The Adams State University Cloyde Snook Gallery will host Intimate Strangers, an art exhibit by Jason Watson from February 18 through March 17. Watson’s artist lecture begins at 4 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 18, in the Art Building room 227, an opening reception will follow. For more information contact the Art Department at 719-587-7823.
Watson, a mixed-media artist and educator, combines interests in the figure, found objects, and text as visual material. His work has been shown at galleries, universities, and non-profit spaces including the drawing installation "Q" at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC, the group exhibition "Following Threads" at the Greenhill Center for North Carolina Art in Greensboro, and the contemporary drawing survey "Line ,Touch, Trace" at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh.
His artist residencies over the past several years include the Newark Museum of Art, Cooper Union Emerging Artist Residency Program, the Lower East Side Printshop, the Elsewhere Artist Collaborative in Greensboro, NC, the Ragdale Foundation in Chicago, and the Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus in Schwandorf Germany. Most recently Watson was awarded the first Wesley Mancini Artist Residency at the McColl Center for Visual Art + Innovation in 2013. He has presented papers and projects at national academic conferences including "Creating in the Queer Diaspora", a study of LGBTQ creative production in non-urban areas with Queer Caucus for Art at the College Art Association.
As an art educator, Watson has taught a wide variety of drawing, painting, and printmaking classes and workshops over the past decade at colleges, universities, and arts non-profits. He was an assistant professor and area head for drawing at Appalachian State University from 2008 – 2013 and currently teaches at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, NC. He is also the visual art manager for Community School of the Arts, a non-profit that provides studio art classes to underserved youth in urban Charlotte neighborhoods.
Watson has also worked as a graphic and exhibitions designer for the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York and has served on fellowship committees for the New York Foundation for the Arts. His recent mixed media collages and works on paper focus on studies of the "notional" and chance encounters with objects, figures, patterns, and images that confound or explode narrative suggestion when placed together on the same page. Watson is currently working on a new drawing series and a mixed media installation for upcoming solo exhibitions in 2016 and 2017.
For more information on Watson, visit jwatsondrawing.com.
The Adams State Art Galleries are open from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays. Starting February 20, the galleries will be open from 11 a.m. until 4 p.m. on Saturdays.
