UNCG Greensboro’s College of Visual and Performing Arts (CVPA) alumna Jane South has been awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.
South is currently the Chair of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and before that she taught at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She studied Painting and Sculpting in the CVPA School of Art, and received her MFA in 1997.
She says, “My time at UNCG was invaluable in helping me hone my craft as an artist, and I am grateful to all the faculty and staff that supported me.”
This year, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded fellowships to 184 artists, writers, scholars, and scientists from almost 3,000 applicants. The fellowships support up to a year of work, and are intended for individuals who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.
“I am delighted to receive a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship. It is especially gratifying to be honored by fellow artists, and I look forward to making a new body of work to be exhibited in 2022.”
South’s artistic practice has been described as “dynamic,” and much of her work has been focused on sculptural assemblages of paper and balsa wood, with recent exhibitions featuring fabrics. The New York Times described her 2020 solo show “Switch Back” at Spencer Brownstone Gallery in New York, as the artist “doing something totally different, (She’s) showing what you might call soft paintings (and an M.D.F. sculpture in the backyard). Sewn together from pieces of canvas, batting, tarp and other pliable materials, with acrylic applied in places, they’re big and roughly geometric, purposefully imperfect and allusively abstract. They evoke homemade creations like patchwork quilts and curtains as much as the post-minimalism of Eva Hesse and Robert Morris, and even Claes Oldenburg’s replicas of ordinary objects.”
Former Guggenheim fellows include more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors.
Read more about the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowships.
Story by Terri W. Relos
Photo provided by artist