Art Professor’s Work in Mint Museum Exhibition

Work by Associate Professor of Art Thomas Schmidt will be in exhibition at The Mint Museum as part of the museum’s Young Affilliates’ fourth annual Coined in the South exhibition. The juried exhibition, which features established and emerging artists from the Southeast, will be on view at the museum’s uptown location from October 10 through February 16, 2020.

Schmidt, who teaches Interdisciplinary 3D Studio, is presenting Notebook Series, a collection of 20 notebook pages in cast porcelain (see detail above).

“Paper is a material I associate with the recording of our thoughts and questions; fleeting notes and scribbles that often fill the periphery of our lives,” Schmidt wrote in an artist statement. “On one hand we use paper and ink to visually chart space in the form of maps and blueprints, while at the same time we use paper to scribble out multitudes of seemingly unimportant lists. Regardless of the significance, paper captures traces of ourselves over time. By recreating notebook pages in porcelain, I hope to give a sense of permanence to these fleeting tactile experiences in a post-digital age. The imagery is loosely autobiographical, including scribbles and sketches from art school, as well as commercial floral decals from my time teaching in Jingdezhen, China. Like our own mutable sense of memory, disparate imagery might overlap, the focus can shift from crisp to blurry, and the content may range in degrees of coherence.”

Professor Emeritus Susan Brenner and art alumnus Austin Ballard are also exhibiting work in Coined in the South. For more information, please visit the Mint’s website.