|
HOWERTON LEIGHTTY
Please contact the gallery for purchasing information
Howerton Leightty graduated with an MFA from Indiana University in 1993. She has been featured in numerous exhibitions in museums, galleries, and cultural centers throughout the United States. She is also the recipient of various awards and honors, including: the 2002 Kentucky Arts Council FY 2002 Visual Arts Al Smith Fellowship; the Siegfried Weng Purchase Award from the 49th Mid-States Art Exhibit; a 1999 Research on Women Grant from the University of Louisville; and a 1996 Kentucky Foundation for Women Grant. In 1998 she was selected by the Kentucky Institute for International Studies to teach "Drawing in Italy." Her work is in public and corporate collections such as Evansville Museum of Art and Science, Fidelity Investments, Orvis Fly Shop, Inc., Trans Financial, Inc., and Jeffersonville Township Public Library. Leightty teaches drawing at the University of Louisville where she also developed and taught the University's first course on women in the visual arts. Her visiting artist appearances include "Transforming the Curriculum" (Women's History Conference, Kentucky State University, Frankfort, Ky.), and "Feminist Pedagogy in the Foundation Studio" (Foundarions in Art: Theory & Education Conference at the University of Virginia). Leightty has four children and lives in Louisville, Kentucky with her Sweetheart. Artist's Statement Eye of the Storm One of the most important things an artist can do is "pay attention." Making art demands that the artist pay attention to both the public external world and the private internal world in a way that most occupations do not. This exhibit is about one artist’s desire to pay attention and to communicate her observations&mdssh;observations about herself, observations about society, and observations about cultural relationships to the land. The ideas behind this work trace back to my childhood, when I first learned that American Indians did not view themselves as "owners" of the land they occupied. I was amazed to learn that land had not always been a product to be bought and sold. As I said in an earlier artist’s statement, for us the land has become "landscape" an object to buy, own, subdivide, decorate, and sell. It has become another form of merchandise: a thing to own and manipulate; a thing that needs our adornment to achieve its full potential for beauty; a thing we use as if it had no life before us and will have no life after us. The land has become our personal object of ownershiplike a work of art. That was the origin of the small drawings in this exhibit. But this is an unusual show in that you are seeing what appears to be two bodies of work. On the surface, they share little. But in fact, they are linked by my motivation to put into visual language my belief that humanity is suffering from an illusion of power over nature. I confess to being not overly concerned with manipulating the perception of the viewer. You may or may not read the language I have chosen. What I hope is that you will "pay attention" to the work in your own unique way. Howerton Leightty, 2006 |
