Atlanta Artist Jamele Wright, Sr. to present talk at the Albany Museum of Art

The Artist Will Speak About His Exhibition, Work, and Career at 5:30 pm on Friday, May 16

ALBANY, Ga. ─ Multimedia artist Jamele Wright, Sr., the inaugural awardee of the Albany Museum of Art’s juried open call for artists, will present an artist talk at the AMA from 5:30-7 pm on Friday, May 16. The event is free and open to the public.

The Atlanta artist will speak about his work in his McCormack Gallery exhibition Hues of Skin and Earth, which features a conceptual body of work called the BROWN series. Wright will also share information about his background and his art practice.

Hues of Skin and Earth is one of three exhibitions that open Thursday, May 15, at the AMA. Also opening are In Conversation: Will Wilson, with support from Art Bridges, in the Haley Gallery, and Buqaqawuli Nobakada: Her Ladyship, Countess of Cumakala in the East and Hodges Galleries.

“Jamele’s works really inhabit the exhibition space,” AMA Curator of African Collections and African Diasporic Art Sidney Pettice said. “When visitors walk through Hues of Skin and Earth, these large abstract textile works create a presence. Having the opportunity to hear the artist speak about the intention of this conceptual series will be a moving experience for our patrons.”

Wright, born and raised in Ohio, moved at age 22 to Atlanta, where he began his artistic career at the intersection of jazz music, poetry, and visual arts. While his works emit presence, they also evoke feelings of warmth, body, and landscape.

Inspired by the work of abstract-expressionist painter Al Loving, who is best known for his artworks which meticulously balanced shape and form, Wright continues Loving’s tradition and legacy while providing new perspectives on the use of color.

His exhibition Hues of Skin and Earth offers an immersive and imaginative experience bringing about memories, feelings, and experiences interconnected with color, shape, and form.

When creating the body of work on exhibit titled BROWN, the artist was inspired by the notion of brown artwork and paintings being unpopular or undesired. In breaking the color down into reds, oranges, yellows, blues, and greens, Wright rethinks color association and hue. He has placed his body of work in the conversation with classical depictions of landscapes from the Hudson River School to the visual world of film Technicolor in the early- to mid-20th century.

Wright is the first awardee of the AMA’s open-call search for Georgia-based artists for a solo exhibition. The jury selected his work out of the nearly two dozen submissions.

“In receiving an overwhelming number of submissions for this first juried open call for artists, we are very excited to announce that this will be an annual occurrence,” Pettice said. “We also plan to expand our scope to include other Southern states, broadening artist exposure.”

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