Meet the 2018 MCAC Featured Artist, Lisa Krannichfeld
There is always much anticipation and excitement circling around Magic City Art Connection’s (MCAC) annual Featured Artist selection, an initiative which serves to support and present artists of great artistic talent and integrity to MCAC collectors and patrons. Their work is spotlighted on the Festival Poster, T-Shirt, and the larger marketing campaign reaching thousands across Greater Birmingham and the region. Over MCAC’s 35 year history, this distinction has been centered on a gifted group of exhibiting artists and award winners, MCAC Emerging Artist honorees, and artists garnering regional, national, and international attention who have been invited to Birmingham as festival jurors.
It is our pleasure to announce that Lisa Krannichfeld of Little Rock, Arkansas has been selected as Magic City Art Connection’s 2018 Featured Artist. Lisa first exhibited with the Festival last year, at which time she was selected as the recipient of MCAC’s Best in Show juried award by our 2017 juror, former Birmingham Museum of Art curator of contemporary art, Wassan Al-Kudhairi. We are delighted to have her back at MCAC in this featured capacity for our 35th year in downtown’s Linn Park April 27-29! And look forward to showcasing Lisa’s art, which she so deftly creates, en-capsuling female imagery and environments. We’ve especially enjoyed looking through her breath of work to select pieces in consideration for the Festival poster and other collateral materials. We found ourselves gravitating to her most recent works, “Girls and Guise”, and look forward to spotlighting several pieces from the series across the Festival campaign.
About the “Girls and Guise” series:
“Throughout history, and irrefutably still to a degree today, the story of women has been told by men. The voice of women, the depiction of women, the desires of women, were and are largely controlled by a gender that has no experience or knowledge of what it is to be female. Our government, film and advertising industries have fewer women at the table to be representatives of who women are and what we want. This certainly has consequences on what women even believe themselves about who they should be, what they should value, and how they should project themselves. This work aims to shift the amplifier to a woman telling a woman’s story. Girls and Guise references a play on words. In this context guise references both the facade created by men of the female gender, and the heavy emphasis of the patterned clothing in the pieces. Their clothes, or guises, are infused with feral and aggressive animals, a symbolic rebellion against the historical domesticated depiction of women. The jarring, faceless compositions represent any and all women who desire to define their own perspective and create their own narratives. Intentional hand gestures hint at conviction.”
To read more about Lisa, see other works, and even watch her art in process, check out her Featured Artist page on MCAC’s website. Click here. And stay tuned for the poster design unveiling in February!
