Community Lecture Series

"Artist Mothers: Daring to Create"

Presenter: Elizabeth Snipes
Reception: 5:30 p.m.
Presentation: 6:00 p.m.

The profound experience of motherhood creates vulnerability, uncertainty, and fear, but it also produces empathy, strength, and power and catalyzes the creative work of artists. In this presentation, artist and mother Elizabeth Snipes highlights daring contemporary artist mothers who, with newfound interest and support from curators and art institutions, are intentionally making art through the beautiful and often brutal lenses of motherhood. She also celebrates some of those few historical artist mothers who have succeeded professionally in the art world and been recognized in the art historical canon. The work of these artists offers us (artists and viewers alike) an opportunity to connect with a fuller range of human experience and for our own assumptions to be challenged. Snipes, a mother of two daughters, will also discuss her recent creative work and process, which since the COVID-19 pandemic has increasingly confidently embraced her role as both artist and mother.

Elizabeth Snipes is a Professor of Art at Lander University, a South Carolina native, and the mother of two wild and beautiful daughters. She has been desperately in love with oil painting, the human figure, and color theory for 30 years. As an artist and mother, Snipes believes in the necessity of vulnerability in any creative process – whether it is the creative process of art making or living. In her own artwork, subjects of group gatherings and solitary individuals in space appear as passages of color, line, and space that oscillate between recognizability and ambiguity. These are potent metaphors for the vulnerability, intensity, and occasional clarity she experiences as a sensitive human in a complicated world. She exhibits regionally and nationally in commercial and academic fine art gallery spaces.