ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, Donna M. Meeks is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Art at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas; where she also resides. Meeks is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee with a Master of Fine Arts in painting and sculpture, and of the University of Louisville where she earned a Master of Arts in Teaching and a Bachelor of Arts in painting and drawing.  She teaches courses in painting, drawing, and art theory.

Having worked in diverse disciplines, materials and techniques, Meeks is committed to creating aesthetic objects that allow the materiality of the work to speak significantly in the subject/form/content equation.  As a result, Meeks often works with mixed media to create paintings that are both objects and images, producing content as much through material selection as depicted form in the realization of any idea.  In much of her work, the figure, or its substitute, is represented in tension between image and text, narrative and metaphor in a complex of shallow and deep picture spaces. This dichotomization of form and reference conceptually equates to the complex social positioning of the individual between the personal and the political, between experience and understanding. Through wry juxtapositions of images, textual references, and materials, the work is intended to provide an opportunity for social critique within a contemporary visual discourse.

Since 1981, Meeks’ work has been exhibited extensively from coast to coast in diverse exhibition venues including, but not limited to, the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Ana, California), the Alternative Museum (Soho, New York), The Montgomery Armory Art Center (West Palm Beach, Florida), the Dallas Visual Art Center, the New Jersey Center for the Visual Arts (Summitt, New Jersey), the Rockville Arts Place (Rockville, Maryland) and the South Bend Regional Museum of Art  (Indiana). Meeks has works included in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Center, Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana; the Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts in New Castle, Pennsylvania; and the Kirkland Fine Arts Center, Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois; among others.

Meeks is also active professionally as a guest lecturer, exhibition juror, and visiting artist. In 2001, Meeks was a recipient of a Knight Foundation Fellowship to serve as a Visiting Artist at Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is listed in Who’s Who in American Art, 23rd edition.