Mary Anne Arntzen (b. Riverside, CA) is a painter based in Birmingham, AL. Her work explores the narrative potential of abstraction through layered compositions that reference architecture, textiles, and cartoons. Arntzen holds an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA in Painting from Boston University. She has exhibited widely, with recent solo exhibitions including Overshot at Bradley University (IL) and Funny HAHA at Gettysburg College (PA). Group exhibitions include Soft Power at Pazo Fine Art (DC) and Incongruent Animation at Mono Practice (MD), as well as shows at the Walters Art Museum (MD), The Painting Center (NYC), St. Charles Project (MD), and Resort Gallery (MD).

She is a recipient of the Bethesda Painting Prize and the Maryland State Arts Council’s Individual Artist Award in Painting and was nominated for the Joan Mitchell Painting and Sculpture Prize. Her work has been reviewed in The Baltimore City Paper and featured in Inertia Studio Visits. Arntzen has attended residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and the Wassaic Project. From 2013 to 2020, she served on the advisory committee for ICA Baltimore, curating three exhibitions. In addition to teaching painting and drawing at the Maryland Institute College of Art, George Washington University, and the Community College of Baltimore County, she worked as a conservation technician for textiles at the Baltimore Museum of Art from 2019 to 2023.

https://www.maryannearntzen.com/

Kyle Riley is a self-taught artist, currently living and working in Birmingham, Alabama. Born and raised in northern Illinois, Riley resided in Chicago from 2014 to 2024, where he extensively made and showed his work. Riley is most interested in making sculptures and working on his studio at Wade Sand and Gravel in Birmingham. He works in a variety of mediums, such as drawing and sculpture, with an emphasis on utilizing found materials and a commitment to exploring new forms and techniques.

https://kylerileyart.weebly.com/

Shori Sims is a multidisciplinary artist whose work navigates the blurred thresholds between subject, object, history, and the body. Through installation and time-based performance, they explore themes of containment, surveillance, and the meaning of selfhood in the 21st century. Grounded in their lived experience, Shori’s practice makes use of the ephemeral and domestic to trouble the line between public display and private ritual. Receiving their MFA in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2024, they have exhibited work across galleries, academic, and community spaces, including in Brooklyn, London, and Toronto. Shori is also a dedicated educator, bringing a critically engaged, care-centered approach to their teaching practice.

https://shorisims.com/

Heather’s work is inspired by her relationship with the physical body. She is devoted to working with her hands, creating works notable for their deft finish and tactile nature. Her visual art has been exhibited at Mass MoCA, The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, The Wiregrass Museum of Art, The Gadsden Museum of Art, The Georgine Clark Alabama Artists Gallery, The Charles W. and Norma C. Carroll Gallery at Marshall University and Revolve Gallery, Asheville, NC. She also holds over 30 years of design and production experience in stage, television, and film, her credits including The Cherry Lane Theatre, The Theater Outlet, The Santa Fe Opera, The Los Angeles Opera, Maine State Music Theatre, Center Theatre Group, Carsey-Warner Productions and Comedy Central. Heather holds a BFA in Costume Design from UNCSA and an MFA in Visual Art from Lesley University, in addition to her studio practice, she is currently an Adjunct Instructor at The University of Alabama Huntsville.

https://www.heatherbaumbachart.com/

Elizabeth Russell is an American artist living between Prague, Czech Republic and Birmingham, Alabama. She received her BFA from the University of Montevallo in 1983 and was later awarded a 3-year fellowship to the University of Illinois in Champaign, where she received her MFA in 1990.

Russell’s exhibitions in the U.S. and Prague have included video installations, photography, painting, collage, and stop-motion animation. Her work has been shown in private galleries, film festivals, and public museums. It is included in many private collections as well as the Krannert Museum permanent collection in Champaign, Illinois.


Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she brings a Southern sense of brooding and sometimes romantic surrealism, influenced by writers such as Flannery O'Connor and Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez. Her work is a study of humanity and its strewn landscape of misery and exultation through the ages. Nature is our silent observer in her many forms. Russell’s paintings and small sculptures address the delicate balance between survival and extinction, capturing the fragility of endangered species threatened by human encroachment, and the vulnerability of women confronted by systemic oppression. It is a deep dive into the chaos that churns our souls and mystifies our reasoning.

https://elizabethrussellart.com/

Jennifer McCohnell is a visual artist whose practice includes fiber, ceramics and printmaking. Her work explores the intersection of memory, place, objects and identity. Through this work, she translates, explores and reveres the nuances and resilience of the Black experience in America. She lives and works in Birmingham.

Iconic objects, personas, people and places from my lived experiences as a Black southern woman are re-imagined. They are touchstones that remind me of ancestral resilience. I continue to explore the objects, places and memories of my life and culture and how the idea of these things have informed my identity. This work helps keep me grounded and moving forward through life’s challenges.

‭ Jennifer Wallace Fields is a visual artist based in Springville, Alabama. She earned her BFA‬ from the University of Montevallo where she focused on sculpture, with a particular interest‬ in metalwork and ceramic hand-building. She has been making, exhibiting, teaching, and‬ talking about art for the past twenty years. She is the host of Monograph for Alabama public‬ television, co-host of the No Bad Art podcast, founder of Birmingham based Crit Club (a‬ semi-regular gathering of local artists to support each other and get feedback on their work),‬ and the Studio Administrator at Studio By The Tracks.‬

https://www.jenniferwallacefields.com/

Sarah Bell is an artist, farmer, and educator based in Birmingham, Alabama. Descended from Chinese and American ancestry, she grew up using art and creativity as a way to find a sense of connection to her experiences of grief, familial emigration, and home.

She has presented work throughout Alabama, including Shelby County Arts Council, Kentuck Museum Gallery, Ground Floor Contemporary, and regularly teaches workshops at Alabama Folk School, MAKEbhm, and at other spaces.

I am a visual artist based in Birmingham, Alabama. As a full-time farmer, I am in constant collaboration with land, place, and the natural world. The daily repetition, intuitive experimentation, and familiar challenges of stewarding land extends and iterates into fabric collages, vine sculptures, basket weaving, and knotwork. As I farm and as I make art, I become both an expression of my ancestors and a purveyor of alternate realities.

https://www.sarahemilybell.com/

Matthew Barton is a sculptor and ceramicist whose works consists primarily of found object sculptures and coil-built vessels. Using irregular pattern and mark-making, his work explores concepts of meditation, religion, labor, and forgiveness. Barton was born and raised in north central Alabama and received his BFA in 2015 from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and his MFA in 2018 from Louisiana State University. Since then, Barton has taught at Tulane University and Southeastern Louisiana University and has been a fellow at the National Gallery of Art and an artist in residence at Haystack Mountain School of Craft. He currently lives in Birmingham, AL

instagram.com/barton_works

Sophie McVicar Tate is a visual artist whose work celebrates the gentle beauties and tragedies of nature. Receiving degrees in both art, B.F.A., and chemistry, B.S., McVicar Tate’s large-scale watercolor paintings thoughtfully speak to her scientific training. In the vein of 19th-century Naturalist field studies, subjects are brought to life in watercolor, pencil, and gouache with critical accuracy, but are then subverted with the passionate and emotive contexts of the animal. Such contexts become accentuated with Renaissance applications of gold leaf or motifs of sacred geometry. The scope and concept of the paintings are heavily research-driven, borrowing material from current and historical field accounts of animals, colloquial histories, folklore, mythology, and medieval bestiaries. Western religious overlays challenge how we view animals in the post-Enlightenment era. Throughout her paintings, the rational presentation is consistently challenged by the whims of the unconscious, underpinning every bird or quadruped with the fantasies of pre-Conscious thought. McVicar Tate currently lives and works in Birmingham, Alabama where she keeps a small, endemic and medicinal garden to complement her art practice.

www.sophiemcvicar.co

Serena Perrone (b. 1979, St. Louis, MO) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Atlanta since 2019. She received her M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and is an Associate Professor of Drawing, Painting and Printmaking at Georgia State University, where she also serves as the Head of Printmaking. Her work is included in numerous permanent collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Philadelphia Museum of Art. She has received grants from South Arts, Idea Capital, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and was nominated for a Pew Fellowship in Philadelphia in 2017. Solo exhibitions of note include the Flatbed Center for Contemporary Printmaking (Austin), Spring/Break Art Fair (New York), Cade Tompkins Projects (Providence), the Print Center (Philadelphia), and the Contemporary Art Museum (St. Louis). Serena serves as the Director of Officina Stamperia del Notaio, an international multidisciplinary artists' residency program and printmaking studio in Sicily, which she founded in 2015. Her work is represented by Cade Tompkins Projects in Providence, RI and she looks forward to forging new relationships and reaching new audiences as a member of Ground Floor Contemporary.

As a dual-citizen who splits her time between the the United States and Italy, a large part of her practice aims at reconciling a tacit and circumspect desire to filter stories and landscapes through a reflexively nostalgic and mythic lens. Her multidisciplinary practice uses landscape and natural phenomena as metaphor to uncover hidden stories, preserve fleeting moments, and explore symptoms of dislocation, relying heavily on printmaking and the decorative arts.

www.serenaperrone.com

Misty Bennett is a Professor of Art who teaches painting at the University of Montevallo. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Drawing and Painting from the University of Georgia. She teaches all levels and media of painting classes and directs the concentration in painting as well as serving as Chair of the Department of Art. Her work has been exhibited across the southeast, most recently in the Alabama State Council for the Arts Gallery in Montgomery, the Red Clay Survey at the Huntsville Museum of Art, Lowe Mill in Huntsville, and the Tennessee Valley Art Museum. It is also featured in collections including the Carmichael Library, the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the College of Osteopathic Medicine in Dothan, Alabama, and the President’s Collection at the University of Georgia. Her abstract paintings are inspired by the expressive power of color and texture and explore the concept of food as a metaphor for American culture. In her paintings she celebrates the textures, shapes, and surfaces of everyday foods while exploring the dark side of consumerist culture. She lives in Vestavia Hills, Alabama with her husband and two children.

www.mistybennett.com

Bethany Moody (she/they, b. 1989) is an educator and artist whose practice combines fiber, painting and sculptural techniques to interrogate ideas of community, domesticity, sustainability and the built environment. Trained as a printmaker, Moody’s process-oriented practice centers repetition, accumulation and maintenance.  Currently based in Alabama, Moody holds a BFA and MFA from the University of Montevallo and the University at Buffalo, SUNY, respectively.

Universities, art spaces, galleries, community spaces and DIY venues across North America have held solo and group exhibitions of Moody’s work, including COOP gallery (Nashville, TN), the Waiting Room (Minneapolis, MN), Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, NY), Collar Works (Troy, NY), The Overlook Place (Chicago, IL), and Little Berlin (Philadelphia, PA). Cornelia, Sculpture Magazine and Architectural Digest are among the publications that have featured Moody’s work. Moody has received numerous grants and awards for their work; most recently, Moody was honored with the Best in Fine Art Crafts award as part of Shelby County Arts Council’s Robin Nance Metz juried exhibition (2024). In addition to prior residencies, Moody is currently Artist-in-Residence at Studio By The Tracks (SBTT).

In 2020, Moody co-founded Studio Support Group, a virtual network for artists resisting art world competition and scarcity. Locally, Moody has led workshops at SBTT, Space One Eleven and Ground Floor Contemporary, in addition to doing arts outreach as the 2023 Visiting Craft Educator for Jefferson County High Schools. Currently, Moody is an Instructor of Foundations at the University of Alabama.

www.cargocollective.com/annmoody

Renee Hanan Plata, an Alabama native, received her BFA from Atlanta College of Art, MFA from Tyler School of Art, and MSEd from Bankstreet College. Renee maintained a painting studio in New York for twenty years and joined a group of abstract painters represented in the exhibition Painting Up Front at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University, curated by Thomas Leavitt. Plata’s work draws vigorously on the genre of geometric abstraction and her methodology often employs a minimalist approach. Her paintings are grounded by and play with the fundamental elements of art – color, form, line, and texture.

www.reneehananplata.com

Meg Howton began her young career making mud pies in the iron-rich Alabama clay. Howton received an award at the ripe old age of 6 for showing creativity by spinning a q-tip® while painting a plate of the paper variety. This pivotal moment set her sights on a career in art, so she attended The University of Alabama, where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Ceramics and Photography in 2015. She then relocated to Gainesville, Florida, where she completed her post-baccalaureate studies at the University of Florida in 2018. Meg attended Southern Illinois University, where she received her Master of Fine Arts. 

Since her MFA graduation, Meg has been a long-term Resident Artist at Hope Center for Arts and Technology in Sharon, Pennsylvania, where she taught printmaking, painting, and ceramics. She has also been a short-term resident at Red Lodge Clay Center in Montana and has an upcoming residency at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine. She is currently a full-time Instructor of ceramics at The University of Alabama. Meg recently led a workshop at the 2024 Alabama Clay Conference and will lead a demonstration at Watershed’s Salad Days. 

www.meghowton.net

Catherine Nelson is a visual artist originally from Louisiana, but has lived across the West, South, and East of the US as well as Rome, IT. Her work integrates both found and made fragments into wall-based installations, rethinking the power dynamic between artist and materials, and more generally between humans and our environment, though always with a healthy dose of visual pleasure in mind. She has exhibited internationally in venues including Redline Contemporary Art Center (Denver), Antenna Gallery (New Orleans), and Philobiblon Gallery (Rome). Her work is part of the collection of the Print and Picture Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia, and residencies include the Vermont Studio Center and Women’s Studio Workshop. Nelson is currently pursuing an MFA in Installation and Performance at the University of Connecticut and co-produces the digital artist residency Southern Heat Exchange.

www.catherinetnelson.com

Ryan Meyer was raised between the suburban Deep South and the road. He received his MFA from the University of California, Davis, and has shown work nationally and internationally. He has recently been interested in entropy, eschatology, and a genre of photography called “ruin porn.” Much of his current work uses landscape and still-life imagery to mirror corroded mental states such as addiction, hallucination, and depression. While aiming to avoid stigmas, Meyer wants to understand the interactions between internal and external environments.

www.ryanmeyerart.com

Elisabeth Pellathy works in a variety of mediums, responding to locations, history, and social context. She sees physical and digital manipulation of material as parallel processes. An open dialogue between these realms provides a generative space for her exploration of materiality and process. Tactile and digital act as metaphors for the complexity of the space in-between, the slippage of the moment.

Her work has been exhibited at Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello, Venice, IT (2019), Booth Museum, Royal Pavilion and Museums, UK (2018), Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, USA (2018), Alfred Ceramics Art Museum, USA (2017), Peale Center for Baltimore History and Architecture, USA (2017), Currents New Media, USA (2016), Unicorn Center for Art, China (2016) and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, USA (2011).

https://vimeo.com/elisabethpellathy

Sarah West is an artist whose work examines our persistent desire to be transported by visual means and explores ways the spiritual realm has been represented in the past and today. Her recent body of work aligns Early Renaissance painting compositions and digital spaces in their shared role as dream space/site of spiritual quests. The resulting paintings evoke a divine encounter, reflecting on both the religious subject matter referenced in Renaissance sources and the mystical aura surrounding new technologies. West was featured in the South 2016 edition of the juried art publication New American Paintings. She received a Bachelor’s degree in Studio Art from Wake Forest University and an MFA from Clemson University. She has taught painting and drawing courses at Clemson University and Columbus State University and currently lives and works in Birmingham, AL.

www.thesarahwest.com

Rebecca Fulmer is a mixed-media artist using a combination of various techniques in collage, assemblage, printmaking, photography, and fiber. Her work explores themes of spatiality, movement, and memory. She has an undergraduate degree in Interior Design from the Auburn University School of Architecture and studied classical ballet for many years, both of which still influence her work. Her primary source, though, comes from her time spent on Mobile Bay, where the natural beauty is a constant source of inspiration. Rebecca lives and works between Point Clear and Birmingham, Alabama.

www.rebeccatullyfulmer.art

Sara Garden Armstrong is a visual artist who works in a myriad of directions, from large site-specific sculpture to hand-held artist’s books, all of which examine organic processes of transformation. Chance and change drive her creative exploration of the possibilities of materials. Her work investigates the interactions between various physiological phenomena and the human body using movement, repetition, transparency, layering and mapping, and, at times, sound and light.

Her recently published monograph SARA GARDEN ARMSTRONG: Threads and Layers, reveals the influences and themes that run through her diverse body of work. It coincides with a current traveling exhibition of the same name. Armstrong, who has exhibited nationally and internationally, is a 2015/16 recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation CALL (Creating a Living Legacy) grant through Space One Eleven. Her artist’s books can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among others. Her atrium sculptures can be found in corporate and university collections. After 36 years in New York City, she now lives and works in Birmingham, Alabama.

www.saragardenarmstrong.net

Annie Kammerer Butrus is a Birmingham-based artist who received her MFA from the University of Notre Dame in Painting and Printmaking and her undergraduate degree in Studio Art from Wellesley College. Butrus has exhibited her work nationally in galleries and museums and has been awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Alabama State Council of the Arts. Butrus is interested in the intersection of place, landscape, and memory and is currently involved in a study of the earth’s surface by portraying star wounds as well as creating garden biographies. She is deeply moved by the stories that shadows tell by capturing time and place, functioning as a contemporary memento-mori.

www.akbutrus.com

Jennifer Marshall is a visual artist and curator who works primarily within the boundaries of film and camera conceptual projects, and her overt focus is often the materiality and temporality of film. Born in Ojai, California, and raised in Bakersfield and Los Angeles, she received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and is pursuing an MLIS in Archival Studies at The University of Alabama. Currently, Marshall is the Gallery Director at Ground Floor Contemporary, produces the visual arts exhibitions program at the Hoover Public Library, and lives and works in Birmingham, AL.

www.jenniferlgmarshall.com

Miriam Omura’s practice includes textiles, ceramics, and alternative photographic methods. Her material processes are guided by a research practice of delving into newspaper archives, genealogy, and other resources about her subjects. Exploring themes of personal and community loss, Omura navigates the known and unknown details surrounding missing and unidentified individuals. Her art invites an exploration of the intersections of materiality, history, and emotion. Omura holds a BFA in Fiber and Material Studies and a MA in History and Art History.

www.miriamomura.com

Patty B. Driscoll is a visual artist that utilizes traditional genres and processes such as the still life, water gilding, metalwork, and textiles – layering her work with subtle narratives and subject matter that investigate the context of the feminine/feminist identity. Her work is a dialogue with historical pathways, iconography, and the symbolism of women, challenging implicit societal representations and inculcated cultural values. Driscoll received her MFA from the California College of Arts after completing her undergraduate work in Studio Art and Art History at Skidmore College. She lives and works in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama.

www.pattybdriscoll.com

Anita Gómez-Ronderos is a multimedia artist that works within a wide range of media and genres, including abstract and representational painting, collage, and hand-made paper. She was born in Colombia and moved to Birmingham in 1962. She studied Art and Art History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. After moving to Birmingham, she became active in the arts community and was one of the original members of the 21st Street Studios.

Chiharu Roach is from Nagoya, Japan where she earned a degree with an emphasis on child psychology. After moving to Birmingham in 2001 and getting her BFA from the University of Alabama in Birmingham, she began painting with acrylic paint and her tangled hair series, in which she explores the spiritual connection between humans and their range of behaviors and emotions. Chi often portrays cultural differences and stereotypes between Japan and America based on her experiences from living in both countries. At Ground Floor Contemporary, Chi is challenging herself to use 2D, 3D art, and mixed media to express themes of memories, spirituality, loss, and humanity.

instagram.com/chiroach

Elaine Farley Kinnaird is a Birmingham native who graduated from the Alabama School of Fine Arts, receiving the Senior Artist Award, and graduated from Birmingham Southern College, majoring in Art History with a minor in Art and receiving a Senior Art Award. She then received her MFA in Fiber Art in 2014 from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. In 2015, she participated in the Cultural Reservation Podere Conte Ràcani–Sculptor Residency Program in Umbria, Italy, and in 2018, she received a Visual Arts Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts.

efkinnaird.com

Tara Stallworth Lee makes photographs, paper, books, and collages. Expansion of human dignity and the significance of the natural world are important themes throughout all of her work. Tara received her BS in Psychology and Minor in Art from Birmingham-Southern College. She taught specialty art classes to youth for The Smithsonian Associates summer camp program for nearly twenty years. Tara is an artist-collaborator at Studio By The Tracks in Birmingham, a studio and gallery for adult artists with autism, and an instructor for the Alabama Prison Arts and Education Project. She is the 2021/22 recipient of the Alabama State Council on the Arts Gay Burke Fellowship in Photographic Arts. Lee lives and works in Birmingham, Alabama where she is an art educator and a resident artist at Ground Floor Contemporary.

www.tarastallworthlee.com

Catharine Friend is an artist and painter who lives and works in Birmingham, Alabama. Friend works within a wide range of styles and genres, such as figurative, landscape, and abstraction. She received a BA from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, where she studied French and Art History and began painting full-time in 2001 after retiring from non-profit work. Friend paints and studies art extensively while working in her Crestline studio, taking workshops, and collaborating with fellow artists.