Presenting Contemporary art demonstrating the diversity of current artistic practice, the Art Department manages two galleries on campus – the Gallery at Bloch Hall and the Poole Art Galley in the new Center for the Arts. Collectively we present four professional exhibitions and multiple student BFA exhibitions each year.
The galleries support our curriculum and are a significant public venue for the visual arts in the Montevallo community and in Shelby County. Most exhibitions include a reception with an artist’s or curator’s talk.
The galleries are free and open to the public. Please contact our Administrative Assistant, Nita Terrell, if you would like to be on the gallery mailing list. Or join us on Facebook: UM ART Department.
Fall 2023 – Spring 2024 Poole Art Gallery schedule
May 4 – August 24Family Ties
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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 12Carlton Nell
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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 30Josh Johnson
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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. 17Alumni Art Auction
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Although Gregory Martin’s paintings are most easily categorized as landscapes, they could also be thought of as contemplative spaces in which to experience dualities and polarities within human nature, the natural world, and the practice of painting such as growth and decay, the illusion of depth and flatness, the “truth” of photography and the “fiction” of painting, the differences between our ideals and our actions. |
Feb. 22 – April 4Mike Jones
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Mike Jones is a Southern brand designer and co-founder of Creative South. He creates brand identity for businesses, organizations, and church ministries. His work and more information can be found on Hugnecks.com, instagram.com/mikejonesdesign, and Dribble.com/Bucket826. |
April 11 – May 31Robin and Ted Metz
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Robin Nance Metz’s paintings and illustrations, inspired by memories of her childhood, were created by incorporating colors, patterns, and themes designed to bring joy and happiness to others. Over 20 of her artworks, images of the sun, in particular, were featured on CBS Sunday Morning over the years. Ted Metz is Professor of Art Emeritus from the University of Montevallo where he taught for over 40 years. He is a nationally recognized artist and a two-time Visual Arts Fellow of the State of Alabama. His public sculpture, Becoming, sits at the center of campus. Ted and Robin were married for ten years before Robin passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2022. |
June 6 – August 22Lee Somers
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