Opening Reception: June 25th, 5pm – 8pm
Octavia Art Gallery – Houston is thrilled to announce our upcoming solo exhibition by the renowned painter, sculptor, and installation artist, Margaret Evangeline. Camellias will open with a reception on June 25 from 5pm-8pm and will close July 16, 2015. While she has lived and worked in New York City for many years, Evangeline was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She later moved around the country with her family before returning to Louisiana where she became the first female MFA recipient from the University of New Orleans, and eventually settled in New York. Evangeline’s Cajun heritage and experience growing up in the south have come to define her work.
Margaret Evangeline – Camellias will feature paintings from Evangeline’s Camellia series. The camellia flower, a fall and winter bloom found in many southern gardens, is an emblem of Louisiana and the Deep South. On Evangeline’s canvases, the humble camellia is treated as an icon either over swaths of regal gold or centralized on the picture plane, dominating the space. The simple outlined forms further advance their use as symbol: of the south, of Evangeline’s childhood, and of the place Evangeline found her artistic voice.
Margaret Evangeline has exhibited both across the US and internationally including solo exhibitions at The Ogden Museum of Southern Art (2008), Eleanor D. Wilson Museum of Art (2012), Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum (2014), and the LSU Museum of Art (2015). Evangeline is a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant recipient, NYFA Fellowship recipient, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Competition nominee, and Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship nominee. In 2008, Illuminate Productions commissioned Evangeline for a site-specific installation on the River Thames, opposite the Tate Modern in London. The work, Saved from the Waters, was a fifteen by thirty-foot floating sculpture that featured reflective steel transpierced with gunshot, memorializing the pleasure boat Marchioness, which sank on the Thames over thirty years before.
Evangeline’s work is currently in the public collections of: the Albuquerque Museum of Art (Albuquerque, NM), Leo Castelli Gallery of Brenau University (Gainesville, GA), Chanel Collection (Sydney, Hong Kong, and Toronto), Georgia Museum of Art (Athens, GA), Knoxville Museum of Art (Knoxville, TN), LSU Museum of Art (Baton Rouge, LA), The McNay Art Museum (San Antonio, TX), New Orleans Museum of Art (New Orleans, LA), The Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans, LA), Pfizer (New York, NY), and Texaco (Houston, TX), among many others.