Barbara Yontz, Instructor Fine Art, Watkins College of Art at Belmont UniversityBiographyA former Professor of Visual Art at St. Thomas Aquinas College, New York, with an MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College, currently teaching in the MFA program at Watkins College of Art at Belmont University. Additional Master's degrees in Art History from Vanderbilt University and Art Education from the University of South Florida expand interests and teaching to those disciplines as well. Splitting time between Manhattan and Nashville, her art practice is diverse in concept and media.
Since 2013 a project with a group of men living in Unit 2 on Death Row at Riverbend Maximum Security Prison in Nashville, TN has shifted artistic interests to ones related to these men, prison education and prison reform. In addition to work inside the prison, the project yielded a number of exhibitions including, Unit 2 Voices: Artwork from Death Row, at St. Thomas Aquinas College in September of 2015. Recent individual work includes a group of drawings, The Love Letter Series, conceived as individual letters to each of these 11 men of Unit 2. A recently published article written with Tom Williams and Robin Paris, Matters of Life and Death: Art, Education, and Activism on Death Row was recently published in a book titled, Higher Education and the Carceral State: Transforming Together, edited by Annie Buckley for Routledge Press. This article documents our process through this collaboration with the men in Unit 2 and beyond. Previous exhibitions include: Vanderbilt University and the Frist Museum, Nashville; the Phoenix Gallery, New York; the Jose Marti National Library, Havana; the Boston Museum School; and the Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences, NJ. https://vcfa.edu/stories/barbara-yontz-2004-mfa-in-visual-art/
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PRISON ART PROJECTCollaborative Projects with men in prisonThese pieces represent collaborations with different individuals living in Unit 2, the death row unit, at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tn.
Over a period of weeks one person would begin a drawing or sculpture and pass it off. We would then respond to each other through drawing. Names of those incarcerated have been abbreviated at the request of TDOC and victims services. |
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