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Teachers could uncover your artistic side

By Allison Alfonso
Press Tempo Writer
aalfonso@johnsoncitypress.com

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There are times when you dream of seeing what you could create if you just had the right teachers to help you discover your hidden talent. Two interesting opportunities are coming up to help you do just that and to provide an afternoon of fun for those whose art talents have already been revealed.

If your love of art was thwarted by an uninspiring teacher in your earlier years, consider taking a class from a good one. Atlanta artist, teacher and curator and Russellville native Sammie Nicely will lead a mixed media collage workshop Nov. 15 from 1-4 p.m. at Becky Mallory’s downtown Johnson City art supply store and classroom, Artopia. Class is limited to 10 participants, age 16 and older. The cost is $80 and includes supplies, which will be provided.

Nicely teaches 2D and 3D art from kindergarten to college level. His art forms include clay, found-object sculpture, paintings, drawings and collage and are inspired by African art and folk art. He was a favorite artist of customers of my former gallery. They looked forward to the new things he’d pull from his boxes of art, and so did I. He had long been exhibiting his masks and drawings and teaching here when he was chosen in the late 1990s to lead clay mask-making workshops for county and city school children. Their miniature masks were permanently installed in the Storytelling Room at the Johnson City Public Library.

Nicely did graduate work at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts and received his bachelor’s degree in art education at Middle Tennessee State University. His major exhibitions have included the a University of Tennessee installation “Requiem of the African-American Family,” depicting African-American cultural progress from Africa, through slavery to the present.

Major commission artworks include “Out of Many, One” for the Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta. His work is in private and public collections, including the Tennessee Valley Authority and Beck Cultural Center in Knoxville, Rose Center in Morristown, the National Afro-American Museum in Wilberforce, Ohio, and East Tennessee State University.

For more information or to register, call Artopia at 282-1861.

Another artist I’ve known for a while is painter and sculptor Patti Lawrence, who runs the Gallery of Local Artists in Kingsport. The Kingsport Public Art Committee awarded her the Kingsport Higher Education Center Community Art Project, funded by the City of Kingsport’s Percent for Art Program and the First Tennessee Foundation. Lawrence received $19,000 to complete a recycled plastic abstract bird mobile, “Birds of a Feather,” for the environmentally-friendly center. The target installation date is April 2010. Community help will also be documented and celebrated.

Lawrence has a bachelor’s degree from the School of Visual Arts in New York and a master’s degree in teaching from Montclair State University, in Montclair, N.J. She has taught art at Hands On! Museum, the Oak Ridge Children’s Museum and the Knoxville Museum of Art.

The mobile will be 60 feet long and 15 feet wide and be made of 200 green, brown and cobalt blue plastic recycled PETE bottles. The bird heads and bodies are being made from one bottle and the tails another. Lawrence heats the bottles with a heat gun for shaping and cuts them with an Exacto Knife.

The plastic will look like translucent glass and will reflect jewel tones upon the sunlit three-story atrium space. The mobile will transform it into an aviary and reflect Kingsport’s designation as a bird sanctuary, a city people migrate to and the beauty of an individual as part of a whole, she said.

You may want to be a part of history, and Lawrence will host a workshop for those who want to help her build the birds Nov. 14 from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. at her gallery. Be careful. The cut plastic is sharp. Participants must be 16 and older. Art centers and civic groups are invited to inquire about helping with the project. She will bring the materials to the site.

For more information or to register, call Lawrence at 367-9211.

Allison Alfonso is a Tempo writer for the Johnson City Press. Reach her at aalfonso@johnsoncitypress.com.