type = AsArtist01

In 2003, artist Chris McCaw began photographing the sun with hand made cameras and paper negatives. The resulting body of work, Sunburn, tracks the sun's movement across the sky, often rendering elegant arcs and shapes depending on the camera's location on the planet, and the time of year the photograph was taken. The "sunburned" (or solarized) negatives are the result of the intensity of the sun's light and the magnification of the camera's lens. They speak elementally about time, light and our reliance on the sun, but also speak more metaphorically about photography itself. Taking from the etymology of the word "photography", Chris McCaw has created a series of "light writings" that are as beautiful as they are awe-inspiring. 

collection type = AsArtist01

Pittsburgh, PA

Dean Allison is a former resident at the Penland School of Craft and currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA. He received his Master of Art, Visual Arts in glass from The Australian National University in Canberra in 2010 and a B.S. in Studio Arts from Illinois State University in 2001. Allison loves details and realism and his Lunch Bag series was designed to be something that was unique but still consistent with his line, each one becoming a little different from the previous. A complement to his practice, these sculptures are meant to be something mundane that could be found around the house and even considered in still life or used as a vase.

collection type = AsArtist01

Chapel Hill, NC

Martiny works with paint, color, and form; elements from the history of painting often referring to color or manner of paint application from diverse areas on the art-historical timeline. His current exploration is in the presence and power of gesture made to exist forever in the present. These massive brushstrokes offer a potent exchange inviting the viewer closer, even inside the work. The intimacy is instantaneous and intensely visceral. His paintings are not depictions of an experience. Rather they are the experience.

collection type = AsArtist01

New York, NY | Edenton, NC

Contemporary artist Jack Early was born in Raleigh, North Carolina and graduated from North Carolina School of the Arts. His ascent to fame began in the late 1980s as one-half of the duo Pruitt-Early with artist Rob Pruitt.  Early seems never to have left his childhood; his playful wit and openness are the foundation for his work.  Early’s lexicon is drawn from wondrous childhood memories, where ordinary things and events can leave long-lasting impressions.   Aware of how visual and auditory phenomena can trigger us, he composes experiences to communicate sweet remembrances of simpler times.

collection type = AsArtist01

Brooklyn, NY

Jason Stopa received his BFA from Indiana University and his MFA from the Pratt Institute. He is a curator and a frequent contributing writer for Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and Whitewall Magazine. He teaches at Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts.  Stopa's works on paper deconstruct the signified object into the painterly, the felt, the tasted. His marks run the gamut from loopy, gestural strokes, to wiry ropes of paint tracing geometric forms, to small illusionistic details. They reference ubiquitous brands as well as private narratives.

collection type = AsArtist01

Wilson, NC

With Bachelor degrees in Art History and Studio Art from UNC Wilmington and an MFA from UNC Greensboro, Jeff Bell serves as the Arts Innovation Coordinator for the city of Wilson, NC where he currently resides. Bell’s work evolves by gathering everyday objects, deconstructing them, and creating sculptures from those elements. He ultimately aims to discover something new, but also something that reflects its previous language: a sculpture that at first glance reaffirms assumptions of commonplace objects but at further examination resists those notions and lives outside of his understanding.

collection type = AsArtist01

Durham, NC

Jim Lee is a multi-dimensional, self-taught artist whose work is heavily influenced by his love of nature, science, psychology, and technology. Working with cameras, scanners, lighting and collections of found and fabricated objects, Lee creates photographic images that range from the darkly mysterious and figurative to the elegantly simple and abstract. One rarely leaves one of Lee’s pieces without some question and that is exactly what he wants. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions and can be found in collections at American Tobacco Campus, Andrew Young Enterprises, Cassilhaus, and Duke University Medical Center.

collection type = AsArtist01

Joy Drury Cox is an artist and educator living in Carrboro, North Carolina. She has exhibited nationally and internationally since 2003 and is the author of three artist books: Stranger, Old Man and Sea, and Or, Some of the Whale. In 2019, her work was included in the Atlanta Biennial, and her most recent solo exhibition, Prone and Plumb, opened in March of 2020 at Asphodel Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Her works are included in various private and public collections, including the New York Public Library and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

collection type = AsArtist01

Kimberly English is a fibers artist and educator living and working in Asheville, North Carolina. She earned her BFA in Fibers as a Distinguished Scholar from Savannah College of Art and Design, and subsequently earned her MFA from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kimberly's textile-based practice is informed by traditional craft processes as they intersect with contemporary garment production. Her making process utilizes both body and machine, emphasizing textiles as a microcosm of manufacturing. The role of myth and the power of progress are intrinsically intertwined in her weavings, sculptures, and textile collages, antagonizing the parallel of cloth to the human experience. Kimberly’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at CICA, Museum of Craft and Design, and Vox Populi.

collection type = AsArtist01

Raleigh, NC

King was Born 1991 in Raleigh NC and diagnosed with autism when he was two and a half years old. He attended the Special Education program of Wake County School Systems and received a certificate from Leesville High School in Raleigh NC in 2012. King attended UNC at Greensboro for one year, living away from home in the college dorm for the Beyond Academics Program in 2013. King became a painter in 2013. In addition to his parents, Thomas & Yuko Taylor and a brother Malik Nobumasa Godwin, he has many other supporters of his painting career. King currently lives in an apartment attached to parents home independently. He is a proud team member of the Special Olympic Raleigh Racer Swimmers and a performing member of Special Japanese Taiko-Drum ensemble.

collection type = AsArtist01

Renowned Southern Folk Artist and Author Kyle "BlackCatTips" Brooks wants to paint the world happy. Originally from just outside of Atlanta, Georgia, these North Carolina themed works were inspired by his travels through the state, the people he has met and most recently by a visit to the Vollis Simpson Whirligig park in downtown Wilson, NC. Kyle's work is collected across the southeast and he has been commissioned by some of the most recognizable brands including Coca-Cola, Delta, Google, Accenture, Netflix, NCR and many others. In 2019, Kyle published his first children's book, "Smile A While" which blends his unique artwork and poetry to remind people of all ages to smile.

collection type = AsArtist01

Chapel Hill, NC

Leah Sobsey is an artist and educator. She received her M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2001 and completed the Resident Certificate Program at the Maine Photographic Workshops in 1997. Her work has been exhibited widely and is in private collections across the country. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants. She has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, Duke University, The Maine Photographic Workshops and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. She utilizes photography as a preservation tool, a way to understand, interpret and create memory.

Her series Lumen Love, made during the pandemic on daily walks in Duke Forest, is a poetic examination of light and the natural world. These Antholumen photograms were created with expired silver gelatin paper, exposed to the sun, and coated with a mix of natural plant materials as a way to alter the color and explore alchemy. Utilizing historical, scientific and artistic lenses, Sobsey aims to understand the connection to plant and animal loss as one indication of the larger climatological perils we face as a species. 

collection type = AsArtist01

Richmond, VA

Artist Leigh Suggs was born in Boone, North Carolina and currently resides in Richmond, VA. She received her BFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2003 and her MFA from the Virginia Commonwealth University in Craft and Material Studies in 2015. Suggs channels her fascination with the mystery and psychology of sight through cut paper works and large-scale installations. She obscures normal perception, manipulating her materials as if optical illusions luring in the viewer, pulling them into an experience of seeing that is at once immediate and elusive.

collection type = AsArtist01

Liz Nielsen is an experimental photographer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her photographs are most often made without a camera and can also be described as light paintings. She works in the analog color darkroom exposing light sensitive paper and processing it through traditional photographic chemicals. Each image is unique and ranges in size from 100" x 100" to 4" x 5". Nielsen received an MFA from the University of Illinois, Chicago in 2004, her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002, and her BA in Philosophy and Spanish from Seattle University in 1997. Liz has exhibited her work extensively including recent solo exhibitions in New York, London, and Paris. Her photograms have been featured at international art fairs such as Paris Photo, Photo London, and Unseen Amsterdam. Nielsen has been reviewed in the New Yorker, the Guardian, the London Financial Times, LensCulture, Vogue UK, and FOAM magazine among others. Nielsen is currently an artist-in-resident at the McColl Center for Art in Charlotte, North Carolina.

collection type = AsArtist01

Durham, NC

Martha Clippinger is an artist based in Durham, NC. She received her BA from Fordham University and her MFA from Mason Gross School of Art, Rutgers University. Clippinger has had recent solo exhibitions at Elizabeth Harris Gallery in NYC, at Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, at Institute 193 in Lexington, KY, at Hodges Taylor in Charlotte, at SECCA in Winston-Salem, and at The Columbus Museum in her hometown of Columbus, Georgia. She has also been a resident artist at the MacDowell Colony, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation and has taught workshops at Penland School of Craft. Her work is in public collections, including the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Duke University, and The Columbus Museum. Clippinger is represented by Elizabeth Harris Gallery in New York and Hodges Taylor in Charlotte.

collection type = AsArtist01

Raleigh, NC

Martha Thorn received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with a concentration in Graphic Design from Western Carolina University and began painting in 2007. Her work has been exhibited at GreenHill, The Carrack Modern and other venues throughout the Southeast.  Utilizing her background in graphic design, Thorn is a process painter starting with line and drawing, followed by texture and design, and color being layered on last.  The bold colors are used as vehicles by which she can persuade her audience to look at her work. In her bright and captivating work, she presents the dichotomies of chaos and peace, dirty and clean, and ugliness and beauty in a fresh and authentic way.

collection type = AsArtist01

Matthew Brandt's work builds on the work of generations of landscape photographers and the history of the photographic process. He makes pictures using the physical matter of the subject in the development process, creating one-of-a-kind prints with methods that make it nearly impossible to create duplicates. 

collection type = AsArtist01

In the series Sun Land, Melanie Schiff exhibits her devotion to creating works that convey temporal and intuitive sensibilities; “Lemon Tree” is the epitome of the artist’s experiential approach to making photographs as they rely on the camera’s inherent inability to record, whether through distance or wavelength, what one can sensorially experience.

collection type = AsArtist01

Hong Kong

Michael Whittle is an artist, lecturer and researcher in diagrammatology, the study of diagrams. He originally qualified and trained as a biomedical scientist, before changing subject to study fine art receiving an MA at the Royal College of Art.  His studio practice draws upon images, ideas, and data found in scientific research papers, and discussions with scientists about the concepts and motivations underlying their studies.

collection type = AsArtist01

Norbert Bisky's treatment of landscapes and exploration of the portrait and narrative structure place him firmly in the tradition of great European painting. But his experiments with breaking down forms and with blocks of color also place him on the borderline of abstract art. His figurative style of painting, conjuring up the socialist realism he experienced as a child in GDR, suggests both hedonism and chaos in its contemporary form.

collection type = AsArtist01

Asheville, NC

Peter Glenn Oakley skillfully re-creates impermanent items—bars of soap, Styrofoam containers, egg cartons—out of marble, transforming the otherwise ordinary into beautiful and permanent objects, all with a wink toward the irony in doing so.  Oakley developed his carving skills working as a stonemason, making grave markers and memorials before turning to sculpture. In his hand, the marble sculpture becomes a solid ghost of what it represents—full of physical presence, but missing the functionality of the object.

collection type = AsArtist01

Peter Glenn Oakley skillfully re-creates impermanent items—bars of soap, Styrofoam containers, egg cartons—out of marble, transforming the otherwise ordinary into beautiful and permanent objects, all with a wink toward the irony in doing so.  Oakley developed his carving skills working as a stonemason, making grave markers and memorials before turning to sculpture. In his hand, the marble sculpture becomes a solid ghost of what it represents—full of physical presence, but missing the functionality of the object.

collection type = AsArtist01

Nashville, TN 

Rob Matthews was born in North Carolina and raised in Mississippi and Tennessee. He received his BFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Matthews examines themes of upheaval, power, and displacement.  Some of his subjects are heroes and others are villains. The remaining are caught in the middle.  His work is made with the intent to spend time considering historical events and the people that get lost in the shuffle of the ever-changing news cycle.

collection type = AsArtist01

South African artist Roger Ballen is one most influential photographic artists of the 21st century. His strange, provocative and psychological work, often depicting subjects in vulnerable and disturbing situations, blurs the lines between reality and fantasy and reverence and exploitation. Ballen is also notable for a hybrid aesthetic that brings together photography, drawing, painting, sculpture and collage into one cacophonous visual language that is entirely his own.

collection type = AsArtist01

Kyoto, Japan

Sangsun Bae is a Korean Artist living and working in Kyoto, Japan. A graduate of Musashino Art University in Tokyo, Bae studied for her Doctoral Thesis at Kyoto city University of the Arts, during which time she won a scholarship to study in London at the Royal College of Art. Twice selected for the prestigious VOCA art prize in Tokyo, she has shown internationally in New York, London and throughout Asia and is currently represented by COHJU Contemporary Art in Japan and Gallery Lee & Bae in Busan, Korea. Bae expresses herself through soft and graceful lines and interlocking curves.  By using organic forms, her work has a flowing elegance demonstrating complete abstraction.  This basic element in her work reflects the stoic style of expression that invokes ties to Buddhism.

collection type = AsArtist01

Sarah Anne Johnson's Arctic Wonderland emerged from an artist residency aboard a double masted schooner in the arctic circle. Using the images she created there as starting points for a number of mixed-media photographic works, Johnson's series comments on the sublime beauty of nature, it's inherent fragility and the irreparable damage that humanity has, and continues, to inflict upon it. In this context, wonderland has the dual meaning, referring to both the brilliant beauty of the landscape and the absurd notion of a utopian colonization of the natural world.

collection type = AsArtist01

Roswell, GA

Sarah Emerson's paintings and installations present viewers with highly stylized versions of nature that combine geometric patterns and symbolic archetypes to examine our cultural landscape. In her compositions, she distorts the physical laws that govern the real world because concepts like gravity, inertia, and locality do not govern our emotional perspective of the world. Emerson does not try to replicate nature or real space, instead she uses the familiar genre of landscape to explore the collective events and conditions that define our cultural landscape. In her career, she has worked on multiple painting series' and site-specific projects that use the ‘flatness’ of painting to explore themes that reflect on the fragility of life, the futility of earthly pleasures, and the disintegration of our natural landscape. As it is presented, painting can flatten events in time, space, and memory onto one picture plane allowing room for a reconciliation of otherwise incompatible states of being.

collection type = AsArtist01

Raleigh, NC

Shaun Richards is a painting and mixed media artist has lived and worked in Raleigh, North Carolina until recently when he relocated to Hamburg, Germany with his wife, Dr. Amanda Maples. He was born in Brunswick, Georgia, grew up in rural Southeast Virginia and attended UNC-Wilmington, where he earned a BA in art in 1999. Richards’ work has broadly focused on incentives, socio-economic issues, and political matters for the better part of a decade. He has described it as a focus on our complicity and responsibility for the world in which we live—particularly those institutions, and paradigms that define contemporary western society. He often combines collage/mixed media, stencils, and traditional painting methods contrasted with abstraction to impress upon the viewer these complicated issues in a way that is often ambivalent, yet layered. 

collection type = AsArtist01

Raleigh, NC

Born in 1979 in Raleigh N.C., Shelley Smith is an artist, curator, and arts administrator. She graduated with a Master of Art and Design from North Carolina State University College of Design in 2016. Her curatorial projects include the one-year activation known as The Pink Building Project, and the exhibitions and programming at Anchorlight, where she is the co-founder and Creative Director. Smith is also the co-founder and Director of the Brightwork Fellowship Program, a year long artist residency located within Anchorlight that focuses on service and professional development within the visual arts.

Smith’s own artistic practice serves as the foundation for all her other creative endeavors. Primarily working with the combination of cloth and digital techniques, her practice reflects the inborn ties between our individual selves and nature.

collection type = AsArtist01

Durham, NC

A resident of Durham, North Carolina, Susan Harbage Page is a conceptual visual artist with a background in photography and site-specific installation. She is an associate professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and also maintains a studio in Spello, Italy. Social justice issues concerning race, surveillance, and militarized borders have been the focal points of Harbage Page's research. Her work is extremely diverse in substance, form, and media and focuses on archives, considering how they shape our histories, whose narratives get included, and whose narratives get left out.

collection type = AsArtist01

Raleigh, NC

Thomas Sayre (b. 1950) is an American sculptor and painter. He designs and builds public art projects and private commissions all over the world. His current work includes large paintings made with tar, smoke, gunshots, welding material, earth, and fire. Sayre founded the multi-disciplinary design firm Clearscapes, alongside the late architect Steve Schuster. The firm designs numerous civic, educational, and museum buildings.

collection type = AsArtist01

Raleigh, NC

Tim Lytvinenko is a photographer and printmaker. With a background in computer science and 15 years as a fine art and documentary photographer, Tim explores ideas of what it means to be human.  Experimenting heavily with print processes and manipulating digital photographs, Lytvinenko creates emotional and detailed multi-media works on the subject of self. His recent work can be seen across the Raleigh skyline on the 66-foot-tall facade of The Dillon, at the 21c Hotel in Durham, and in private collections across the East coast and the South. 

collection type = AsArtist01

Washington, D.C.

Tim Tate is Co-Founder of the Washington Glass School and Studio. Tim’s work is in the permanent collections of a number of museums, including the Smithsonian's American Art Museum and the Mint Museum.   He is the subject of several articles in American Style, American Craft, and Sculpture magazines, as well as the Washington Post and Times newspaper reviews. He was also the 2010 recipient of the $35,000 Virginia Groot Foundation award for sculpture.

collection type = AsArtist01

Durham, NC

William Paul Thomas is a visual artist based in Durham, North Carolina.  His work is centered on making images to record his life experiences and observations, with an approach that defies standard documentary practices. For over 10 years he has created intimate painted portraits of everyday people that he chooses as a way of recognizing their significance in his life’s path. In addition to painting and drawing, he also experiments with video and photography to capture idiosyncratic, abstracted depictions of love, joy and adversity.  He earned a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and an MFA from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

collection type = AsArtist01

Raleigh, NC

Yuko Nogami Taylor is a painter who thoughtfully fuses Eastern and Western painting traditions. Drawing from both her Japanese upbringing and her experiences in the Southeastern United States over the past 30 years, Nogami Taylor's work is a  beautiful collision of cultures and techniques, a celebration of our shared humanity. Employing Nihonga techniques, a general term for traditional Japanese painting, her slow and meticulous process exhibits a reverence for craft, materiality and heritage, while simultaneously oscillating between abstraction and representation. 

collection type = AsArtist01