Today we’d like to introduce you to Allison Meriwether.
Allison, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I grew up in a small rural town in Mississippi. We didn’t have art programs in my school until my junior and senior years of high school, but I was always artistically inclined, even though I didn’t have much guidance early on. My parents couldn’t afford to spend extra on art materials, and it was never a thought to use more than what I had readily available, so I strictly used writing pencils and printer paper to draw.
I enjoyed drawing people around me, sort of like documenting people and moments as realistically as possible. As high school graduation grew closer, no one talked to me about the future and what I envisioned mine looking like. Still, I knew I wanted art to be a significant focus of my adult professional practice. I vividly remember thumbing through career catalogs during school and seeing how thin the visual arts section was at the time.
My mother and I pulled together our inexperience at college applications and put together a piecemeal application to a college that had an art therapy program. I ultimately switched my major to studio arts after experiencing the process of painting for the first time my sophomore year. I didn’t know what I would do with a degree in Fine Arts, but doing anything else didn’t feel right.
Soon after I graduated, I got married and started teaching art in an inner-city school while my husband started medical school. I left teaching after two years to move to New York and start a master’s degree program in Fine Arts while my husband stayed in Alabama, where we were living to finish medical school, a second career for him.
We finished our programs within a few weeks of one another and relocated to Washington, DC. While my husband spent the next four years in residency at Georgetown, I continued teaching in low-income public schools before relocating to Tampa, FL, for my husband’s first fellowship.
I continued teaching while we lived in Tampa for three years but transitioned into professional studio practice for two years in Boston while my husband completed his second fellowship at Harvard. We relocated again to Knoxville, where we have lived for the last two years.
I continued my professional studio practice for the first year before starting back teaching this year in addition to my studio practice.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The largest obstacle I faced early on was a lack of artistic exposure and guidance as a young student. I clearly wasn’t deterred by it and opted to blindly follow a fervent desire to create despite not having a clue what I was doing. Nonetheless, it was an obstacle. I had to work diligently for years to catch up to where my college peers were artistic.
A professional roadblock I’ve repeatedly had to address has networking. Because of the frequency of our moves, I haven’t had the opportunity to settle into a local art market and art scene. Networking is a huge part of professional growth in a community and I’ve not stayed in one place long enough to reap the benefits of relationship building and networking with other artists.
The positive flip side is I’ve had various opportunities come my way that may not have occurred otherwise.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I am a representational oil painter and color pencil artist.
My current body of work, “Firsthand” is a group of drawings and oil paintings depicting hands accompanied by gold leafing. These paintings started as drawings from candid photographs that tell stories about a person’s identity, daily life, and purpose.
Most of my work is portraiture and figurative in some capacity.
Before we go, is there anything else you can share with us?
I have an upcoming show downtown on April 1st at Awaken.
Contact Info:
- Email: art.ameriwether@gmail.com
- Website: www.allisonmeriwetherart.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/a.merarts/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AllisonMeriwether.artist
