Gallery

Spruill Center for the Arts and Spruill Gallery are pleased to announce that the 2024 AMPLIFY finalists are Steven L. Anderson, InKyoung Chun, and Manty Dey. 

In 2020, Spruill Gallery introduced AMPLIFY, an annual creative placemaking project on the Gallery grounds meant to engage the community through vibrant public art installations and to support working artists and the art economy. Each year, an artist’s mural design is selected from a vast pool of entries from a nationwide call. The AMPLIFY selection committee reviews artist submissions. From this impressive pool, three finalists emerge, with one artist and their public art project revealed at the annual Spirits for Spruill event to be held this year on October 26. 

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Steven L. Anderson

Steven L. Anderson (b. 1971, Ann Arbor, MI) is an exhibiting artist and Co-Director of Day Projects—an artist-run gallery in Atlanta that he helped initiate in 2016. Since 1996, galleries and museums throughout the United States have exhibited his works. His work is also featured in public and private collections such as Fulton County Public Arts, Coca-Cola headquarters, Emory Winship Cancer Center, Emory University Hospitals, and the National Park Service, Joshua Tree, CA . Anderson lives and works in Atlanta as a Senior Graphic Designer in the Office of Undergraduate Admission at Emory University.  

Anderson’s proposal aims to continue his “ReNaturing” artworks from Spruill’s In Light exhibition of Summer 2023. Images clipped from 19th-century botanical engravings of vines and flowers will cascade across the wall in black, punctuated by colorful washes, gradients, drips, and marks of varying transparencies that seem to escape from the scientifically rendered flora. The black lines never totally disappear, so the engraving’s pictorial space and the new dimension of bright colors seem to shimmer back and forth.

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In Kyoung Chun

Born in Seoul, South Korea, InKyoung Chun is a painter living in Atlanta. The High Museum of Art, the City of Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs, and the Fulton County Public Library of Atlanta feature Chun’s work in their collections. Recent premieres of her work include a solo show at Sumter County Gallery in Sumter, SC and HiLo Press of Atlanta, Georgia. 

Chun’s public art Rainbow Gateway: Saekdong curated by Dash, was presented on Peachtree Center Plaza in downtown Atlanta (2021). In 2022, Emory University presented her sculpture Blue Gate, which is currently featured in a curated presentation by YI Gallery on view at the Industrial City Square in Brooklyn, New York.  Chun served as an artist-in-residence at Atlanta Contemporary (2020-2023), where her installation Table and Cloud 2 premiered for the Studio Artist Wall in the Spring of 2023.

Chun is represented by Yi Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. For the AMPLIFY mural project at Spruill Gallery, she offers to create a scene of The Table filled with fresh foods, drinks, and decorations. The Table is a significant, central object in the house. The Table symbolizes serving, sharing, celebrating, and togetherness. Its presence invites us to sit around and lets us keep positive energies for our bodies by having a meal, and for our minds by cheering on conversations. It is a fundamental spot where we grow and amplify our life and world.  

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Manty Dey

Manty Dey (b. 1988 Kumarghat, India) is a visual artist who now resides in Atlanta. Dey earned a BFA in painting and drawing from Georgia State University and an MFA from the University of Georgia. Her work has been exhibited at MOCA GA, Georgia Museum of Art, Macon Museum of Arts and Sciences, and MINT Gallery. She has been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center and The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences.

Manty Dey creates botanical paintings inspired by her daily surroundings and observations of nature. Paper collages, botanical illustrations, and colour field paintings inspire Dey’s recent works. Her mural design for the Spruill Smokehouse is a colorful floral abstraction inspired by cyclamen petals. Each year, the sweeping petals on the flower return in the winter months after resting during the summertime is a reminder of the delightful moments that await in the next season

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