Mike Holsomback "Faces and Things" Opens Friday 4/2

opening night reception friday, april 2 5pm - 8pm

 a b o u t    t h i s   e x h i b i t

“Myths are stories of our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance. We all need to tell our story and to understand our story...and we all need help in our passage from birth to life and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are.” Bill Moyers here speaks of our birth to death search for personal identity and the help we all need to find that identity. We are born into; raised within; guided toward; pushed toward personal and cultural identities which may remain with us for our entire lives. They become part of the story of our lives, and then the myths which we each create for ourselves, complicates the narrative further. The subjective modern myth and the search for personal identity within 21st century are the themes I will explore further in this new series of paintings. The works in this series were made possible in part by a grant from Create|Here.

a b o u t    t h e    a r t i s t

Holsomback is a well-known artist and art department faculty member at Chattanooga State Community College in Chattanooga, Tennessee. While being the primary painting instructor at Chattanooga State, Mr. Holsomback is also a productive painter himself, having a considerable regional and national exhibition record.  His work has been selected for exhibitions in such venues as: the San Diego Art Institute, the University of Mobile, the Stage Gallery in Merrick, NY, the Huntsville Museum of Art in Huntsville, AL, and Nassau College in Nassau, NY. Mr. Holsomback’s paintings and collages are found in the holdings of numerous private, corporate and government collections, including most notably, the corporate law offices of King and Spalding of Atlanta, GA, and the Park Avenue offices of Dr. Jacqueline Dryfoos of New York, NY. He continues to live in north Georgia with his wife and a houseful of rescued cats and dogs, teaching, painting and observing the changing world around him.

Born in rural north Georgia in 1961, Michael Holsomback is the self described son of a son of a white sharecropper, as his father’s parents lived in a string of depression era sharecropper shacks. The fields may have been segregated but the poverty was colorblind. It is through his own veil of poverty, and the illnesses which arise within it, that Holsomback has sharpened his vision as a painter. He has seen and participated in the long and often painful journey of southern cultural evolution.  Holsomback’s passion for art developed early, fostered by the sacrifice and support of his parents, he earned a MFA degree in painting in 1989, and began his teaching career shortly thereafter.