The Vanderbilt University Department of Art is pleased to announce the recipient of the prestigious Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Award for 2015. This year’s recipient is Alexis Jackson of Memphis, Tennessee. As Hamblet winner, she will receive a $25,000 prize that provides the funds for a year of art research and travel, culminating in a solo show at Vanderbilt in one year.
Jackson’s work explores the histories and complexities of systematic racism in America. She hopes to start a dialogue about the cyclic motion of history in relation to racism by using photographs, digital images, text, audio and video.
The $10,000 Merit Award was presented to Emily Neal of Greenville, South Carolina.
Neal’s artwork, titled “Clonal Colony” after a group of plants descended from the same ancestor, explores time through its marking in the natural and human world. The passing of time is a universal experience, she says, but one we are incapable of controlling.
The 2015 Senior Show is currently on display from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday–Friday until May 10. The gallery is located in the E. Bronson Ingram Studio Art Center at 25th and Garland avenues on the Vanderbilt campus.
The jurors for the 2015 competition were Carol Prusa, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida; John Douglas Powers, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee; and Billy Renkl, Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, Tennessee.
The Department of Art has supervised the awarding of the Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Award since 1984. The award was established by Clement H. Hamblet in honor of his wife, Margaret, whom he met while she was studying abroad.
For more information, contact the Department of Art at (615) 343-7241 or visit vanderbilt.edu/arts.