Maritza Dávila is Professor Emeritus at the Memphis College of Art where she was professor of fine arts and the head of printmaking. She began teaching there in 1982 and received the Klyce Family Fund Benjamin Goodman Faculty Award in 2018 for her long service to MCA. She is currently teaching printmaking at the University of Memphis.
She has exhibited around the world and has works in collections in the United States, Europe, the Caribbean and Asia. She has received awards in the United States, Puerto Rico and France. Her work is included in collections at the National Library in Madrid, Spain; the National Library of Paris France; Taller ACE of Buenos Aires, Argentina; Mu-seum of Art and History at the University of Puerto Rico; and the National Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., among others.
She is owner of the Atabeira Press studio. She was also a visiting artist at University of Bilbao, Spain in 2011 and the School of Fine Arts of the Institute of Culture of Puerto Rico among others. Residencies include Taller ACE in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2011 and Illinois State University’s Normal Editions in 2016.
Carl E. Moore was born in Canton, Mississippi and currently lives and work in Memphis, Tennessee as an artist. He attended the Memphis College of Art where I received his BFA and MFA.
His most recent work deals with identity and color. During this process his goal is to compare social ideologies about race, stereotypes, and personal beliefs to everyday colors and the perception of these colors in the environment. As part of this process, he found that Black has always been a color of identity for Black people, Black American, African American, etc. Just as White, for Caucasian or those of Anglo or European descent, and Brown for the South and Central American population.
The color black has always had a negative representation for being compared to death, bad or poor quality and even race. He's taken the color black and made it the narrative, and used it as part of the emotional conversation. The goal is to make the dialogue more about the content of the artwork and less about the color of the characters, even though the characters are part of that narrative.
He use's media-based events as the primary theme of his work, by taking those situations and reducing them down to their most basic form, it allows him to direct the narrative. Color and content redefines the conversation by developing a social connection between the characters and their environment. The color becomes an important part of that dialogue, and the content becomes part of the social statement.
