Felicia Belair-Rigdon

Felicia Belair-Rigdon
Lewes, Delaware, USA

STATEMENT

A focus on other-worldly concerns developed as a synergy from my early childhood experiences: The Church, the theater, and the drama of the auction house. Bringing together disparate imagery of art historical
references: angels, skydivers, bones, or twigs, for instance. The surface is worked over with diverse materials including gouache, oil pastels, and bole unifying and developing a painterly approach to paper. Old engravings are sometimes copied on rice paper and Japanese spirit money are favored additions, as is my grandfather’s marbleized endpapers. The use of my own artist-made paper adds to and is seen to create a more genuine quality to the pieces. It is all executed archivally.

BIO

Felicia Belair-Rigdon’s work has evolved through a concentration on collage incorporating hand-made paper. Entering national competitions served to include her artwork in juried shows in the mid-Atlantic region as well as on the West Coast. After graduation from VCU in 1963, she studied advanced painting at the Corcoran School of Fine Art at night school while employed full time in advertising at the Brown Companies, Weitzman, Dym & Associates and Washington Post. In 1990 she was juried into the Torpedo Factory Art Center where she maintained a studio for 22 years. During this time her work caught the attention of Julia Boyd, David Levy, Linda Norden, and Ann Cohen DiPietro jurors of note.

“A compelling combination of past and present”, New York critic Donald Kuspit remarked, “this is to me a central, contemporary and topical motif…which calls attention to vulnerability and mortality.” The artist was honored with Best in Show, Art Howard County 1993, the Howard County Arts Council. Steven Lanier of the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art stated “CreatorLifestories… subconsciously the allegorical mixed media collage challenges our sense of well-being in the context’s both spiritual and biological threat.”

The artist’s collage has been exhibited at The Baltimore Museum Of Fine Art, The Chrysler Museum, The Hemicycle at the Corcoran Gallery and The Peninsula Museum of Art, Belmont, CA. Felicia’s work is in the private collections of Warren Buffett, Brigette and Daniel Keaser, Stewart Glass, and the Children’s Inn, the National Institutes of Health to name a few. Dubbed an artist’s artist, Ms. Belair-Rigdon continues to create in her in-home studio in Lewes, DE. Assemblage art, a recent fascination, earned her a solo exhibition as a two-year winner of the Annual Fine Craft Exhibition at The Rehoboth Art League in Rehoboth Beach, DE.

ARTIST CONTACT

(302) 827-1059
[click to email]
www.civa.org

IMAGES