February 22 - March 18
A Social Practice is a two-person exhibition that features paintings by Donna Woodley that address themes of social justice and prints by Noah Breuer that encourage a spirit of collaboration and community building.
Donna Woodley is a visual artist originally from Memphis, Tennessee. Her most recent works examine black culture and the black experience in conjunction with American culture. Woodley holds a BS in Studio Art from Tennessee State University in Nashville and MFA from Lesley University College of Art and Design in Boston.
She was named Nashville’s Best New Artist in 2016 by Nashville Scene magazine. Recent group exhibitions include shows at the Todd Art Gallery at Middle Tennessee State University, Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Monthaven Arts & Cultural Center, Hendersonville, Tennessee, University of Tennessee at Martin, and a solo show at SkyPAC Southern Kentucky Performing Arts Center, Bowling Green, Kentucky.
Donna Woodley resides in Nashville and is on the faculty at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee and Tennessee State University in Nashville.
Noah Breuer has also supplied three interactive stations where guests can create their own prints with crayon rubbings on Carl Breuer & Sons inspired wood cuts. There are two copies of the book, CB&S Frottage Book, that he published with Spudnick Press in Chicago based on rubbings from these tables.
This project investigates early twentieth-century domestic textile design in Europe and the Jewish-owned textile printing companies in Czech Bohemia and Moravia. My artwork responds to both their role within that economic and cultural landscape as well as their legacy. The case study for my research is “Carl Breuer and Sons” (CB&S), my family’s former textile printing business, founded 1897 in Bohemia. In 1939 the company was seized and sold to Nazi-approved owners along with all other Jewish-owned property in German-occupied areas. Most of my family members were murdered shortly thereafter, and the product of their work was lost. Through my research trips to the company’s archive of fabric samples and designs held at The Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, I have amassed a rich collection of primary source material in the form of digital scans depicting designs, and printed fabric and letters of correspondence. This archive has been my springboard for creating an array of printed works which not only tell my family’s story of persecution and emigration, but also raise questions about labor, authorship and appropriation.
Noah Breuer is an American artist originally from Berkeley, California. His creative work examines themes of family, identity, labor and diaspora. Breuer holds a BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design, an MFA from Columbia University and a graduate research certificate in traditional woodblock printmaking and paper-making from Kyoto Seika University in Japan.
His artist books have been published by the San Francisco Center for the Book, as well as, Small Editions in Brooklyn, New York. His work is in the permanent collections of the New York Public Library, the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Penn State University Altoona, Spring Hill College, Left Field Gallery in San Luis Obispo, California; SPACE Gallery in Portland Maine; and Spudnik Press in Chicago, Illinois.
Breuer currently works as an Assistant Professor at Auburn University.