In the wake of the high profile deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner and the ongoing Confederate flag controversy, it’s clear that race is very much on Americans’ minds. And as all of those nightly news firestorms have illustrated, there is still an enormous divide in speaking about or understanding race.
Amidst the red-faced debate and apoplectic misunderstanding, it’s a welcome relief to come across someone treating race with thoughtfulness and subtlety. Atlanta artist Bethany Collins has made race the focus of her artwork, seeking to plumb those divides and possibly foster some understanding.
A panel of visiting curators were so impressed with Collins’ unique “language-based” artwork that they awarded her this year’s competitive Hudgens Prize. Handed out every two years by an anonymous donor, it is one of the largest individual art prizes in the country, which bestows the winner with $50,000 and a solo show at Duluth’s Hudgens Center for the Arts.
Collins uses the objects of education — chalkboards, dictionaries, pencil erasers — to create sculptures, paintings and installations that examine how words define our understanding of race. Her mission is to examine how the language we take for granted can contain inherent prejudices and assumptions. In “Colorblind Dictionary,” the artist took a Webster’s New World Dictionary from 1965 and smeared or obscured references to color, from the “red” in mistletoe to the “white” blossoms of the mock orange shrub.
“Each and every color term has been erased from the text, challenging the absurdity of a language without color and/or a society without perceptions of race,” Collins said.
In “Southern Review,” Collins blacked out thick sections of the prestigious literary journal’s essays about race, challenging our need for clarity and denying the viewer easy answers.
“Language is infinitely full of possibility to communicate and connect,” said Collins. “And yet, as an extension of us, words fail.”
The artist’s perspective that there is work to be done and nuance to be examined seems like an especially thoughtful approach to race relations in an age of black and white opinions, invective and fury.
Collins’ win was especially noteworthy considering the strength of her competitors: Atlanta artist Scott Ingram, and Columbus artists Ryan Steele and Orion Wertz.
“All four finalists are excellent artists,” says Buzz Spector, a member of the 2015 Hudgens Prize jury panel and an art professor at Washington University’s School of Design and Visual Art. “The great and pleasant surprise for me in jurying the Hudgens Prize was to see the exceptional conceptual breath of art being made in Georgia today.”
Other members of the jury were Shannon Fitzgerald, executive director of Minnesota’s Rochester Art Center, and Hamza Walker, associate curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago
“There’s a real sense of honesty and integrity in Bethany’s work that draws me in,” said Angela Nichols, Hudgens director of exhibitions and programming. “I think because of the highly personal nature of the issues she’s addressing with the work and the heavy role of process, her work stands out. I respond to seeing her hand in the laborious process. Apart from that, there’s just a quiet beauty in the work.”
For Spector, it was not just Collins’ social message but her poetic technique that helped her stand apart from a strong group of artists.
“Her touch, whether with charcoal, ink, or a dampened finger, inscribes a feeling of visual poetry onto the pages and papers she has chosen for her work.”
Race emerged as a theme over the course of Collins’ studies first at the University of Alabama and then while pursuing her MFA at Georgia State University. But the genesis of Collins’ interest in race as the focus of her art-making was undoubtedly forged much earlier, when she was growing up in Montgomery, Ala., the child of a black father and white mother. Collins, who identifies as both black and biracial, says her parents are creative in their own right. Her mother is a painter and her father “can fix absolutely anything,” she said. “Both qualities were good primers.”
Collins is the third winner of the Hudgens prize since its inauguration. Past winners were Gyun Hur and Pam Longobardi, a former professor of Collins’ who is credited with encouraging Collins’ strong work ethic.
“One of the crucial acts of the artist is to just keep working,” said Collins, referring to one of the lessons she learned from Longobardi. “That longevity is often the artist’s friend and with any luck, the world will come around.”
In addition to capturing the 2015 Hudgens Prize, the 30-year-old Collins has received an impressive number of notable awards including a prestigious residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, a 2014 Artadia Award, a Walthall Artist Fellowship from Wonderroot and inclusion in the High Museum’s 2013 exhibition “Drawing Inside the Perimeter.” She’s currently preparing for a solo show at Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago.
For Collins the Hudgens Prize is not just an acknowledgement of her artwork, but a way to bring it to a larger audience.
“So much of a studio practice can be peculiarly solitary,” she says. “One of the significant aspects of the Hudgens Prize then is to have so many new eyes on the work, from this year’s finalists, jurors and Hudgens’ staff to an ever broadening audience.”
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