Teona Yamanidze G’18, a graduate studio arts student in the College of Visual and Performing Arts’ School of Art, was selected from a nationwide pool of master of fine arts (M.F.A.) artists to participate in the “National Wet Paint MFA Biennial 2018” in Chicago through Feb. 12.
The “National Wet Paint MFA Biennial” is an outlook and an overview of emerging artists across the United States currently working in the medium of painting. “Wet Paint” refers to the idea that this is a fresh group of artists; they are M.F.A. candidates or recent M.F.A. recipients. The exhibition consists of 38 paintings selected from more than 250 submissions.
The exhibition takes place in the expansive gallery of the Zhou B Art Center in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood and is curated and organized by Sergio Gomez, the center’s curator and exhibitions director. All of the works in the exhibition will be permanently available at www.artsy.net.
Yamanidze is a New York-based Georgian artist who holds a bachelor of arts degree in visual arts from the State Academy of Fine Arts in Tbilisi, Georgia. In 2011 she was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant from Canada and Research Scholarship from the Ministry of Culture in Georgia that gave her an opportunity to study at University of the Arts London. While obtaining a postgraduate degree she became deeply invested in using documentary photos from hostilities. Her final degree show was concerned with the unknown facts from the 2008 war in Georgia.
Yamanidze’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including at the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow, Berlin International Art Week, and MARS Modern Art Center in Moscow. She was also involved as an artist, curator and researcher in the exhibition “That Day Now: Shadows Cast by Hiroshima” at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse. She is a recipient of the 2017 Edmund S. Muskie Fellowship for young leaders and is currently a Fulbright Scholar.