The Yoknapatawpha Arts Council and the Department of Art & Art History presents the Annual Holiday Art Gala & Artist Drawdown, silent auction, general sale, local vendor booths, cash bar, & more!
DETAILS: November 30: 1-9 pm – Tickets sold from 1-8 pm. Drawdown begins at 8 pm.
• Artist Drawdown – Featured work by University faculty will be available for you to win! Tickets may be purchased for $20 each or 6 for $100 for a chance to win a piece of featured work of your choice! How does the Drawdown work?
A limited amount of tickets will be sold until 8 pm, Friday November 30th.
After that, the Drawdown will begin! A ticket will be called out and that lucky winner gets first pick of the featured artwork. Tickets will be drawn until all artwork has been selected and you can win more than once. This is your chance to win fantastic art for a great price, and you get to support the Department of Art & Art History!
• Silent Auction – Hand picked art set aside for you to bid on! The Silent Auction will end at 8 pm, Friday, November 30th
• Free Holiday Snacks – Our sponsored “Holidaze Punch” (FREE while supplies last) provided by CATHEAD Vodka. A cash bar will also be available.
• Local Vendor Booths – Come see what artists from around Oxford have to offer!
• General Sale – This will run throughout the event (Friday 11/30-Sunday 12/2) and will offer you the chance to snag some great work from across all mediums! Times: Friday, 1-9 pm, Saturday, 9 am-9 pm, Sunday, 12-5 pm
Drawdown Artists:
Brooke Alexander (Painter)
Brooke P. Alexander was born and raised in Athens, Alabama. She completed her BA in Studio Art with a minor in English in 2015 from Athens State University. She received her MFA in Studio Art with a concentration in Painting in May 2018 from The University of Mississippi. Her work has been shown regionally and nationally. She currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi, and is working as an adjunct instructor at The University of Mississippi.
Mike Cinelli (Ceramicist)
Mike Cinelli is a ceramic artist, father and occasional husband residing in Taylor, Mississippi. Born and raised in Ormond Beach, Florida; he first attended the University of Florida where his initial serious interest in clay began. After relocating to Mississippi, he received his BFA (ceramics) from the University of Mississippi in 2014. The following year, he filled a one year position as the Ceramic Studio Technician for the University of Mississippi.
His work has been displayed nationally and internationally in numerous juried and invitational exhibitions, with work displayed as far away as Skopelos, Greece, where he attended a one month residency at the Skopelos Foundation for the Arts. He has received various jury awards, including the Studio Potter Merit Award. He was featured in the August 2016 issue of Ceramics Monthly as a contributor to “From Idea to Finished Form”. Currently, he is attempting to juggle his studio practice, being a father and husband, and maintaining a rigorous schedule of complaining on the internet.
Philip Jackson (Painter)
The tenor feature of Philip R. Jackson’s work is his ability to take the common object and elevate it to an object of wonder. Jackson’s still life paintings have a pervasive sense of classicism in his deftly controlled and elegant arrangements, imbuing them with heightened worth and poetic presence.
An emerging force in contemporary realist painting, Philip R. Jackson’s work has been shown in many national and international juried, group, and solo exhibitions in more than nineteen states, is part of the permanent collections of art museums in Evansville and Fort Wayne, Indiana, and is in over thirty private collections nationwide.
His still life paintings have been featured in a number of premiere magazines, including, Art in America, Southwest Art, American Art Collector, and twice featured in American Artist, first as a cover story and recently in their Highlights issue. Jackson has received numerous awards for his paintings, in 2001, he received an international juried fellowship from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation in Montreal, Canada, and in 2008, he received an individual artist grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission, and a faculty research grant from The University of Mississippi. He recently celebrated his first major survey of paintings as the Martha and Merritt DeJong Memorial Artist-in-Residence at the Evansville Museum of Art in Evansville, Indiana.
Robert Malone (Painter)
Serving on The University of Mississippi faculty since 1997 as an Adjunct Assistant Professor, Robert Malone has taught beginning through advanced painting and drawing. Previous teaching experience includes three years as an adjunct at Middle Tennessee State University, teacher seminars, and Art League Workshops. Mr. Malone is a working artist who depends on his painting to provide the majority of his income. He brings life lessons to the classroom, with a strong traditional foundation and an open contemporary viewpoint.
His landscape paintings in oil capture the sublimity of nature; each canvas reveals the inherent spiritual reality of the beautiful world in which we exist.
William McKinney (Ceramicist)
His work in ceramics is experimental in nature and investigates function versus abstraction, and explores environmental changes that are happening across the country, specifically in his home state of West Virginia.
Durant Thompson (Sculptor)
Durant Thompson is an Associate Professor of sculpture in the Department of Art at the University of Mississippi. In 1997, Durant received a BFA in Sculpture from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and in 2001 he earned an MFA in Sculpture from Louisiana State University. He has also worked at The Johnson Atelier School of Technical Sculpture in New Jersey and at the University of Southern Mississippi as a technician and instructor before accepting his current position.
Recently Durant participated in national conferences giving panel presentations at the Southeastern College Arts Conference in New Orleans, LA and Charleston, WV. He has been the panel moderator for discussions at the 5th International Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art in 2006 at Telford, England and the 6th International Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art in 2010 at Kidwelly, Wales.
This past year Durant was asked to participate on the steering committees for the 2011 National Conference on Cast Iron Art at Sloss Furnace National Historic Landmark in Birmingham, AL and the upcoming 7th International Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art in 2014.
Brooke White (Photographer)
Brooke White is both a practicing artist and educator specializing in photography and video art. She received her M.F.A. from Cornell University and B.F.A from Alfred University, School of Art & Design. White has exhibited her photographs and videos nationally and internationally including the Hammer Museum, Mississippi Museum of Art and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. She was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in India and is a recipient of numerous Mississippi Arts Council Individual artist grants. Her work has been published in Aint Bad Magazine and Oxford American and is included in the Do Good Fund collection.
For two decades White has made work about the landscape. She sees it as a space that reflects much of what is taking place within the world, both on a macro and micro level. The conceptual framework of her projects is consistently driven by the politics of place, memory and time, and the role they play in establishing identity.
White resides in Oxford, MS where she is Chair, Professor of Art, Area Head and founder of the Imaging Arts area in the Department of Art & Art History. She also serves as affiliate faculty in the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies and Digital Media and Cinema minors at the University of Mississippi. 
