The Duckett Gallery in the Mary C O’Keefe Cultural Center is pleased to announce a new art exhibit starting April 10th entitled “Transformations: 3 Women, The Alchemy of Friendship: Clay, Paper and Fiber".

It started April 10th and will run through June 15th. The reception which is free and open to the public will be on April 21st 5-7pm. The center and gallery are open daily Monday- Saturday from 10-6pm and admission is free.

Claudia Cartee, Barbara-Ann Carver-Hunt and Amanda Lovitt-Call have been friends and fellow artists for over 25 years. They have seen each other's lives grow and change and those changes are reflected in their art works. These friends are once again showing their works together to present and reflect these experiential transformations.

Claudia Cartee has been a professional studio potter since 1973. “I grew up with clay. My parents were ceramic artists throughout my youth; my affinity for clay and my path through it began early.”

She received her BFA in ceramics from California State University at Fullerton. Claudia’s achievements include membership in the Craftsmen’s Guild of Mississippi for over 25 years, being featured in “From Our Hearts and With Our Hands” a guide to Mississippi Arts and Culture and included in a segment of “Southern Expressions” for public television in Mississippi. Her impressive work has merited a scholarship to study at Penland School of Crafts and an Artist Fellowship Grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission in 1989 AND 2011. Claudia notes that receiving the 2011 Mississippi Arts Commission fellowship has helped fund her work and therefore participation in this exhibition.

About her work she states, “I am inspired by the infinite beauty of the natural world, observing its offering of color, shape, and texture. I am also stimulated by the history of man’s response to that world through his creative, artistic endeavors, both ancient and modern, conscious and unconscious.

These connections have been long represented in clay; and as a potter, I revere the classical forms to be found in the ancient works of various cultures. These forms appear and reappear throughout history. I expect their reappearance in my work. I love the potters’ wheel and I also love hand building. I see these two aspects of clay as complementary in the creation of form and I often use both methods and enjoy combining them. This juxtaposition of differing elements, opposing aspects of the clay or of design, are often found in my work. I carry this idea of contrast further with the use of texture and glazing.

The new series of wheel thrown and altered jars in this show were inspired by river canyons and river rocks that I loved and pondered recently on a trip out west. I am amazed by Nature’s display of rock formations and especially the variety of textures and shapes from canyon walls to riverbeds.”

Claudia also exhibits her work in the gift shops at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs and the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi.

Canadian born artist Barbara-Ann Carver-Hunt received her BA-Honors degree in English at Marianopolis College, University of Montreal. Graduate study continued in English literature at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario with additional post baccalaureate work in sculpture, ceramics, printmaking and drawing at California State University-Hayward, and with sculpture/printmaking at the University of Houston. She completed her MFA in sculpture at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Carver-Hunt has served as visiting faculty for the University of Southern Mississippi and as the C.W. Woods Art Gallery Director. She has acted as core faculty artist, planning educational opportunities in the arts for the Forrest County Detention Center and Pine Belt Adolescent Offenders Program to name a few programs that benefited from her artistic and teaching expertise.

Carver-Hunt has exhibited her work consistently for 25 years in biennial solo exhibitions and multiple yearly group invitational and juried exhibitions.

Consistent themes in her work explore women’s journeys, montages of artistic forms, interior vision, and universals in mythology.

A dominant figure in her work, Trickster, “embodies that element of Change and Transformation so essential to growth and life. It is the Trickster who shows us that life itself not only allows, but is rooted in paradox and will, sooner or later, manage to defy our most precious intentions, expectations and conceptions. Trickster if the Holy Fool, roguish, unpredictable and incomplete but fiercely tender and wise. Sometimes male, sometimes female, often both at once S/He symbolizes reality. S/He is both the pathfinder and the path, the often blundering and gauche way we must inevitably fumble our growth.” Trickster invites us to open ourselves to a larger vision of Life, above and beyond the field of our self-interest, beyond our contrived and static idea of how things are supposed to be!” Like her personification of Coyote, “among the peoples of the Woodlands, Plains and the Southwest…a powerful being, both human and animal,” Barbara-Ann conveys through her art a strong sense of the sacred, of what it means to be a teacher, to serve as a messenger from the Creator. Listen now as the artist invites us to hear Coyote whispering, “I am the cry you hear in the black and soundless night. I disperse myself in the morning mist. I am part of the Mystery that you refuse to recognize. I am waiting for you. For you must change or be changed so that you may come to not fear your dreaming. Blessed be.”

Amanda Lovitt-Call fell in love with art and textiles as a child. A master weaver introduced her to the loom in 1974 and she has been weaving structures of color and light ever since. Her design skills were honed at Parson’s School of Design in New York and Pacific Basin School of Textile Arts in California. Amanda has been a weaver, textile artist and teacher of fiber design for the last two decades.

She looks to the past to the women weavers of ancient civilizations who fashioned functional fabrics for beauty’s sake alone. She works in honor of her mother, grandmother, and all those weavers who came before her and all those still working in primitive conditions to produce the “shining cloths”. Amanda’s “shining cloths” are woven with undulating surfaces that shimmer with reflective strands and create illusions of light. “When I am weaving, I am in a world of rhythm that empowers me. It is a life-fulfilling endeavor, especially upon completion when the strength of my creative abilities gains a confidence which sustains me.”

Amanda has been a recipient of numerous awards and grants which include; the John Arthur Payne Grant for a glass/ fiber installation, a Certificate of Excellence in the Fiber Arts Show in San Francisco on two separate occasions, the Peter R. MacArthur Grant to study at Parson’s at Lake Placid, New York, “fellow status” with the Mississippi Craftsmen’s Guild, the Samuel and Flora Taylor Foundation grant to create “glass weavings” of 600,000 glass beads for an installation at the one of the Pavilions in Indianapolis, special study with ShaShaHigby, a world-renowned artist/performer of textures of movement through multi-layered costume and sculpture of textures, the Mississippi Chapter of the National Museum of Women in the Arts “Honored Artist” of 2009.

Her work has been exhibited in the Wacoal Ginzu Art Space in Tokyo and she has work in many collections in not only the United States, but also England, France and South America.