Feathers Fall, Grass Grows: Andréa Keys Connell

August 7 – October 5, 2019 | Geoffrey A. Wolpert Gallery

Andréa Keys Connell is an Associate Professor of Ceramics in the Department of Art at Appalachian State University. She is a former Fountainhead Fellow and served as the Head of the Clay Area in the Department of Craft/Material Studies at VCU from 2010-2017.

Andréa’s work has been featured in a number of national and international publications and she has widely exhibited her work. She has had 14 solo exhibitions in various galleries and museums since 2009, including The Florida Holocaust Museum and The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft. Andréa also works on large-scale public art commissions such as the See Also endowment commission with the Cleveland Public Library.

Along with exhibiting her work and teaching at App State, Andréa has taught workshops on figure sculpting at various craft schools across the country including Haystack, Arrowmont and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

My interest in commemorative objects, particularly the hidden narrative of figurines, has evolved through multiple bodies of work. I’ve approached figurines in different contexts – as monuments and as statuary, as representations of experience and as objects of scale. From this perspective I see figurines engaging in both private and in public narratives; they fit easily in the family china cabinet but they can depict an image a whole community might receive. At their most authoritative they would make their way to a community plinth, elevated and honored as a monument. I am interested in how figurines influence communities and homes, on what they conceal and what they reveal.
– Connell