Poole Art Gallery 2023- 2024

May 4 – August 24

Family Ties
Rod Hildreth Collection 

This exhibition features artworks by three families of folk or self-taught artists working in Alabama and Georgia during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Mose Tolliver (known as “Mose T”), Howard Finster, and Jerry Brown established traditions of art making that their family members — children, grandchildren, spouses, and extended family — engaged in and continued. More than thirty artworks exhibited here represent these multiple generations of artists and illustrate how each family of creators shared approaches to style, technique, and subject matter. While we attribute individual artworks to individual artists, as indicated by the object labels throughout the exhibition, in reality, multiple artists’ hands shaped many of the paintings and ceramics exhibited here. The artworks in this exhibition embody family ties of different sorts — parents and grandparents passing on artistic knowledge, children and grandchildren emulating their teachers’ stylistic idiosyncrasies, and family members working together to make art.

This exhibition is possible thanks to the generosity of Rod Hildreth, who carefully collected these and many more artworks that he recently gifted to the University of Montevallo. This exhibition benefits from the support of the Department of Art and the College of Fine Arts.

August 31 – October 12

Carlton Nell
Recent Compositions in Silver & Paint 

Carlton Nell’s drawings and paintings originate from direct observation of immediate visual surroundings. He is interested in how abstract visual properties–shape, tone, pattern, scale, etc.–form a framework for seeing the world. By using these properties as a prism with which to view and suspend the observed world, he hopes it leads to a deeper experience of it. Carlton is a professor at Auburn University and is represented by Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York and Thomas Dean Fine Art in Atlanta.

October 19 – November 30

Josh Johnson
Make a Collection of Cobwebs 

Josh Johnson carves, constructs, and joins low, often rummaged materials and portions of past works into lonely vistas alluding to the slippages associated with memory’s shaky hold on place. The resulting sculptures are a build-up of references aimed at softening the margins that separate perceptions and moments, inhabiting a landscape between ‘here’ and ‘there.’ Josh is an art instructor at Missouri State University. For more information, visit josh-johnson-art.com/.

Jan. 18 – Feb. 17

Alumni Art Auction
Poole Party 

Aut Auction 2024

Feb. 22 – April 4

Mike Jones
Cookin’ Up Brands 

April 11 – May 31

Ted Metz & Scott Meyer
Process and Product: Sculpture

June 6 – August 22

Lee Somers
Japanese Ceramics Exhibition