TRACI STOVER

BETTY PRESS

ANDREA KOSTYAL

ABOUT THE ARTISTS


Traci Stover was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She earned a B.F.A. in Painting and Drawing at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing at The American University in Washington D.C. She taught at the University of Southern Mississippi from 1999-2019.

Ms. Stover's paintings, drawings and prints explore forms that are meaningful to her on both a narrative and structural level. These include eyes, bugs, flowers, rocks, and bones. She is always exploring the relationship between the image, medium and compositional structure. 

TRACI STOVER

Betty Press is a fine art photographer. She is well known for her photographs taken Africa where she lived and traveled for many years. This work placed in Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50. Now living in Hattiesburg, Mississippi she has a new project using vintage and toy cameras about living in Mississippi.

In 2011 she published an award winning photobook I Am Because We Are: African Wisdom in Image and Proverb which portrayed a stunning, life-affirming portrait of the African people and culture. In 2012 she received a statewide award in photography, from the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters and in 2013 a Mississippi Visual Artist Grant.

Her photographs have been widely exhibited, collected as well as selected for many juried competitions. In 2015 her Mississippi photos were added to the collections of the Mississippi Museum of Art and The Do Good Fund (Southern Photography Initiative).  She received an award of excellence for her Mississippi photos in the Mississippi Collegiate Art Faculty Juried Exhibition. 

Lens Culture, Silvershotz magazine, South x Southeast, Lenscratch, ACurator, RfotoFolio, Art Photo Index, John Wall’s Southern Photographer and Women in Photography International (WIPI) have all featured her work.

She is represented by Panos Pictures, London; Photographic Image Group, Portland, Oregon; International Visions, Washington, DC; Fischer Galleries, Jackson, Mississippi; and One Off Contemporary Art Gallery, Nairobi, Kenya.

BETTY PRESS

My dreamlike paintings are inspired by urban landscape and nature that reflect experiences from my childhood and young adulthood. I grew up in a small town in Europe where playing outdoors and gardening was commonplace. Later, I studied art and textiles in an artistically and culturally rich city in Hungary filled with beautiful historic buildings and architectural masterpieces. My craving and memories of dynamic city life, the sense of the streets’ atmosphere suggests that my paintings investigate the natural environment and their connections with man-made structures in harmony.
I enjoy careful planning of my detailed collaged and transferred photographs of street views as viewpoints in my paintings. They contain constructed forms between grids. These grids simultaneously connect shapes and forms along horizontal and vertical lines, like woven tapestry, creating rhythms, a sense of depth and visual spacing between detailed or compendious forms. Playful bubbles permeate the whole painting in poetic movement on the canvas, reflecting my feelings and moods.
In my most recent New Normal series that I have created during the COVID-19 pandemic figures wearing masks appear in my cityscapes as it became a new norm in our everyday lives. My goal through my art is to encourage viewers to stay positive and most importantly united. My primary concerns are to find peace in our emotional struggles and in our adaptation to new challenges that we may have never experienced before.

ANDREA KOSTYAL