The Coleman Center for the Arts is please to present American Castles, a show by Alabama artist Mary Jane Everett. The show will open with a public reception on Tuesday, September 23 at 6 PM and will be on display until January 9, 2015. The reception is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served and all are welcome!
Mary Jane Everett is an artist whose reverence for the land has had a profound impact on her work. American Castles features baskets and woven sculptures that incorporate found objects from farms and depict or reference iconic American farm structures. Everett has been making baskets since 1999, when she took a class with Billie Ruth Sudduth, later studying with Lissa Hunter, Hisako Sekijima and Mark Kolinski. While her baskets have always had a signature shape, over the years her work has become more sculptural, allowing found objects to dictate the structure and identity of her pieces.
Mary Jane Everett grew up on the edge of the Black Belt Prairie in Starkville, Mississippi. This fertile crescent of dark soil that runs from Mississippi through Alabama has been her home for over 30 years. For much of that time, Everett resided on Sumter Farm, a well known farm and 10,000 acre hunting reserve in Geiger, Alabama, where her husband was the wildlife manager. Everett says for her this work is “tied up” in the experience of living on the Black Belt Prairie for the last three decades.
This show mixes some more traditional basket shapes, like Friend of Jack with its pleasantly swollen circumference, with woven sculptures shaped around found objects and representations of silos and grain bin formations. Metal tractor seats, cultivator wheels and tire caps all serve as bases. Stakes include chicken wire, hardware cloth and metal grates. Everett harvests and hand processes kudzu vine, frequently collected from a rustic family retreat called “the land.” Other fibers include feed sacks, sisal and more traditional reed, sometimes dyed in bold colors and other times left in its natural state. In a sense, all the works are monuments to the rural American landscape of farms, labor and land.
Everett now lives in Hale County, around the corner and down the road from Newbern, Alabama, where another Alabama artist has been known to collect objects and images from the Black Belt. William Christenberry’s sculptures of Alabama buildings grew in part from what the artist identified as his desire to possess them. Unlike Christenberry’s hyper realistic depictions, Everett uses iconic structures as a starting point to reinterpret form, function and materials.
Many of the objects Everett incorporates are functional items, isolated from their original purpose. The baskets themselves are mostly non-functional, either primarily decorative or purely representational. Baskets, like grain bins, are structures made for storage, but in Everett’s work what remains are the iconic forms, made out of tools of agricultural labor and natural fibers. In her many grain bin and silo works she depicts actual formations with true proportions, and recreates their intricate connections with copper piping. But the basic cylindrical form gets repeated throughout this body of work. American Castle 2 strips the silo to its basic shape, while Gathering twists in on itself, natural kudzu collapsing inside its industrial metal rims.
Following a studio visit with Everett in preparation for this show, we took the short journey from her house to the small town of Newbern. After parking in front of the Green Warehouse that Christenberry has depicted in both sculpture and painting, and has photographed repeatedly for three decades, we poked around the numerous Rural Studio projects currently underway in this small Alabama town. Everett’s work stands in literal geographic proximity to a great artistic lineage of works, that could not be more varied in form and discipline, but that are connected to this Alabama land.
William Christenberry and Rural Studio founder Sambo Mockbee were both Alabamians inspired in part by the work of James Agee and Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the iconic depression era work of text and photographs that depicts white tenant farmers in Hale County, Alabama. Like Christenberry and Mockbee, Everett has her own unique way of repurposing objects and materials that descend from this rural landscape. When Agee writes about the failings of his work, as he frequently does in his epic tome, he laments about the inability of words to capture the true essence of the place. He would rather that, in addition to photographs, “the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron…” Perhaps this lineage of artists who descend from the land Agee visited are inclined to agree with him.
In Everett’s work, the decay of the objects become stilled in time. Old rusty surfaces exude the subtle shine of wax or sealant applied by the artist. In their new form they are transformed from something fragile to something enduring, their beauty revealed to anyone who might not have seen it already, as Everett surely does. She makes a fertile ground for the rest of us to stand on.
– Shana Berger, Co-Director
This work is made possible by funds form the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Daniel Foundation of Alabama and the generous contributions of our individual supporters. For more information please contact the Coleman Center for the Arts at 205.392.2005 or email colemancenter@gmail.com.
About the Artist
Mary Jane Everett grew up in Starkville, MS and graduated from Auburn University in 1978 with a B.S. in Ornamental Horticulture. Everett started making baskets in 1999 after taking a workshop led by Billie Ruth Sudduth at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. She has also studied under Lissa Hunter, Hisako Sekijima and Mark Kolinski. In 2004 she moved her studio to a renovated building in the arts district of York, Alabama. She has twice won the Merit Award at the Kentuck Festival of Arts, Northport, AL, and has exhibited in the Alabama Artists Gallery, Alabama State Council on the Arts, Montgomery, AL, Space 301/centre for the living arts, Mobile, AL and the Coleman Center for the Arts in York, AL. in 2005 she received an individual Artists Fellowship Grant from the Alabama State Council on the Arts.