Fall Gallery Night - Renewal Exhibition

About The Artists

Carol Benson 
Carol Benson’s work exist in the liminal space between painting and sculpture. She continues to use the icon of the house as a symbol of refuge and protection, but she maintains that it should not isolate us from our natural world. Benson is an avid gardener and plant enthusiast. Recent solo shows have been at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, Drawing from Nature, and Outside In, at William Campbell Contemporary Art Gallery. In 2016-17 she led a team of artists in a project that gauged citizens perception about Public Art. She displayed three variations of wire mesh houses throughout Fort Worth. Her work has been shown in the Cell Series at the Old Jail Art Center in Albany Tx. and in a solo show, Containment of Thought at the Tyler Museum of Art. 

Benson was a Hunting Prize Finalist in 2010, 2014, and 2016. She won First Place in Art in the Metroplex in 2002 and 2003. Her work is the collection of the Tyler Museum of Art, Moncrief Cancer Center, Health South, Neiman Marcus, Verizon, Fort Worth Public Library, Bennett Bender Architects and Freeze Nichols. 

Allie Regan Dickerson 
Allie spent three years in studio art at Stony Brook University, New York at their Fine Arts Center. She later went on to earn a BFA in graphic design from the University of Texas at Arlington. In 2014 she completed her MFA at TCU. A native of New York, she currently works as an artist and creative director in Dallas, Texas. Her creative process is sparked by an idea that resonates. Through exploration, a visual, symbolic language emerges through various media made of different elements. The current series, Collateral Beauty, was conceptualized while taking long walks in nature to heal a loss. She began observing plant life and how it is “built.” She realized that in nature, as in life, loss or damage often unveils the beauty that was always there. Clay seemed a natural way to build this newest body of work. These “clay paintings”—which blur the line between sculpture and painting— explore themes such as repetition and discontinuation, brokenness and renewal, beauty and loss of beauty, separate versus connected, fragility and strength. At times, things break, are created by happenstance or...are what they should be. Each piece is intuitively adhered one at a time to a board until the work feels compete. The repetition of shapes takes the work from the simple to the complex. The clay is timed to burn to achieve various shades from white to black. When finished each intricate clay painting morphs, impacted by light and space, and becomes what it will in response to its ever-changing environment and the viewer’s eye. Allie has participated in many notable exhibitions including; the Chelsea International Fine Art Competition, the Agora Gallery, New York; the Hunting Art Prize, Houston, Texas; the Small Works Show, National Association of Women Artists, New York; the Annual Long Island Artists 32nd Juried Exhibition, the Heckscher Museum of Art, New York and an award winner in the Pastel Society of the Southwest Juried Competition. She has also been published in the nationally, critically acclaimed periodical, New American Paintings, Issue #108. 

Erika Huddleston 
Erika Huddleston is an Austin based artist whose work is a study of nature in urban settings that range from Shoal Creek Greenbelt in Austin to Central Park in New York City. It was New York City itself that kickstarted her interest and appreciation for inner city green spaces. Huddleston loved participating in community gardens and volunteered at the High Line for three years. It is Huddleston’s belief that cities are built in the wilderness and the remnant of these landscapes is important to recollect and engage with.

Interested in how the perceptions of nature and how the overall change of natural processes affects the human psychology, Huddleston always paints outdoors, and all work is painted life-size. The act of painting for long hours in what Huddleston describes 

as “urban wilderness” allows her the opportunities of analysis and observation she needs that goes beyond brief walks or quick snapshots to be painted later in a studio setting. This is a recording of change which is usually considered difficult to render and allows a new sense of data-collecting that differs from the traditional use of technologies such as digital mappings of landscapes. Huddleston welcomes this face-to-face interaction with nature that breaks the habit of constant digital stimulation that looms over all of us daily. She begins each painting by walking the selected site for days and sometimes weeks without creating any preparatory drawings. After she has decided on a vantage point, she creates a sketch in pencil on her canvas. Directly after, Huddleston goes in with oil paint and begins her recording of information on the canvas.

Janet Chaffee
Janet Chaffee is originally from Denver, Colorado but has lived in Texas most of her life. She earned her BFA in painting from The University of Texas at Arlington in 1999 and received her MFA in painting from Texas Christian University in May 2002. After graduating, she taught drawing at TCU, UTA, and The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.  She has shown in both individual and group exhibitions throughout the state of Texas receiving third place in The Dishman Competition 2005 at the Dishman Art Museum at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. Andrea Karnes, Curator of The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, juried the exhibition. In 2006, Janet was awarded The Murrin Family Award in the, Preservation Is the Art of The City, exhibition held at The Fort Worth Community Arts Center in Fort Worth, Texas. The juror was Rebecca Lawton, Curator of Painting and Sculpture for the Amon Carter Museum. She had a solo exhibition at The Ellen Noel Museum in Odessa, Texas in 2008. Janet’s work was exhibited with the Daimler Financial Services in Fort Worth Texas, 2009-2010 and in the 2010 exhibition, Intense Concentration, at The University of Texas at San Antonio, a drawing show featuring seven nationally known artists. During the summer of 2010, she was awarded a Once Upon a Time Grant from Trinity Valley School of Fort Worth to attend the residency at Atelier Hilmsen in Germany, and in the summer of 2012, she spent time at Santa Fe Clay in Santa Fe, New Mexico. September 22 through January 6, 2013, her collaborative work with Benito Huerta was shown in the exhibition, Espoused, at The Art Museum of Southeast Texas. She had a one-person exhibition, Pentimento, in March of 2013 at Brookhaven College in Dallas, Texas, followed by a collaborative exhibition, 2014 Post Structuralism/ I Zimbra, September 24- October 26, 2014, at Cedar Valley College Gallery. Also in the fall of 2014, she was included in, Flow into the Mystic: Marriage and the Contemporary Artist, an exhibition at the Tyler Museum of Texas and curated by Derek Frazier. Recently, Janet was juried into the Texas Vignette Art Fair, in Dallas, Texas.  Vicki Meek was the juror for the exhibition.  She was also in the exhibition, “More Than This...”, at Arts Fort Worth, curated by Anne Allen.  Janet is also currently teaching Upper School at Trinity Valley School in Fort Worth, Texas.