Alliance Art Gallery to present ‘Collaborations in Color’ during March with artist’s talk set for Saturday

HANNIBAL, Mo.— The Alliance Art Gallery in Hannibal is welcoming Carol Clay Mann as a guest artist during the month of March.

A Hannibal native who now resides in Quincy, Ill., Mann retired after 27 years of teaching art full-time as a K-12 instructor, the last 20 years in the Highland School District. Mann is an adjunct professor at Culver-Stockton College, where she teaches sculpture. Although she holds a master’s degree in sculpture, she also works in a wide range of media including felted vessels, batiks and clay flower bowls.

Mann loves nature thanks to creative parents who fostered that love along with a love of art. Her father took her and her five siblings camping, where he taught them about trees and birds, and she wandered the woods surrounding her childhood home in Oakwood.

Her mother, who made most of Carol’s clothes, often handed her scraps of cloth for her to play with and later taught her to sew and began her lifetime love of fibers. They introduced her to art by trips to the St. Louis Art Museum.

Mann recently received a merit award at the Mary S. Oakley and Lee Lindsay area Artists Showcase, a juried show at the Quincy Art Center with a fiber piece titled “Flight.” This is a piece based on the Tale of Seven Swans and is about transformation and change, of letting go, something she now has time to do now that she is no longer working full time.

March ushers in a three-way collaboration of gallery artists Libby Campbell, Patricia Garey and Peggy Burchard-Ballard centered on the artists’ use of color. Campbell will be exhibiting fiber works having a particular color combination and Burdhard-Ballard will be showing new paintings inspired by the fiber art, using handmade watercolors.

An opening reception for these exhibitions will be held from 4 to 7 p.m. on Saturday, March 8, with an artists’ talk at 6 p.m. This event is free and open to the public.

To further celebrate color, the gallery will be facilitating “Color Walks.” Visitors to the gallery may choose a small card with a particular color printed on it and will then be encouraged to find work in the gallery that incorporates that color. It’s a way to dive a little deeper into the gallery spaces.

Campbell, a fiber artist from Quincy, is one of the most recent artists to join the gallery. Campbell weaves and spins her line of Merino wool yarn that she offers for sale at the gallery and uses to create her own art pieces and wearables.

After getting a master’s degree in music therapy, she worked at Heartland Hospice while her husband was in school in Madison, Wis. During her graduate studies, she had taught herself to knit and became interested in the production of yarn. When they moved to Lamoni, Iowa, she began taking classes at the Historic Arts Guild of Kansas City to learn more about dying and spinning yarn. Campbell’s day job is marketing for the Quincy Art Center, but after her children are in bed, she finds her way to her studio and gets lost in time in this art she loves — dying, spinning and weaving her creations.

Garey is producing watercolor paintings exclusively with Burchard-Ballard’s paints that coordinate with Campbell’s yarn and weavings.

While in art school, Garey worked with a variety of media. It wasn’t until she was raising her family when she found watercolor was the most convenient media to work with.

After working full-time, she started watching online videos and tutorials and taking online courses. She has taken classes from Columbia watercolor artist Paul Jackson and Hannibal artist Brenda Beck Fisher.

Burchard-Ballard is known to gallery visitors as a collage artist who has recently started producing a line of high quality watercolor paints. After years of teaching a variety of college level art classes at area universities, she is retired and spends time in her studio creating her story telling collages and perfecting her line of watercolor paints.

As an Air Force brat, Burchard-Ballard experienced a vagabond early life that started in England. She went to college in Texas, where she met her husband, and later attended college in Florida and Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, where she majored in art therapy.

When asked to journal as part of her education, she found that creating altered books fit her much better. This led to her making the first of her collages. She was asked to exhibit her collages at Canton Art League, and she received so much encouragement that she continued exploring this art form. She uses old magazines and books and newspapers, some dating to the 1800s.