Combining world-class art and the great outdoors, the Great ARTdoors Festival presented tours of the artist-in-residence studios, art installations and demonstrations, visits to our farm with sheep and chickens and historic gristmill, an invitational show & sale of pottery and hand-made wares, U-Do-Raku, native plant sale and activities for children of all ages. As usual, we had plenty of live music, and served up fresh local food, featuring an old-fashioned pig roast plus food from our brand-new outdoor KNR Grill!

Click here to look at the photos of this gorgeous day at Hambidge.

This is the only time during the year when full access is granted to our protected creative sanctuary and artist studios. The 600-acre property, lovingly cared for by Hambidge since 1934, is home to seven miles of hiking trails, waterfalls, wildflowers, a swimming hole, and a number of historic structures including a working 67 year-old water-powered gristmill. All proceeds go towards the creative residency program and nature preserve.

Festival Highlights

Open Studio Tour & Talks with our distinguished artists-in-residence from across the South - Orlando, Knoxville, Chapel Hill, Charlotte, and Atlanta (see artist list below)

Art Hike – Hambidge Fellow and Board Member, Gregor Turk, will lead a hike to visit our growing collection of on-site art installations, the most recent by Rachel K. Garceau.

U-Do-Raku – choose a pot, glaze it yourself and have it fired to take home

Live Music featuring the folk, blues, and cosmic laments of Jake Xerxes Fussell, the New Orleans-inspired second line music of Groovemasters Brass Band, and traditional mountain bluegrass by Oliver Rice and the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys

An Old-Fashioned Pig Roast serving up our own Bar-B-Q alongside homemade veggie chili and local tasty provisions

Native Plant Sale and Kids’ Activities by Beech Hollow Wildflower Farm

Invitational Pottery & Handmade Objects Show & Sale featuring Hambidge Fellows and artists from across the region

Snake Handling and reptile & amphibian education by the Orianne Society

Activities for All Ages with grits grinding, sheep meeting, a bouncy house, face painting by Macon Faces, and art-making for everyone!

Artists

Lisa Alembik (Spring House installation)
William Downs (in residence)
Jake Xerxes Fussell (musician)
Rachel K. Garceau (on-site trail installations)
Groovemasters Brass Band (musicians)
Scott Hocking (on-site trail installation)
John C. Kelley (in residence)
Gracelee Lawrence (in residence)
Quoctrung “Kenny” Nguyen (in residence)
Oliver Rice & the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys (musicians)
Michael Murrell
Corrina Sephora (Silo installation)
LeAnn Siefferman (in residence)
Gregor Turk (on-site trail installation)

Project & Artist Descriptions

Lisa Alembik
For the festival Lisa Alembik created Hambidge Chairs, a mixed media installation in and around the Spring House.

Alembik’s academic interests are in social justice and sustainability issues. She recently took part in C4’s Hatch Program, which prepares “artists to work in community-centric art projects in ways that are both sustainable and meaningful to all involved.” In April of 2017 she chaired a panel titled “Considering Sustainability” at the Foundations in Art, Theory and Education Conference in Kansas City. In 2016 she organized two exhibitions, “Lightweight” at the Hambidge Center, and “This beautiful tangle” at the Dalton Gallery of Agnes Scott College. From 2002 until 2013, Alembik managed and directed the Dalton Gallery. She left Agnes Scott to teach full time and focus on her own artwork.

Alembik’s work focuses on architectural spaces that are charged with histories of both tenderness and violence, the effects of loving and loss on the fleshy body, and issues of women’s rights. Among the exhibits she participated in during 2016 was Kibbee Gallery’s “The Green Mantle,” named after a chapter in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and the “Garden of Unearthly Delights” at Whitespace Gallery.

William Downs
William Downs is a contemporary artist who focuses mainly on painting, drawing and printmaking. Born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina, Downs lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. He studied at the Atlanta College of Art and Design where he received his BFA in Painting and Printmaking in 1996. He received his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2003.

Downs has had exhibitions in the United States and abroad including the Nexus Biennial at the Nexus Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta, GA; Century Gallery in London, England; and Hammonds House Gallery in Atlanta, GA. He has had solo exhibitions at the Chattahoochee Valley Art Museum in La Grange, Georgia and at Mission Space in Baltimore, MD.

The Hambidge Center awarded William the Nellie Mae Rowe Distinguished Fellowship.

Jake Xerxes Fussell
Last year, entrancing guitarist and singer Jake Xerxes Fussell followed his celebrated self-titled debut with a critically acclaimed and moving new album, What in the Natural World, in the form of transmogrified folk/blues koans. This time these radiant ancient tunes tone several shades darker while amplifying their absurdist humor, illuminating our national, and psychic, predicaments.

Jake was awarded the Dust-to-Digital Scholarship at Hambidge.

Rachel K. Garceau
We are proud to present two outdoor ceramic installations by Rachel K. Garceau.

Graft began as an exploration of points of attachment and points of former attachment, both in nature and in Garceau’s life. Through the collection, casting, and assembly of branches, sticks, and twigs from places she has lived, she has intertwined the elements of her geographical history into a new interpretation of home.

When she first encountered the Hambidge lodge ruins two years ago, Garceau felt an impulse to mend the sections of the existing structure which had fallen, replacing the solid, fallen stones with hollow, porcelain forms. After learning more about the history of the site, she discovered that the intended building had never been completed. This new understanding added an important element to the work–not only is it a repairing of the past, it is an opportunity to continue to build upon the abandoned structure, each new stone, an opportunity for a different future. She incorporated both ideas in reclaim – (re)imagining an abandoned intention.

Garceau is a studio artist living and working in the Atlanta area and has been recognized as a 2015 Emerging Artist by the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts and one of 2017’s Women to Watch by the Georgia Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. She utilizes slip-cast porcelain forms to construct site-responsive installations. Her work is often born from a curiosity about an object or a place and a desire to come to a deeper understanding of it. She has been published in Studio Potter, Ceramics Monthly, and NCECA Journal, and also appears in CAST: Art and Objects Made Using Humanity’s Most Transformational Process.

Groovemasters Brass Band
The Groovemasters Brass Band is an 8-piece ensemble that plays traditional 2nd Line and contemporary New Orleans favorites. They’ll have you groovin’ along in no time.

Scott Hocking
Massa Confusa is a site-specific installation by Scott Hocking commissioned by Dashboard US in partnership with the Hambidge Center. The project was completed over the course of 5 weeks between June and August 2017, and opened under the direct path of the total solar eclipse. Based on ideas of chaos, prima materia, alchemical transformation, sacred geometry, creation mythologies, cosmogonies, numerologies, red clay, iron oxide, historical and ancient histories of Hambidge and the Blue Ridge Mountains, Cherokee and Mississippian cultures, ceremonial and archaeological sites, obscure objects of worship, and the varied symbolism of the terrapin, the installation incorporates numerous Platonic and Archimedean Solids, approximately 200 terra-cotta artifacts, and 1 burnt offering of the primordial egg (the Massa Confusa), to create a mystical sacred space in the temperate Appalachian rain forest of Rabun County, Georgia.

Scott Hocking was born in Redford Township, Michigan in 1975. He has lived and worked in Detroit proper since 1996. He creates site-specific sculptural installations and photography projects, often using found materials and vacant locations. His artwork has been exhibited internationally, including the Detroit Institute of Arts, Cranbrook Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the University of Michigan, the Smart Museum of Art, the School of the Art Institute Chicago, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Museum, the Mattress Factory Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Kunst-Werke Institute, the Van Abbemuseum, and Kunsthalle Wien.

John C. Kelley
Through cinematography and music, John C. Kelley works with ideas of memory loss, mental and emotional erasure, and other states of cognitive fracture. He continued developing a sound piece to be played from a collection of handmade speaker boxes.

Currently an Assistant Professor in Time-Based Arts at the University of Tennessee, Kelley is an actively exhibiting media artist and musician working in Knoxville, TN. His studio practice is centered in video and sound installation, but branches out into collaborative performance, film production, music for film and sculpture. Since 2015, he has shown his film and video art work at events in more than 20 countries. Highlights include the Barcelona International Short Film and Video Festival, Fuse Stockholm, Edinburgh Artists’ Moving Image Festival, Anti-Matter Media Art, and he was one of 3 US artists selected for the Tasmanian International Video Art Festival.

Gracelee Lawrence
Using a 3D scanner, Gracelee Lawrence collected objects that represent the history, mythologies, and modern day life of the South and combined them in sculptures that will be 3D printed during her residency.

Lawrence recently finished a year and a half as a Visiting Artist in the Multidisciplinary Department of Art at Chiang Mai University on a 2016-17 Luce Scholars Fellowship and completed her MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media at the University of Texas at Austin in 2016. Gracelee graduated from Guilford College as a Principled Problem Solving Scholar with an honors degree in Sculpture in 2011. She is a co-founder of Pig & Pony, founder of the Virtual Studio Visit Network, a contributing writer for the International Sculpture Center Blog and a member of the collective MATERIAL GIRLS.

Quoctrung “Kenny” Nguyen
Quoctrung “Kenny” Nguyen created a new series of paintings and installations. His work often explores the concept of cultural identity, integration, and displacement. Influenced by his Vietnamese cultural heritage and traditional art, he also has a background in fashion design, which has shaped his studio practice in creating art, especially in his use of materials such as silk.

Nguyen was born and raised in South Vietnam. In 2007, he received a BFA in Fashion Design from Vietnam National University of Art and Architecture. In 2015, he earned a BFA degree in painting at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has exhibited his works in many group exhibitions and solo exhibitions in the U.S and aboard including Japan and South Korea. In 2016, Nguyen received an Excellence Award for his painting exhibited in Asia Contemporary Young Artist Award Exhibition at Sejong Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea. In 2017, Nguyen is one of ten Vietnamese American artists was chosen to exhibit his works on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. In 2018, Nguyen’s Solo Exhibition titled ‘The Indescribable Fears’ was exhibited at Czong Institute for Contemporary Art Museum, South Korea.

Michael Murrell
Artist Michael Murrell brought his beautiful sculptural horns to Hambidge for the day! He made some fun sounds with them and gave visitors a chance to try it, too.

Corrina Sephora
Moontide Cytes installation emerged out of Corrina’s recent residency at the Hambidge Center consisting of Cells, Lunar, and Galactic concepts and imagery. The work is a mixed media meditation in the making, a creative process nurturing the space to heal, imagine, and recreate a connection while honoring the moment of a loved one's passing, a new existence within the universe is born. Moontide Cytes is intended to evoke the space of a journey, a voyage while paying homage to the Vikings and their rituals of sending the deceased to the next world. The Silo becomes the vessel for this voyage and incorporates the elements and surroundings of the water and sky into the piece, while we exist as a viewer on the earth.

Okori Johnson's cello music is incorporated to set the mood and to touch our senses and bring us into the space further. In his new album, Resolve, Okori aims to offer a healing balm of hope. He invites listeners to move beyond their pain into a new perspective.

Corrina Sephora received her BFA in Metals and Sculpture at Massachusetts College of Art, Boston Mass, in 1995. She received her MFA in Fine Arts and Sculpture in 2005 from Georgia State University. In 1997, after working professionally with artists and industry, she established her studio in Atlanta, specializing in metal sculpture. Her work has won many awards around the country, and is on permanent display at The Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site, the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, Greenfield Hebrew Academy, MOCA GA, and the King and Spalding Collection, among others. Corrina creates commissions for both public and private environments.

Leann Siefferman
LeAnn Siefferman had a two-month residency during which she collaborated with Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School to produce a series of clay works that prompted cross-cultural exchange amongst students on campus. For this, students will researched family history and cultural folklore, as well as their own personal values and beliefs. They examined pottery of past civilizations and what it has taught about ancient cultures. Students discussed these things with each other as they created their own pottery with illustrations that represent themselves.

Siefferman currently works as Program Coordinator for Crealdé School of Art and as a Sustainability Associate for the City of Orlando. She is completing a Graduate Certificate in Social Justice with additional course work in Sustainability from Harvard Extension School, and is a member of American’s for the Arts Emerging Leaders Network.

Gregor Turk
Phalanx, by Gregor Turk, serves to demarcate a section of the 35th parallel (Georgia/North Carolina border) with 17 convex security mirrors.

As a Georgian, a Southerner, and an American, Turk’s identity is partially defined by abstract lines drawn on maps— the 35th parallel, the Mason-Dixon Line, and the 49th parallel respectively. For this project, he wanted to provide hikers with a meaningful yet absurd encounter with a remote section of the Ga./N.C. border. The configuration of shield-like security mirrors is intended to mimic the dot-dot-dot motif often used for the symbol for boundaries found on maps.

Through his ongoing interest in borders, spatial delineation, and cultural markers, Turk’s work typically incorporates mapping imagery. In 1992, he traveled by foot and bicycle along and adjacent to the course of the world’s longest straight border—the 1,270-mile section of the U.S./Canadian border formed by the 49th parallel. That border is demarcated with a 20-foot wide clear-cut and a nearly a thousand boundary markers. His 49th Parallel Project resulted in international exhibitions and a documentary video broadcast on public television. Turk has permanent installations in airports, parks, a library and fire station. He received his B.A. from Rhodes College and his M.F.A. from Boston University.

Honorary Co-Chairs

Rick Berman and Jennie Ashcraft

Hosts

Platinum Possums Lucinda Bunnen + Wanda S. Hopkins + Melissa Bunnen Jernigan & James Jernigan + Belinda & Ken Reusch + Kirk Rich + Marcia Weber

Golden Eagles Michael Bishop & Shane Thomas + Sherry & Jeff Cohen + Judy & Scott Lampert + Paula Francis Rogers + Kathy & David Williams

Silver Foxes Lyn & Rick Asbill + Lucinda & Bob Chapman + Annette Cone-Skelton & Robert Hipps + Vicki Darrah + Robert DiFiore + Caroline Howell + Rosemary Magee & Ron Grapevine + Ruth West & Bob Wells + Woodie & Steve Wisebram

Bronze Bears Alecia Adair-Foltz & Doug Foltz + Judy Allison + Suzanne Arpin + Dirk Brown & Tim Burns + Becky & Tom Callahan + Kimberly Campbell + Catherine & Charles Colpitts + Erica DeChicchis + Margaret & Dallas Denny + Jesica & Brian Eames + Lisa Ezzard & Brooks Franklin + Elizabeth Feichter & Frank White + Greg Head + Ann & Tim Johnson + Beth Jones + Chris Lewis + Bari & Russell Love + Mo Kennedy & Beth Climo + Marianne Lambert + Margaret F. Patterson + Kay & Jim Polk + Saundra Robinson + Dawn & Tim Severt + Susan Todd-Raque + Gregor Turk & Murphy Townsend + Barb & Thom Williams + Susie & Lee Winton

The 2018 Great ARTdoors Festival

Festival Highlights

Artists

Project & Artist Descriptions

Honorary Co-Chairs

Hosts

Sponsors