A Birmingham artist gave a lecture at Biggin Hall to end her exhibition of painting and sculptures Thursday, Jan. 29, at 5 p.m., and collaborated with Andrew Kozlowski, assistant professor of art, on prints of her work.
The department of art hosted Amy Pleasant, whose exhibition ran from Dec. 14, 2014-Jan. 29, 2015.
Pleasant received her bachelor's in fine arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her master's in fine arts at The Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Her work has been featured at Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York, Whitespace Gallery in Atlanta and the Birmingham Museum of Art and Candyland art gallery in Stockholm, Sweden.
Pleasant spent her 45 minute lecture speaking about her progression as an artist in the 12 years since she finished graduate school.
"I think it's important to see how an artist's work changes, why they change, different things they experiment with and failures," Pleasant said. "All of those things are a part of a lifetime of practice."
Pleasant said she is interested in mundane, daily things and people's basic relationships with others. Pleasant makes tiny drawings with brush and ink that show people doing things such as getting out of bed, having a conversation or sitting in a chair. She combines many tiny images to create large, sweeping wall drawings. Her largest wall drawing, located in The Columbus Museum in Georgia, is 20 feet tall and 30 feet wide.
"A lot of what I'm interested in is how all of our lives cross over each other at one point or another when we're all seemingly doing our own isolated things," Pleasant said, "and then what happens when we come into each other's lives and how that changes us and how that forms our decisions."
Although her artwork focuses on drawing and painting, Pleasant said she has been interested in working with print for a long time.
"There's a historic relationship between printers as facilitators," Kozlowski said. "There's this really great tradition of artists coming into print shops where the master printer or assistant printer is the go-between for the artist. They see something in the artist's work and they translate it into the print form."
Jessye McDowell, assistant professor of art and exhibitions and lectures coordinator, is generally in charge of setting up and organizing the art in Biggin Gallery during exhibitions.
"She clearly has a vision," McDowell said. "She basically designed the curation (in the gallery) ... She was very involved and had a clear idea where things should go. She is a very nice combination of someone who knows her work really well, has very clear ideas about how it should be shown, she's obviously very engaged in a deep way with her practice and she's also easy to work with and fun to be around."
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