Sheet Cake Gallery is pleased to present two new exhibitions opening February 15 from 5 - 7:30 PM. Accessories features Althea Murphy-Price in the first gallery space, while Tales from the Journeys featuring Nelson Gutierrez takes place in the second gallery space. Both artists expand the traditional boundaries of their respective media to further interrogate the complexities of the human experience in their work. 

Althea Murphy-Price is known for her innovative artistic practice, working across a wide variety of printed media including photography, 3D printing, lithography, and other printmaking methods. Her work is concerned with the deception and social and cultural implications of beauty practices and decoration, particularly those related to beauty standards imposed on women and Black hair. For her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Murphy-Price presents arrangements of armatures and accessories inspired by beauty tools and everyday objects such as barrettes and bobby pins. Drawing inspiration from daily self-care rituals, she has created orderly and repetitious patterns that explore the ongoing cycle of reflection and critical examination or the desire for transformation. The work suggests both windows—through which one might look—and grids that evoke barriers or constraints, symbolizing the tension between visibility and restriction in our constant self-assessment. Murphy-Price’s dimensionally printed screen prints merge surface and texture, with the imagery rising from the page in a tactile way. The prints play with perception, evoking the presence of objects; thick, glossy, and metallic, yet flat—creating a deliberate visual deception.

Nelson Gutierrez’s work examines the psychological and social consequences of conflict. Based on extensive research, personal history, and the long, continuous history of conflict in his native Colombia, Gutierrez seeks to create empathy for and consideration of the lived experiences of those surrounded by constant turmoil. Working between two and three dimensional objects and installations, Gutierrez uses traditional drawing, 3D cutouts and projections to express feelings of collective longing, fear, grief, resilience, and hope. His recent work is inspired by forced displacement and global migration, depicting cutouts of individuals and groups of people that form anonymous masses moving towards an unknown future. The starkness of his black linework, cutouts, and shadows mirror the complexities inherent in the subject matter, while the attention to detail displays a deep care and understanding. Gutierrez ultimately asks the viewer to reflect on our shared humanity when it is often easy to become desensitized or simply ignore events happening near and far. 

Althea Murphy-Price (b.1979, San Jose, California) received her BA in Fine Art from Spelman College, her MA in Printmaking and Painting from Purdue University and her MFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout the country and internationally including in Spain, China, Japan, Italy and Sweden. She is included in multiple public collections such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, Knoxville Museum of Art, the Huntsville Museum of Art, the Brandywine Print Achieves, Fairfield University Art Museum, the Bush Art Center, Bernard A. Zukerman Museum of Art, and Gregory Allicar Museum of Art. Her work has been featured in such publications as Art Papers Magazine, Art in Print Magazine, Printmaking Today (UK), CAA Reviews Journal, Printmaking: A Complete Guide to Materials and Process, and Printmakers Today. Murphy-Price lives and works in Knoxville, TN, where she is a Professor at the University of Tennessee. She has taught printmaking there since 2010. 

Nelson Gutierrez (b. 1968, Bogota, Colombia) holds a BA in Fine Art from the Universidad de Bogota Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogota Colombia and a MA degree in Fine Arts from Chelsea College of Art and Design in London UK. He worked as a professor in the Fine Arts Departments at the Universidad de los Andes and the Universidad de Bogota Jorge Tadeo Lozano, in Bogota,  Colombia. In 2002, he moved to the US where he has kept developing and showing his artwork in addition to working as a teaching artist for different organizations such as Arts for Learning in Miami, FL, and Children’s Studio School in Washington, DC. During this time, he also attended the Corcoran College of Art where he did coursework in the MFA program. His work has been exhibited around the US and also internationally in Colombia, the UK, and Switzerland, and it is part of private and public collections. He lives and works in Memphis, TN where he has served as an Exhibition Committee Member for the Brooks Museum of Arts, an Artist Advisory Council Member at ArtsMemphis, and an Official Advisor for Locate Arts in Nashville, TN. Gutierrez is the Founder of Future Project Art, formerly 2021 Projects, a Contemporary Art collective, dedicated to increasing the awareness for, appreciation of, and involvement in, the visual arts in the Mid-South.