Artist/Architecture Professor to Launch New Lecture Series

Fayetteville, Ark. - Southern culture - from yard art to tumbledown barns, grits to collard greens - forms the heart of Laura Terry's research, painting, and teaching. A professor at the University of Arkansas School of Architecture and an accomplished artist, Terry photographed sites across Arkansas, Alabama and Georgia and read 22 novels by Southern women while producing a new series of paintings that celebrate the rich culture and landscape of the South. Terry will discuss the paintings and the process in a lecture titled "Learning from Alice Walker: Porches, Paintings and a Side of Collards" at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 7, at the Arkansas Arts Center lecture hall.

Terry's lecture will launch a new educational initiative co-sponsored by the UA School of Architecture, the Arkansas Arts Center, and the central Arkansas section of the American Institute of Architects (AIA).

Little Rock resident June Freeman, who was instrumental in developing the new series, said: "We want to increase people's awareness of the importance of architecture in their lives. Whether it's good or bad, public or domestic, it sets the stage for living."

"Our goal is to bring the art and architecture communities together with interested members of the general public, and the Arts Center provides a great venue for that interaction," said Tim Yelvington, section president of the AIA.

Laura Terry's dual roles as artist and architecture professor make her a natural choice for starting the new series. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Design from Auburn University in 1993 and a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1998. Since 1999 she has found her niche at the UA School of Architecture, where she teaches architecture students to draw and paint, directs the Camp Aldersgate design/build program and researches Southern "yard rooms."

"The everyday way people live is extraordinary - the gestures on the landscape of their yards reveal their desire to make space a place, an experience," she said.

"Poultry Science" from Terry's "Paradise Lost" series of paintings, which she describes as "abstract representations of the Southern literary landscape."
 
Terry's artwork has been featured in exhibitions in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Savannah, Ga., and was included in "New American Paintings," a juried publication. In 2003 she was honored as the first recipient of the School of Architecture's McIntosh Faculty Award, which funded a new series of paintings titled "Paradise Lost." Featuring floating planes of richly saturated color punctuated by silos, honeycombs and other rural symbols, the paintings evoke the vanishing agricultural landscape of the South.

The lecture series will continue in the spring with a presentation by noted Memphis architect Coleman Coker. The group also hopes to screen "My Architect: A Son's Journey," the acclaimed documentary exploring the secret life of architectural genius Louis Kahn, directed by his son Nathaniel Kahn. Lectures are free and open to the public. Continuing education units will be awarded to design professionals.