Amy Pleasant

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Amy Pleasant (born 1972) is a Birmingham-based artist known for her figurative, free associative paintings and drawings that explore simple, daily acts in slowly unfolding narratives.

Pleasant got an early start as an artist, exhibiting work in a show arranged by Thelma Pritchett when she was five years old. She graduated from Shades Valley High School, then earned a bachelor of fine arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a master of fine arts from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. For much of her career she has worked out of a studio near the Alabama Theater that was later renovated as the Hill Event Center.

In an article in Art in America, Max Henry wrote that her work "chronicles everyday life...full of existential angst and loneliness, her paintings are able to evoke an empathetic response from the viewer." David Moos, who had a close relationship with Pleasant at the Birmingham Museum of Art, wrote of Pleasant’s work that through "fragments of overlapping narratives" the viewer is allowed to "glimpse the formation of images" and is "made aware of how the painter makes decisions in paint, amending a passage and visibly editing the composite image."

Pleasant has had solo exhibitions at the Birmingham Museum of Art, UAB Art Gallery, JoJo Home and the Tandem Gallery in Birmingham; the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in Georgia; Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennesse; and the Ruby Green Center for Contemporary Art in Nashville, Tennessee.

In addition, her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Huntsville Museum of Art in Huntsville; the Wiregrass Museum of Art in Dothan; the Mobile Museum of Art in Mobile; the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Georgia; the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, Tennessee; the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C.; and the U.S. Embassy in Prague, Czech Republic.

She has been awarded an Individual Artist Grant from the Cultural Alliance of Greater Birmingham and the Alabama State Council on the Arts. her work can be found in the collections of the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Wiregrass Museum of Art, and the Progressive Corporation, as well as in many private collections. In 2015 she received Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Award and the Mary Hambidge Distinguished Artist Award. In 2018 Pleasant was presented with the "South Arts Prize" for Alabama, and also awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

Pleasant currently works from a home studio in Avondale. She has a daughter, Cameron, and a son, Ellis.

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