Graduate student in painting Nathan Childers received the Best in Show award in the exhibition Queer Aesthetics held at Mississippi University for Women Galleries, October 5 through November 11, 2022, in Columbus, Mississippi. Childers won for his oil painting Peter’s Denial. The exhibition was organized and curated by Assistant Professor Jill Drouillard in MUW’s department of languages, literature and philosophy. The exhibition’s purpose is to highlight artwork from the LGBTQ+ community and is part of a series of initiatives that focuses on queer visibility in an effort to upset or to queer traditional modes of knowledge production, according to the website.
“With the painting Peter’s Denial,” Childers said, “I focused on the techniques of classical paintings of biblical stories. These techniques have been weaponized in the past to establish hierarchies and erase people as participants of that history. My aim is to use them to make present a community of people that has been often overlooked or erased.”
Nathan Childers is working toward the Master of Fine Arts degree in painting at UA, with an assistantship. He received a BFA cum laude in painting from the University of West Georgia. Childers received an Honorable Mention at the Georgia Watercolor Society 42nd National Exhibition in Carrollton, Georgia, and his work has been juried into Ink Only III National Juried Print Biennial, Art Fields (2020 and 2021), Mark Arts Oil Painting National Exhibition and Kansas Watercolor Society National Exhibition. Childers has also participated in one- and three-person shows at Lowe Mill Arts in Huntsville, Alabama, and the Carrollton (Ga.) Center for the Arts.
For more information about The University of Alabama’s programs in studio art and art history, visit our Degree Programs page.