New Tibbott exhibit features USN art teacher

Lower and Middle School teacher Bridget Bailey's oil self-portraits and clay moldings will remain on display through the end of the school year.
by Delia Seigenthaler, visual arts teacher

The Visual Arts Department is excited to present the work of Bridget Bailey in the Tibbott Center Gallery opening May 2.

Bailey was born and raised in Nashville, and earned her bachelor of arts at the University of Virginia in biology and art, with a concentration in painting and a minor in art history. She has been working at USN since 2016 in the green door kindergarten classroom as Karri Leslie's teaching assistant, supervising Lower School students in After-School, and teaching seventh and eighth-grade ceramics.

Meanwhile, she has been making art, primarily in her kitchen. She has been accepted to the graduate school at Boston University and will earn her master of fine arts in painting in the fall.

"My work is and has always been about the act of painting, the visceral qualities of oil paint and its relationship to the body. I have also been making things out of clay because, for me, clay is very much related to painting,” Bailey said. “I am interested in the exchange between the material, its fluidity, and myself. I am inspired by playdough used in the kindergarten and my own lifelong fondness for modeling clay, its eternal squish. The canvases are self-portraits and as I look in the mirror to paint, I draw from my familiarity with my own socks and knees to sculpt, but they are also odes to the slipperiness of paint and of clay, odes to bodies--alone and together, to casual clothes, and to play."

Please join us for an opening reception to celebrate "Soapy Girl" from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. Thursday, May 2. The exhibit will be on display through Wednesday, May 29.
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University School of Nashville models the best educational practices. In an environment that represents the cultural and ethnic composition of Metropolitan Nashville, USN fosters each student’s intellectual, artistic, and athletic potential, valuing and inspiring integrity, creative expression, a love of learning, and the pursuit of excellence.