May, June, and July Gallery Exhibitions at Pullen Arts Center

Pullen Art Center's new May, June, and July Exhibitions feature work from Betty McKim, Emily Rubin Malpass, Hannah Schneider, Jane Cheek, Janine LeBlanc, Joanna Moody, Lillian Jones, and Patrizia Ferreira.

Artwork will be on display from May 4 through July 28, 2024. A closing reception will be held at Pullen Arts Center on Saturday, July 27, from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. 

Exhibition Artwork

Photos coming soon.

About the Artists

Betty McKim

Betty McKim’s jewelry is about structure and shapes with movement. Textural surfaces embellish the forms and give each piece a unique quality. The work is about keeping complexity, composition, and beauty interesting while creating visual movement and whimsy within the piece.  Each piece is fabricated primarily from silver with gemstones and gold accents. The oxidized satin finish gives depth and creates value contrast. It also highlights and defines textured surfaces. McKim’s inspirations are reflections of visual editing and the abstracting of nature and her surroundings. The spoke shape has an energy that radiates and reminds her of an industrial flower, spinning wheel or sunburst. McKim restructures and abstracts this shape, as it appears throughout her work. The work is always a sensitive combination of restraint and indulgence. The multiplicity and repetition of shapes and textures are layered, clustered, tangled, and or isolated. The elements and forms move mimicking the rhythms of nature. The object can be playful and sensuous as it takes on a life of its own. Each piece is carefully executed and timeless in design. Each piece is hand fabricated combining various metalsmithing techniques. McKim particularly enjoys the process of making a series of parts and then composing them in a harmonious way.

Website: bettymckim.com

Emily Rubin Malpass

Emily Rubin Malpass is a teaching artist and community organizer living in Raleigh, NC. She has worked with clay for three decades, including at UNC-Chapel Hill, many workshops at Penland School of Craft, and as a teacher at Pullen Arts and The Joel Fund. She seeks to empower students at every age, stage and ability level to find their way with clay, emphasizing the enjoyment of process when working with one’s own hands. . After a hiatus from making work in clay during pregnancy and early parenting years, she found renewed inspiration and creative play as a student in other media, especially printmaking and letterpress printing, sewing and fiber art; she once again enjoys taking her time at the wheel, especially with an ongoing series of beautiful and fussy lidded containers. Her current work is driven by her curiosity about the relationships among these materials and everything she does.

Website: emilyrubinmalpass.com
Social Media: @milly_malpass

Hannah Schneider

Hannah Schneider is from Raleigh, North Carolina. She is a first-year student in Duke’s Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts program. Since discovering the darkroom in 2021 as an undergrad at Meredith College, Schneider has fallen in love with the experimentality of creating work there. Her work merges analog and digital photographic practices, transcending the line between photography and digital art. Schneider has had work published in The Colton Review (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023), presented in the DISRUPT Exhibition (2023), SPE International Combined Caucus Juried Exhibition (2024) and SPE Juried Members Exhibition (2024), and was a finalist for Photolucida’s 2023 Critical Mass. She is passionate about using photography to push the boundaries of the media and create narratives that make visible what cannot be seen. With her work, Schneider hopes to create captivating, personal pieces that leave the viewer in contemplation.

Website: hannahgschneider.com

Jane Cheek

Jane Cheek was born in Winston-Salem, NC and earned a BA in Art Studies from NC State University. She later obtained a K-12 Visual Arts Education certification from East Carolina University and recently pursued public art studies under the mentorship of public artist, David Wilson. Self taught in installation art, Cheek combines her interest in painting, sculpture, and textiles to create work that is both monumental and delicate.

Cheek’s work includes commissions at the North Carolina Museum of Art, outdoor art installations for Artsplosure and Downtown Raleigh Alliance, and a large-scale, immersive installation for IBMA Live! - an international bluegrass festival in Raleigh, NC.

Website: janecheek.com
Social media: @jane.the.artist

Janine LeBlanc

After earning a BFA in Graphic Design from Massachusetts College of Art in 1976, Janine LeBlanc worked for more than 20 years in the design industry. In 2000, she enrolled in the graduate program at the College of Design at NCSU intending to design fabric but found museum work instead. After exploring many different textile techniques, she returned to beadweaving in 2013 and to creating compositions in 2018. The Artist lives in Raleigh and recently retired from the Gregg Museum of Art & Design.

Website: beanwhite.crevado.com

Joanna Moody

Joanna Moody is a teaching artist working in Raleigh, NC. With a Visual Arts degree in Collage Mixed Media from UNC Asheville, her practice is historically rooted in materials exploration with a strong lean toward figurative narratives. Her current work is influenced by newer interests in printmaking and more abstracted imagery often inspired by familiar daily observations and an appreciation of the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary. She uses her art making process to explore her intuitions, challenge her assumptions, and better understand her experience. Joanna enjoys teaching as an opportunity to introduce new techniques to students and watch them engage their natural creative decision making- to encourage play, thoughtfully.

Website: joannamoody.com
Social Media: @josabode

Lillian Jones

Lillian Jones makes precision crafted art jewelry in silver, gold and enamel. Enameling is the medieval art of applying colored glass to metal, which is currently enjoying a resurgence among jewelry craftsmen and collectors. It is a difficult craft to master, and through years of diligence and experimentation, she has learned to produce very fine examples of this beautiful technique. The luminous quality of colored leaded glass layered over highly polished silver is rare and durable, creating small masterpieces that will become heirlooms with the passage of time.

In the tradition of the medieval artisans, each piece is more than jewelry, but reflects an artist's effort to make an object that has subtle meaning and connects the wearer with a sense of the magic present in daily life. Her pendants and earrings are small wearable art pieces that are portals into the deeper worlds of the imagination.

She has also been fascinated by the symbolism in Tarot cards, and has been working on a series of Tarot illustrations in the media of silver and enamel. She has been awarded several prestigious Saul Bell Awards for her enamels.

Website: lillianjonesdesigns.com

Patrizia Ferreira

Patrizia’s work laboriously incorporates the debris of her surroundings namely, textiles and plastic, creating poetic pieces that speak of our society of over consumption, and the state of our environment. By giving life to otherwise inanimate materials, making something beautiful of the discarded, she invites the viewer to reflect upon our actions and the repercussions on our planet. Patrizia Ferreira received a bachelor’s degree in textile design from the Institute of Industrial Design in Montevideo, Uruguay and a Master of Science degree in textile design for prints from Philadelphia University (currently Thomas Jefferson University). She is an artist and educator living in Raleigh.

Website: patriziaferreira.com
Social Media: @patriziaferreira