Contact: Kay Fike Jones
The work of a Mississippi State University art professor will represent the state in a national printmaking exhibition next year at Lubbock, Texas.
Linda Seckinger is among 50 artists--one from each state--to be featured in the Colorprint USA 1998 Printmaking Biennial Exhibition and National Print Portfolio Exchange. Each artist is producing a piece for the project, which is housed in Texas Tech University's art department.
Seckinger and the other artists will receive portfolios of all the prints, enabling each state to hold simultaneous exhibitions. The Mississippi showing is tentatively scheduled for the campus McComas Hall gallery in November 1998.
Copies of the Colorprint collection will be housed permanently at Texas Tech and the Art Institute of Chicago.
With printmaking, an artist first draws on a surface, usually a metal of some sort, then applies ink. "Each piece is printed individually, color by color," explained Seckinger, winner of the 1995 John Grisham Faculty Excellence Award.
"I feel very honored to be included in this," Seckinger said. "It's the most prestigious project to which I've ever been invited."
Seckinger says lithography is her favorite form of printmaking. It is a planographic (printing on a flat surface) process that involves applying a chemical to a drawn image on a limestone or an aluminum plate in order to create a design.
While the California native works on her entry for the Texas showing, she also has work accepted to Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum permanent collection.
Meanwhile, Seckinger is spending much of her free time with the Houston (Texas) Art League's HIV+Art Outreach Program Workshop. She first became involved in the Houston project in 1993 after a friend died of AIDS.
Since then, she has helped secure national funding for the group, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Designers in Fashion Fighting AIDS.
Seckinger holds undergraduate and master's degrees from San Diego State University and a master of fine arts degree from Arizona State.