This year we are pleased to have two winners for the Betty and Clay Smith Award. Both students were chosen by Johanna Norry from her student body at the University of North Georgia, since both were so deserving, and will graduate this year, they will share the prize.
Both Roxie and Gracen have been involved leaders in the relatively new Textile Artist Group (TAG), a student run organization; Roxie is currently serving as President and Gracen as Secretary. They generously give of their time to prepare for meetings and projects to teach to a growing group of TAG members, many of whom are not visual arts students. Early in the Fall semester this year, TAG worked with Well Made owner, Megan Noble (Tommye Scanlin’s niece), to have TAG members make 50 little stuffed and painted fabric pumpkins to raise money for ConnectAbility, a local non-profit that supports individuals with disabilities and their families. In one day, they sold out at Noble’s shop and raised $500.
Both Roxie and Gracen will undoubtedly continue to weave and make textile art after graduation. Gracen is planning on pursuing their Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) and aspires to be a textiles professor. Roxie has already acquired an 8-shaft Macomber loom and her plans after graduation include participating in as many artist residencies, assistantships, workshops and classes as possible, and potentially attending graduate school to pursue an MFA in Textiles.
Roxie Friction
Roxie’s work is always ambitious—large scale, colorful, and often technically complex. She has, as I would say in Yiddish, chutzpah. She will figure out how to do something she has never done, and then decide to do it large-scale and it never occurs to her to take the easy way. Outside of the classroom, Roxie interned this past summer for re:loom in Decatur and served as Tommye Scanlin’s studio assistant for a week-long tapestry class at Arrowmont. She had a piece accepted into a juried show called Rage Becomes Her at The Bakery in Atlanta this past September. At the end of the Fall semester, Roxie will have a solo show in the Hansford Gallery of her Overshot weavings, including a coverlet, the culmination of an independent study semester with me which grew out of the book Overshot: The Political Aesthetics of Woven Textiles from the Antebellum South and Beyond, as well as research she did in the archives at Arrowmont.
Roxie Friction
Gracen DeBruyn
Gracen’s work, and Gracen, is quieter but no less impressive. Often choosing natural tones, tone on tone, and preferring texture and transparency over color, their work is often autobiographical. When thinking of themselves, they have said that “color has never been what comes to mind.” Gracen’s work appeared in two shows at UNG this Fall, Celebrating Connections and The LGBTQ+ Art Exhibition 2023. Gracen’s textile art often explores issues of gender and gender identity, so it is no surprise that their BFA Capstone project, which will be exhibited in the Spring, will explore themes of gender expression and interpersonal relationships in their process. They will be weaving huck lace and incorporating both the neutral colors they associate with their transgender identity and handspun fibers dyed by their mother, who introduced them to fiber art through knitting and spinning. Gracen’s thoughtful artistic process, considering multiple layers of meaning and symbolism in every aspect of their art from materials and color to structure and form, is what elevates their work and elicits respect and admiration from their peers in the textile and weaving program.
Gracen DeBruyn
