Artwork With Layered Meaning Selected for 61st Annual Delta Exhibition in Little Rock

Image courtesy of Laura Terry

"A Book of Maps" (collage of monoprints, graphite drawings and hand-stitching, 2017) was selected for the 61st Annual Delta Exhibition in Little Rock.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Artwork by a University of Arkansas architecture professor was selected as part of the 61st Annual Delta Exhibition, a collection that presents a vision of contemporary art in the American South.

This is the third time that Laura Terry, an associate professor in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, has been selected to include work in this exhibition.

The exhibition will be on display from Friday, May 3, through June 30 at the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock. A lecture and opening reception are planned for 5:30 p.m. Thursday, May 2.

The Arkansas Arts Center organizes and presents this vision of contemporary art in the American South, providing a unique snapshot of the Delta region. "The Delta Exhibition reflects the region's strong traditions of craftsmanship and observation, combined with an innovative use of materials and an experimental approach to subject matter," according to its website.

The guest juror for this exhibition is Kevin Cole, an Arkansas native and contemporary artist best known for sculptural works, paintings and intentional use of color. He selected the pieces to be exhibited and will assign the $2,500 Grand Award and two $750 Delta Awards. Additionally, a $250 Contemporaries Award will be selected by the Contemporaries, an auxiliary membership group of the arts center.

The exhibition is open to all artists who live in or were born in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee or Texas. It features original artwork completed in the last two years that hasn't previously been exhibited at the Arkansas Arts Center.

More than 1,000 pieces were submitted this year, with only 49 selected.

"The Delta exhibition is one of the oldest and most respected juried exhibitions in the country," Terry said. "And every year, it gets more and more competitive."

Terry's piece that was selected, "A Book of Maps," is from her most recent body of work that involves printmaking. This piece is a collage of monoprints, graphite drawings and hand-stitching. Terry completed the monoprints in the summer of 2017 at an intensive printmaking workshop at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado. She had something else in mind when she created them, but as the work evolved for an early 2018 solo exhibition, she kept coming back to the prints.

She arranged them in many different compositions, photographing the iterations so she could determine which one was most successful. In the end, the final composition maintained some of the original intention behind the piece while also being something completely different.

"The prints were about the idea of geological layers that stack on top of one another," she said. "The horizontal striations in the prints are complemented by straight lines of dark purple/blue that are extended by the stitching."

The title for the piece came to mind when she thought about all of the maps, atlases and photographs she had looked at while making this work.

"I imagined the layers like pages in a book, where they all have individual information that add up to something larger," she said. "In the end, the title just seemed to fit. I liked the obvious reference but also the open-ended, speculative idea."

Terry considers the piece successful in conveying the ideas of layering, time and compression.

"I have always imagined this piece as geological layers of rock, but because of the color palette, many people automatically read the piece as wood grain. I am fine with that reading. Rock and wood are both organic forms that are made of layers," she said.

This piece is largely about the stillness that is expressed in the geological layers, she said — "as if time is frozen in this piece."

For Terry, "A Book of Maps" was one of the signature pieces of the exhibition of drawings and prints that she mounted in the Smith Exhibition Gallery of Vol Walker Hall in early 2018. While the other work in that collection represented singular moments in the landscape, this piece represented a more holistic view of the idea of geological layering.

It's size alone — 24 inches by 36 inches — gave it a distinct physical presence. That size also allowed it to be read in different ways when viewed up close and at a distance.

"When viewed from a distance, it is about the larger composition," she said. "And when viewed up close, the details, the stitching and the physical layers of the collage yield a textured and detailed view."

Terry teaches the first-year design studio — a collaborative effort between the architecture, landscape architecture and interior design programs — as well as professional electives in printmaking, painting and book binding. She has taught in the Fay Jones School since 1998.

This spring semester, Terry is on an off-campus duty assignment, working on a new body of work on paper that continues to investigate the landscape, and more specifically, the pine forests of southern Arkansas. She has completed several pieces and has made multiple site visits, but is still early in the process. She also plans to attend another printmaking workshop over the summer.

"I eagerly await that experience and the work that will come from it," she said. "I know enough to know that I need to patient with my art; when I force it, it is not authentic."