Sweet Art Alabama 

Contributed by Sharon Butler and Jonathan Stevenson / Hitting the road to Alabama for Sharon’s solo show “March” at the Sarah Moody Gallery at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in late March, we knew from ongoing contact with gallery director and art professor William Dooley and his assistant Vicki Rial that a deftly curated presentation in a beautiful space and a warm reception from the Art Department were in store. The students and gallery patrons who attended Sharon’s artist’s talk were inquisitive, smart, and welcoming. What we did not expect was the prevalence of so many talented people in the wider art community spanning Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, which we discovered is rich with deeply engaged artists, curators, and gallerists.

Dooley himself is a consummate abstract painter, specializing in medium-sized canvases that feature vertical lines, neat but painted freehand, each containing variable marks that quietly but magnetically deepen the paintings’ contemplative effects. Renee Hanan Plata concentrates on the flow of surface patterns and their subtle mutations across visually galvanizing canvases. The two artists are notably complementary, and in fact share a studio – catty-corner from the rollicking Yo’ Mama’s restaurant, where we inhaled unmatched jambalaya, hushpuppies, blackened catfish, and slaw – in Birmingham’s growing, if still rakish, trackside art district. 

There Sara Garden Armstrong owns an old brick walk-up containing numerous loft spaces for artists – dozens have occupied them over the years, their names memorialized in the baseboards of ascending stairs – and Ground Floor Contemporary gallery, which presents thematically expansive and curatorially incisive exhibitions. An inventive conceptual artist as well as a stalwart of the Alabama art scene, Armstrong herself renders work in two and three dimensions that often explores the act of breathing, lest it be taken for granted.

Gallery director Jennifer Marshall is a scholar of art and library science and a discerning photographic artist, especially adept in her work at exploring the interplay of shape and color, line, and the effects of light over time. At her studio in Birmingham, we fastened onto a sublimely rendered print that captured the lighting as she walked through a submarine. In Marshall’s sitting room, Anne Herbert’s beautiful abstraction greeted us, and we were pleased to meet the artist – who also teaches at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, Birmingham’s outstanding free arts high school – at Armstrong’s for a terrific dinner that evening. We were surprised to find a small painting by Douglas Degges — one of Sharon’s colleagues in the MFA program at the University of Connecticut.

Jennifer, too, was at dinner, as was Brian Edmonds, who cleverly infuses casualist abstraction with a sense of illusionistic space and light. Brian curated “Eraser,” Sharon’s first show in Alabama that included many notable abstract painters. Guest also included Rebecca Tully Fullmer, a versatile multimedia artist whose studio we visited a couple of floors up; ace printmaker and UA professor Sarah Marshall; and her UA colleague Bryce Speed, a formidably freewheeling abstract painter, at once eclectic and original. Quietly preparing a stellar meal was installation artist Doug Baulos, an art professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham whose extraordinary work features the creation and use of textiles and dyes.

While we had the privilege of taking the full measure of Armstrong’s well-loved vertical compound, the Birmingham art scene boasts many other prepossessing venues, not least Scott Miller Projects, a pristine gallery that had on view Virginia-based painter Alison Hall’s uncannily trenchant narrative abstractions.

Sharon’s paintings returned from Tuscaloosa this week, except for San Miguel, which the gallery acquired for its outstanding collection of abstract painting. We learned that there’s plenty more to see down south — we’ll be back.

Click here for a PDf file of the exhibition catalogue for Sharon Butler: March