In partnership with Northwest Arkansas Community College’s 2019 Spring Arts & Culture Festival, please join us for a special lecture by artist Gaela Erwin. Erwin’s pastel painting Portrait of my Mother in her Wedding Dress and her series Self-Portrait with Blue Eyeshadow are featured in 21c Bentonville’s current exhibition The Future is Female.

> RSVP on Facebook here.

About the Spring Arts & Culture Festival
The Spring Arts & Culture Festival is an annual cross-campus, cross-disciplinary event at NWACC designed to encourage conversations about social issues, broaden understandings of culture, promote creativity and diversity, and to feature and promote the arts. The theme for 2019’s Spring Arts and Culture Festival is home – broadly construed. This year’s theme addresses home as place, local culture, home-making, displacement, alienation, local culture, diasporas, public-private divide, respite, and the body as home. For more on these four days of 2019 SACF events please visit: https://library.nwacc.edu/sacf2019/home

About the Artist
Born in a Franklin, Indiana Gaela Erwin grew up in various locations in the Midwest She was afforded an opportunity to take lessons at a young age from a portrait painter. Her B.A. is from the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio and an M.A. in Expressive Therapy from the University of Louisville. A summer program in Samos, Greece instructed by faculty from the New York Student’s Art League deepened her commitment to figurative realism.

She has been a recipient of numerous grants and residencies, including Yaddo, Mac Dowell, Oberflazer Kunstler, Germany, Tyronne Guthrie Center, Ireland, the Camargo Foundation Fellowship, France, among many others. Awards, to name a few, include a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptor’s grant, Outwin Boochever National Portrait Competition from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. with a Commendation Award, and the BP NPG 18 National Portrait Gallery in London with second place People’s Choice Award. Erwin has also exhibited nationally and internationally with two solo exhibitions at the Speed Art Museum, and others at the Huntsville Museum of Art, the Ogunquit Museum of Art, and galleries in Chicago, Tennessee, Germany and elsewhere in the United States.

Presently, Erwin has shifted from working in pastel to oils and continues to pursue feminist themes including an ongoing series of small portraits of men entitled: “Looking at men: Objects of Desire”. Psychological aspects and the interiority of her sitters are hallmarks of her work. Themes of mortality are distinguishing features throughout many of her paintings.