BUCKHANNON – West Virginia Wesleyan College’s Sleeth Gallery will host an exhibit by Matthew Fields Nov. 2-Dec. 2, 2023. A reception for the solo exhibition, entitled “Self-Awareness: An Introduction to Labor,” will be held Thursday, Nov. 2 from 4:30-6 p.m. with Fields giving an artist talk at 6 p.m. Sleeth Gallery is located in McCuskey Hall.

Fields, an assistant professor of art at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (UAPB), earned his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2021, and his Bachelor of Science in visual arts from UAPB in 2019. In 2020, between his time in Pine Bluff, he returned to his hometown of St. Louis where he worked as an interior and exterior painter while finishing up his graduate studies.

“The work created in conversation with my written thesis, ‘The Labor of the African American Experience,’ is a contemporary installation including both traditional approaches to art making as well as three-dimensional structures to frame the work in the context highlighted by the writing,” Fields said.

“During my time working as an interior/exterior painter, I came to realize the symbolism embedded in the practice of transforming a space,” Fields continued. “The largest being how the United States is founded on the recreation of a space that already existed, and consequentially how the formerly enslaved had to work for the space to evolve in this country.”

For more information about Fields and to view more of his work, visit his website unartistikcreations.myportfolio.com.