Professor of Art Lydia Thompson, former chair of the Department of Art & Art History, is the new Constellation CLT artist at the Mint Museum of Art. Constellation CLT is a solo exhibition series that features work by local artists. The installations rotate three times per year. Lydia Thompson: Travelers will be on view May 13 – September 4 in the museum’s uptown facility.
Trained as a ceramicist, Thompson is a mixed-media sculptor whose art explores “how we imbue objects with meanings and power and how places—both the landscape and the culture it contains—define who we are,” the museum’s exhibition description states. “As part of her research, Lydia Thompson seeks to immerse herself in a region’s art and architecture, teasing out its roots of color, line, and design.” The resulting works “distinctly speak to her own history and heritage as an African American woman in the United States, while also linking to universal associations of place and culture.”
Thompson’s work has been included in galleries, art centers, and museums such as the Society for Contemporary Crafts, Pennsylvania; Baltimore Clayworks; the Ohr O’Keefe Museum in Biloxi, Mississippi; the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft; Te Temauta Gallery in New Zealand; and Guldegaard in Denmark. She has completed public commissions for businesses, and her work is in private and public collections in North Carolina, Virginia, New Mexico, New Zealand, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy.
The Mint Museum will hold an opening reception for Lydia Thompson: Travelers on May 13 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. Thompson will speak about her work at 7:15 pm.