Greater Columbus: The 2024 Greater Columbus Arts Council Visual Arts Awards Exhibition
Columbus Museum of Art
Located in Upper Level Walter Wing
On view August 2–December 1, 2024
Admission Information
Greater Columbus: The 2024 Greater Columbus Arts Council Visual Arts Awards Exhibition is included with the cost of general admission.
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Exhibition Description
Greater Columbus features work by artists in central Ohio who have been recognized for their outstanding talent. Presented biennially, the exhibition represents a continuing partnership between the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) and the Greater Columbus Arts Council (GCAC). Featured artists for the 2024 exhibition include Dillon Beck, Brett Davis, Marsha Mack, and Alek Shabazz.
On behalf of GCAC, a jury of distinguished arts professionals working outside the region awarded the 2023 Visual Arts Fellowship to Beck, Davis, Mack, and Shabazz. Working in various media, these four artists represent a diverse range of practices fostered within the region’s artistic community.
Jurors for the 2023 Visual Arts Fellowship Awards were Lily Siegel, Executive Director of Hamiltonian Artists in Washington, D.C.; Kurt Mueller, Senior Director of Marian Goodman Gallery in Los Angeles; and a third juror who wishes to remain anonymous.
Through this partnership, the museum and GCAC support the arts and advance cultural development in the Columbus area. GCAC’s Visual Arts Fellowship program was established in 1986. Since the inception of the program, hundreds of artists have received awards in a variety of disciplines, including the visual arts, crafts, film and video, creative writing, music composition, and choreography/movement arts.
About the Artists
Brett Davis, Sayaka Saito Davis, and Toko Davis, Love Like an Ocean, 2023. Used clothing, acrylic, tape, glitter on photographs
Brett Davis
Brett Davis is a father, partner and artist based in Ohio. He holds a BA in American Studies from Georgetown University and an MFA in Visual Art from the Ohio State University.
Davis’ art practice draws connections between artmaking and fatherhood through explorations of love, care, joy, domestic space, intergenerational relationships, and transnational possibility. He collaborates closely with his four-year-old child, Toko, as a method to disrupt the hierarchies of family, empower a young child and himself and translate the experience of parenthood into visual art. The results of their making take the form of expansive, materially rich intermedia installations and self-published artist books.
Davis is the recipient of the 2023 Greater Columbus Arts Council and Columbus Museum of Art Visual Artist Fellowship. His books are held in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University (New Haven, CT), Brooklyn Museum Library (Brooklyn, NY), The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs in the New York Public Library (New York, NY), The Museum of Modern Art Library (New York, NY), The Ohio State University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library (Columbus, OH), Tokyo Photographic Art Museum Library (Tokyo, Japan) and Whitney Museum of American Art Special Collections (New York, NY).
Dillon Beck, Uncertainty, 2023. Aerosol on cradled wood panel
Dillon Beck
Dillon Beck is a contemporary painter, muralist, and designer based out of Columbus, Ohio. His work has always found its footing somewhere in the realm between analog and digital; between the real and the impossible. With a keen eye for detail and a vibrant imagination, Dillon creates paintings that transport viewers to ethereal worlds – a place you’ve never been that somehow feels oddly familiar.
Marsha Mack, Happy/Sad, 2023. Glazed ceramic and mixed media
Marsha Mack
Marsha Mack holds an MFA in Ceramics and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Women’s and Gender Studies from Syracuse University, and a BFA in Ceramics from San Francisco State University. Working primarily in ceramic and found objects, Marsha’s artistic practice blurs the line between sculpture and grocery shopping. Her ongoing interest in cultural consumption and the formation of identity serves as wellspring for embellished objects and installations that play to the subconscious, honoring playfulness and introspection as equals. Marsha is the Director of Fresh A.I.R. Gallery and SEEN Studios, an Adjunct Professor of Ceramics at The Ohio State University, an instructor at The Priscilla R. Tyson Cultural Arts Center, and a practicing artist who has presented projects and exhibitions with the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (Denver, CO), Black Cube Nomadic Museum (Englewood, CO), The Galleries of Contemporary Art (Colorado Springs, CO), and Skylab (Columbus, OH), among others. Marsha was the 2022 summer artist in residence at The Priscilla R. Tyson Cultural Arts Center, and a 2023 Fall Artist in Residence at The Columbus Printed Arts Center.
Alek Shabazz, you drank till I was empty, 2023. Oil pastel and colored pencil on paper
Alek Shabazz
Columbus-based artist Alek Shabazz, also known as Fiō, is a multimedia disciplinary whose practice engages a wide range of materials from silk screen printing to photography. She believes that dreams are a representation of self-reflection and evaluation, meaning anything we have psychically possessed is never completely gone. With this in mind, she seeks to explore the connection between dreams and memory and how that affects how we interact with the world and, more importantly, ourselves.
