Artist Biographies for Carnegie Classics: To Kill A Mockingbird
1. Ron Davis
Ron Davis (aka Upfromsumdirt) was awarded an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship in 2009
from the Kentucky Arts Council. The award program recognizes and supports Kentucky
professional artists who are producing work of creative and artistic excellence.
He could often be found drawing his own artistic veves in the mud behind his mama's house in
Louisville's west end or on the concrete surfaces at his great grandmother's home near
Louisville's downtown district. His imagination (as well as his creative pseudonym,
Upfromsumdirt) springs from his fascination with earth and nature, as well as the influences of
blues, jazz and 70's era funk music. These influences are then channeled thru his creative eye,
creating a modern mythology for African American culture. Inspired greatly by the works of
Romare Bearden, Ron predominately turns his visions into Digital Collages or new New Media amalgams of photographs, scanned and hand-drawn elements where graphic design and visual
art meet and form a union.
2. John Lackey
John Lackey is a painter, printmaker, writer and designer whose studio, Homegrown Press,
recently moved from Galerie Soleil to its new home gallery in a beautifully renovated bakery
building at 574 North Limestone in Lexington, Kentucky.
Through his art he has been fortunate enough to work with Wilco (the Band), Larkspur Press,
LexArts, the Kentucky Arts Council, Kentucky State Parks, Holler Poets Series, University Press
of Kentucky, Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, Garden Gate Records, Fillmore Auditoreum
Denver, Terrapin Hill Farm, Alfalfa Restaurant, Clyde's Retaurant Group, and many of
Kentucky's fine authors and musicians.
A former television station art director, John is a juried member of the Kentucky Guild of Artists
and Craftsmen.
3. Nana Lampton
Nana Lampton was born in 1942. She graduated from Louisville Collegiate School, earned a
Bachelor of Arts degree with a major in English literature at Wellesley College in 1964, and a
Master of Arts degree in English Literature at the University of Virginia in 1965. She completed
another year of graduate study in English at the University of Virginia from 1965-1966. She
attended programs at the Harvard Business School from 1973-1979. In 2004, she received an
MFA in Writing from Spalding University. At each stage of her education, she was instructed in
drawing and painting, including classes at the Corcoran School of Art and the Louisville Visual
Art Association, as well as private instruction. She is Chairman and CEO of Hardscuffle, Inc. in
Louisville, KY and is the author of three books of poetry.
4. Guy Mendes
Forty years of photographic work have yielded two books, LOCAL LIGHT, an anthology of
100 years of photographs made in Kentucky (1976), and LIGHT AT HAND, a monograph of
45 photographs (1986); both were published by Gnomon Press.
His photographs by have appeared in magazines such as Aperture, Newsweek, the Smithsonian,
Mother Jones, Playboy, Southern Accents, Bomb and the quarterlies Parnassus and
Conjunctions.
His work has been exhibited at the International Center for Photography and the Aperture
Gallery in New York, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the
High Museum in Atlanta, the University of Louisville Photographic Archives, the Speed Art
Museum, the University of Kentucky Art Museum, the Berea Artisan Center, Louisville’s
Zephyr Gallery and the Kentucky Museum of Art and Design. His prints are in the collections of
the Cincinnati Art Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the University of Kentucky Art
Museum, Fidelity Investments national headquarters, the Maker’s Mark Distillery and
Louisville’s Commonwealth Bank. Private collections include those of Ashley Judd and Willie
Nelson. Represented by the Ann Tower Gallery in Lexington’s Downtown Arts Center. He lives
in Lexington with his wife and two sons.
5. Arturo Alonzo Sandoval
In 1965, Arturo Alonzo Sandoval took a beginning-weaving course while a graduate student at
California State College-Los Angeles. That same year he was ushered into the U. S. Naval
Reserve and soon was shipped off to Vietnam where he spent time as a U.S.N.R. Officer on the
U. S. S. Kitty Hawk, CVA 63 and on the U. S. Naval Base in Yokosuka, Japan. In 1969, he
finished his M.A. specializing in sculptural fiber art. Encouraged by his professors Michael
Schrier and Virginia Hoffman to consider teaching he pursued his terminal art degree at
Cranbrook Academy of Art under Robert Kidd and Gerhardt Knodel, completing his M.F.A.
degree in 1971. That same year while employed as manager of the Edison Institute Greenfield
Village Carding Mill, he was offered a summer teaching position at Southern Illinois University
at Carbondale. More job opportunities surfaced and he accepted the teaching position at Southern
Illinois University at Edwardsville. There he began the Fiber and Textiles Program. He received
a NEA Fellowship (1973) for his creative research in machine stitching and interlacing igniting a
pursuit to create monumental mixed media fiber art in what traditionally are considered craft
processes. In 1974, he joined the University of Kentucky Department of Art faculty. At UK
Sandoval was provided a large art studio and freedom to explore recycled materials for his fiber
art expressions as creative research.
Sandoval’s background is both Hispanic and Native American (Tano). His ancestry (father:
Lorenzo Sandoval, mother: Cecilia E. Archuleta) may provide clues to his interest in the fiber
arts. He had been told by his mother that she wove 60 blankets while pregnant with him, but
discovered at the age of 40, during a visit to his birthplace, that men on his paternal
grandmother’s side have been weavers of colonial Spanish textiles for over two hundred fifty
years; and they continue to weave functional craft objects in his native home state of New
Mexico. What a revelation to this fiber artist who questioned why a spiritual voice told him in
college “weaving will be very important to you”. Was that voice an ancestor? Sandoval wove
during that discovery some of the commissioned linens for his great uncle Alfredo Cordova in
the quaint Cordova Weaving Shop in Truchas, New Mexico. There are other similarities to be
found between colonial Spanish designs and Sandoval’s fiber art. The most striking are the use
of symmetry in brilliant color, bold shapes, contrast, and pattern. Symbolism is another design
form employed by Sandoval. The Cordova weavers use traditional stylized forms to depict
feathers and landscape whereas Sandoval combines complex patterned circles, flags, targets, and
planets. Sandoval creates a new aesthetic with his contemporary fiber art objects using 20th
Century recycled industrial materials as computer tape, battery cable, microfilm, Mylar,
Holographic film and Lurex. Whether using a floor loom, sewing machine, interlacing, or simply
combining new age materials in collage or assemblage processes, Professor Sandoval pursues the
cutting edge in his chosen art medium.
Sandoval’s professional activities include being an adjudicator, lecturer, and curator of
exhibitions, set designer, workshop facilitator, non-profit board member, art mentor, and advisor.
His fiber art works have been exhibited extensively regionally, nationally and accepted by jury
into international exhibitions including the 8th and 14th Biennial of Tapestry in Lausanne,
Switzerland, the Textile Triennial in Lodz, Poland, and the International Textile Competition in
Kyoto, Japan. His creative efforts have been awarded two NEA Visual Arts Fellowships (1973,
1992); several NEA supported Visiting Artist Grants. He received two Kentucky Arts Council Al
Smith Visual Arts Fellowship (1987, 2006), two Al Smith Professional Service Awards (1998,
2003), the Kentucky Craft Marketing Honorary Award, and the Kentucky Craft Marketing and
Kentucky Art and Craft Foundation, Inc. RUDE OSOLNIK Craftsman Award. In addition, he
has been honored with the 2003 Governor’s Award in the Arts Artist Award, and a Kentucky
STAR from the Downtown Lexington Corporation both for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual
Arts. In 2007, he was elected into the American Craft Council Society of FELLOWS, a most
prestigious national craft award. His fiber mixed media art works are in many collections
including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, The Museum of Art and Design, NY, the
Smithsonian Museum of American Art: Renwick Gallery, Washington, DC; Indianapolis
Museum of Art, Indiana, the National Vietnam Veteran’s Museum, Chicago, IL, the Greenville
County Museum of Art, SC, and The J.B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY. Several
corporations as the Champion International Paper Co., Knightsbridge, OH and the Louisville
Water Co. Louisville, KY; banks include Central Bank, Lexington, PNC and Bank One,
Louisville; commissions include the UF&CW Union, Washington, DC, the KMSF, Lexington,
and Lexington Public Central Library, KY, the GSA-AIA 6th District Courthouse, London, KY.
At the University of Kentucky Professor Sandoval continues his passion for teaching and his art
studio activity. In 2007, he was awarded the University of Kentucky KIRWAN PRIZE for
creativity in research. In addition, the Provost awarded him the University of Kentucky Alumni
Professorship Award (2007-2012). In addition, in 2008 he has been given the university’s
highest honor by having the first Endowed Professorship Chair in his name awarded to the
College of Fine Arts approved by the University of Kentucky Board of Trustees.
However, at retirement age, he continues to pursue the creation of innovative issues in his field
sharing them through solo, invitational, and group exhibitions. In addition, he continues to enjoy
teaching where he encourages his art students to work hard, develop discipline, take risks, and be
self-motivated. His students are encouraged to participate in campus and professional arts related
events for their personal growth. Some of his art students have become professionals in the fields
of craft, design, education, and arts administration while continuing their art studio careers.
6. Bianca Spriggs
Affrilachian Poet and Cave Canem Fellow, Bianca Spriggs, is a multidisciplinary artist who lives
and works in Lexington, Kentucky. Currently a doctoral student at the University of Kentucky,
she holds degrees from Transylvania University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Named as one of the Top 30 Performance Poets by TheRoot.com, Bianca is the recipient of a
2013 Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry, multiple Artist Enrichment and Arts Meets
Activism grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and a Pushcart Prize Nominee. In
partnership with the Kentucky Domestic Violence Association, she is the creator of "The
SwallowTale Project" a traveling creative writing workshop designed for incarcerated women,
and the creator and Artistic Director of the Gypsy Poetry Slam featured annually at the Kentucky
Women Writers Conference. Spriggs is the author of Kaffir Lily (Wind Publications) and How
Swallowtails Become Dragons (Accents Publishing). In January of 2013, she will debut a visual
art/performance poetry based show with collaborator, Angel Clark, called, "The Thirteen,"
revolving around thirteen black women who were lynched or otherwise violently murdered in
Kentucky in the 19th-20th centuries, sponsored in part by the Kentucky Arts Council at Morlan
Gallery at Transylvania University.
7. Lynn Sweet
Since the mid 80’s I’ve been painting parts of my original design furniture or ‘functional art
objects’ in one way or another. I began by using automotive lacquer and then by mixing artist’s
pigments with acrylic mediums and applying them in various ways. Often I’d paint either the
inside or the outside of my container forms to add contrast to veneered surfaces. This was
intended to add an element of surprise.
For fifteen years I would also construct picture frames and paint them with artist’s acrylics using
several techniques to approximate the effects of ultra violet damage, wind, rain and time on
abandoned truck fenders, gates and other painted surfaces in the desert southwest.
Eventually I was persuaded to forgo the center piercing and approach the picture plane with the
techniques I’d developed painting utilitarian objects. Initially I continued using artist’s acrylic,
but have for years largely employed dry oxides and earth pigments, calcium carbonate (marble or
chalk dust) and artist’s acrylic medium.
8. Laverne Zabielski
She received her MFA at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. She studied shibori silk
dyeing with Arturo Alonzo Sandovol at the University of Kentucky. Currently she lives on a
farm in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. She has exhibited and sold work in galleries
and boutiques in Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, California, Georgia and Louisiana.
9. Fielden Willmott
Fielden Willmott Millinery is the creation of Lexington, Kentucky native and Milliner, Fielden
Willmott. As a passionate seamstress, Fielden is concerned with the loss of skill, knowledge, and
cultural value that is inevitable with the decline in the popularity of sewing. Motivated by a
desire to preserve and promote a craft rich in history, Fielden began a fascinating exploration
into the art of Millinery. This lead her to her formal study at the atelier of Haute Couture
Milliner, Anya Caliendo in New York. Upon her return to Kentucky, Fielden opened a studio
and has been making custom and bespoke hats ever since. She lovingly creates pieces to inspire
the wearer’s creativity, and to help them experience feelings of beauty and joy. Hats have long
been a symbol of dignity and style; a way to walk out the door feeling like the best version of
oneself. Fielden’s hope is that by experiencing this sensation of positive self-image, people will
be motivated to act as vibrant ambassadors for themselves as they create a stronger, healthier
community.