Based in Oxford, Mississippi, Carlyle Wolfe Lee creates drawings and paintings rooted in direct observation. Through a cumulative process of drawing, painting, and layered silhouettes, she records the passage of time, gradually revealing seasonal change through sustained and attentive engagement with the natural world. 

Carlyle holds an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Louisiana State University and a BFA in Painting from the University of Mississippi. She also studied in Cortona, Italy, and at the University of Georgia. Her work has been exhibited throughout the South at institutions including the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, the Mary C. O’Keefe Cultural Center, the University of Charleston, the Shaw Center for the Arts, the Mississippi Museum of Art, the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, the University of Mississippi Museum, the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, and the Arkansas Arts Center. Her work was selected for the Art in Embassies Program at the U.S. Embassy in Maputo, Mozambique.

Carlyle is the recipient of four Mississippi Arts Commission Visual Arts Fellowships (2005, 2010, 2015, and 2026) and two Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Visual Arts Awards (2008 and 2017). She served as Adjunct Professor of Art at the University of Mississippi from 2005 to 2014.

Based in Oxford, Mississippi, Blair Hobbs is an artist and poet who creates narrative-driven mixed-media works ranging from the mundane to the sublime. Quirky, surreal, and deeply personal, her work draws inspiration from literature, home life, nature, and travel. As a literary scholar with a love for language, she incorporates handwritten quotes and personal musings into her compositions. Delighting in found and sparkly ephemera, Blair adorns her paintings with foil candy wrappers, sequins, shattered Christmas ornaments, threads, feathers, pressed flowers, fragments of doilies, glitter, and gold leaf.

Blair holds an MFA in Creative Writing, with an emphasis in poetry, from the University of Michigan; an MA in Creative Writing from Hollins University; and a BA in English Literature from Auburn University. Now retired, she served for 28 years as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi. Her art and poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, including The Georgia Review, Oxford American, The Paris Review, and Atlanta Magazine. Blair is the 2026 Sarafest Artist-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi’s Institute for the Arts.

Based in New Orleans, Louisiana, Claire Downes Whitehurst is a painter, printmaker, and ceramicist whose work draws from the landscape and atmosphere of the Deep South. Her practice explores queer space, religious iconography, and botanical structures through form, color, and composition, playing with the relationship between image and object.

Claire holds an MFA in Painting from the University of Iowa, a Post Baccalaureate from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and a BFA in Painting from the University of Mississippi. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and has published two books of drawings and poetry. Her work has been featured in New American Paintings, Oxford American, The Iowa Review, and Graphite Journal in collaboration with the Hammer Museum, among others. Her work is forthcoming in Peripheries, a journal published by Harvard Divinity School, and is included in The Drawing Stall Vol 2: Compendium of Colored Pencil.

Claire has been shortlisted for the Hopper Prize and nominated by the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. In 2026, she completed a residency at the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts. In 2028, she will present her first solo museum exhibition at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, Mississippi.

Heather Bird Harris is an Atlanta-based artist, curator, educator, and writer whose work investigates alternative ways of knowing and their potential to foster emergence and systemic change. Known for materially grounded and place-based works across painting, film, and social practice, Heather blends abstraction with communal, scientific, and more-than-human archives to examine the entanglements of Western knowledge systems and ecological crisis. 

Heather holds an MFA from Georgia State University, an MA in Education Leadership from Columbia University, and a BA in Art History from Skidmore College. She is the recipient of fellowships at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, The Golden Foundation, The Hambidge Center, and the Art and Social Justice Fellowship at Emory University. Recent exhibitions include the New Mexico State University Museum; Louisiana State University; Stoveworks, Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Greenville, South Carolina. Upcoming exhibitions include the Fine Arts Center in Austin, Texas; the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Portland, Oregon; and Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been featured in Burnaway, ART PAPERS, ArtsATL, and NPR. Heather’s practice is grounded in over fifteen years in education leadership, where she used arts integration to lead schools and developed anti-racist history curricula.

Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Tokie Rome-Taylor is an interdisciplinary photo-based artist whose works explore the intersections of identity, archive, and memory. She combines photography, archival imagery, and illustrations through layering, textile manipulations, and other mixed media processes. Tokie investigates familial and cultural archives of African Americans in the South through what has been shared and passed down, and by excavating what has been forgotten, exploring how people of the past sustained themselves, both physically and spiritually. Her works are rooted in the strands of her heritage and the universal kinship we all share with nature.

Tokie holds an MAEd and EdS from Lesley University and a BA from Morris Brown College. She is an alumna of the Atlanta Contemporary Studio Artist Program, a Penland School of Craft Artist Fellow, a Nexus Fund Awardee, and a recipient of a Fund for Teachers Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Georgia Museum of Art, the Zuckerman Museum of Art, Hammonds House Museum, the Fralin Museum of Art, the Griffin Museum of Photography, Brenau University, Austin Peay State University, the University of North Carolina Greensboro, and the Frances M. Maguire Art Museum at Saint Joseph’s University.

Her work will be featured in the forthcoming book Picturing Black Girlhood, published by Aperture (Spring 2027), and is held in numerous public and private collections, including MOCA GA, the Fralin Museum of Art, Yale University, the Southeast Museum of Photography, The Coca-Cola Company, and the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art. Tokie is an educator and working artist.