what used to be: work by Kate Roberts is currently on exhibit through Feb. 14 in the Mary Ed Mecoy Hall Gallery (sixth floor of the Doyle Price Fine Arts Building). Admission to the galleries is free and open to the public. The collection is a blending of two bodies of work, each investigating the consequences of nature, time and circumstance. The first body of work investigates the destruction caused by the forest fires that blazed across Oregon and much of the west coast in 2020, the effects of which rippled out as far as the east coast and Europe. The second half of the exhibition takes inspiration from a collection of nineteenth century landscape paintings at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee. 

The artist Kate Roberts is a native of Greenville, South Carolina. She received both her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2010 and Master of Fine Arts in 2015 from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. She has completed residencies around the world including Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Montana, Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado and the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris. Her work has been exhibited in museums such as the Tampa Art Museum, Frick Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York, among other venues. She has lectured at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington and the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin. She currently resides in Memphis, Tennessee and is an assistant professor of art at the University of Memphis.

The University Galleries visitor hours for spring 2023 are Monday through Thursday, 8 a.m. – 6 p.m., and Friday 8 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. For more information about the Department of Art & Design please visit murraystate.edu/art or follow them on Instagram at instagram.com/murraystateart/.