FLORENCE-The Kennedy-Douglass Center for the Arts is pleased to present “The Beautifully Strange World of Wayne Sides”, beginning August 30, 2024, and continuing through October 11, 2024. Artist and UNA Professor Emeritus, Wayne Sides, describes this exhibition as “three shows in one. It’s a little bit of a strange retrospective in the sense that it borrows work from different periods of my career, 3D and 2D, but also includes new work too.” A reception for Sides will be held at the Arts Center on Fri., September 6, 6-8 p.m.
In the artists words, “Much of the work hasn’t been shown in this state or this country and some, not at all. What’s never
been seen before has a lot to do with what I’ve been creating since I was a child. It’s the work that basically saved me, grounded me, and allowed me to push forward in my life and eventually, my career.”
“It served as a type of substitute for my inability to comprehend written language, otherwise known as dyslexia. As a child growing up in rural Alabama in the 1950s, the words, ‘learning disability’ was never a part of the lexicon of the south and was something I didn’t learn until I was an adult. […] I never had any art classes until I was an adult, but it was a gift that was given to me, and I was lucky to recognize it.”
“Drawing and assembling found objects was a way of communicating. It allowed me to have a sense of confidence in that I was able to complete a task and communicate with it, at least to myself. Photography was also another form of communication that I could use to investigate my environment in which I found myself. It presented a way of understanding what things looked like in a different form, and opened a whole new world of imagination.”
“Photography, drawing, and three-dimensional art basically became my only form of communication and has been for most of my life. I make what I consider to be art, every day of my life. I my case, I make art today the same way I did as a child. As Picasso once said, ‘every child is an artist, the problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up’ but that’s never been my problem.”
Wayne Sides is a native of Calhoun County, Alabama. He has received a bachelor’s degree in visual and performing arts from the University of Alabama New College in Tuscaloosa and earned a master’s degree in photo image making/art from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. He worked as a lecturer and artist in residence with Southwest State University of Marshall, MN, the New York Federation for the Arts. His work has been displayed nationally and internationally in galleries that include the OK Harris Gallery, Soho, NYC; A Palazzo Panichi Museum in Pietra Santa, Italy; and Birmingham Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham, AL
His photographs are published in several books such as Side Show, Litany of a Vanishing Landscape, White Knights, Silence and the Hammer, Human Traces, Gather Up Our Voices, and Interpreter. His work has also been used as cover art for The Ballad of Little River by Paul Hemphill, Goodbye to the Buttermilk Sky by Julia Oliver, and three collections of poetry by Jeanie Thompson: How to Enter the River, Witness, White for Harvest, and New and Selected Poems.
The Kennedy-Douglass Center for the Arts is free and open to the public Monday – Friday from 9-4 and on Sundays from 1-4. The art center is located at 217 E. Tuscaloosa St. Florence, AL and can be reached by calling (256) 760-6379.
Media Release/Jenny Dawn Stucki, Art Director/Kennedy-Douglass Center for the Arts
