CHARLESTON, S.C., November 22, 2022 – The Gibbes Museum of Art is pleased to announce the 2022 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art finalists T.J. Dedaux-Norris, Raheleh Filsoofi and Sherrill Roland. This annual $10,000 cash prize is awarded by the museum’s young professionals’ auxiliary group, Society 1858, to one artist whose work demonstrates the highest level of artistic achievement in any media, while contributing to a new understanding of art in the South.
“The 1858 Prize exemplifies artists at the forefront of contemporary Southern art, and this year’s three finalists were chosen out of an outstanding group of over 220 candidates,” says Angela Mack, executive director of the Gibbes Museum of Art. “We continue to be overwhelmed by the talent of these artists and the stories they tell through their work.”
T.J. Dedeaux-Norris is a mixed-media artist who employs painting, fiber, performance, video and music to explore the somatic impacts of racial, gender and class socialization. Dedeaux-Norris’s work poses a philosophical inquiry into the distinction between self and other, with the body as a social microcosm of dynamics to observe and question. Their embodied practice extends beyond the studio where they develop performances, edit video, sew textiles, assemble installations and paint into a life-wide investigation of collective identities and how that manifests in the body and its labor over time. Dedeaux-Norris completed their bachelor’s degree at the University of California at Los Angeles, received a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University and is now a tenured associate professor at the University of Iowa.
Raheleh Filsoofi is an interdisciplinary artist who covers a vast amount of experiential, geographical and conceptual ground on issues of land, ownership and immigration to spur questions about identity, inhabitancy and belonging. Her works create a holistic sensory experience by utilizing ancient and contemporary technology in ceramics with poetry, ambient sound and video, and she has a deep appreciation of clay as both a plastic material and a source of metaphorical content from her upbringing in Iran. Filsoofi holds a Bachelor of Fine Art in ceramics from Al-Zahra University in Tehran, Iran and a Master of Fine Art from Florida Atlantic University. Currently, she is an assistant professor of ceramics in the Department of Art at Vanderbilt University.
Sherrill Roland’s practice deals with concepts of innocence, identity and community, reimagining their social and political implications in the context of the American criminal justice system. Roland’s right to self-determination was lost to a wrongful incarceration, and after spending ten months in prison for a crime he was later exonerated for, he returned to his artistic practice which he now uses as a vehicle for self-reflection and an outlet for emotional release. Converting the haunting nuances of his experience into drawings, sculptures, multimedia objects, performances and participatory activities, Roland shares his story and creates space for others to do the same, illuminating the invisible costs, damages and burdens of incarceration. Roland studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture after receiving his Bachelor and Master of Fine Art from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Published November 22, 2022