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Prometheus Art

Over the winter she and her husband and partner, Brad Connell, have been working furiously to complete Kentucky’s Covid-19 Memorial monument in time for an installation in late spring on the State Capitol grounds.

Realizing at a young age she wanted to be an artist, Matthews graduated from the University of Louisville in the early ’90s with a degree in studio art and philosophy, then worked in “the corporate world” for years until she migrated back to the arts and became a successful and established painter and teacher.

A couple of decades ago, she began to add more texture to her canvasses until they wilted under the weight. Finally, she thought, “Tis is crazy; why does one side have to be fat?” and exploded beyond two dimensions.

An early result was a female head whose wild hair is actually the root system of an uprooted honeysuckle bush. “Rhiza,” as she called the piece, was the frst of her Messengers series that uses wood and other natural objects to create mythical female fgures known as dryads. In her 30s, Matthews had found her artistic calling: “Te challenge of three dimensions, 360-degree perspective … really changed the way I saw things.”

Tat all-encompassing perspective melds with Matthews’ wide-ranging intellectual curiosity. In college she explored subjects from philosophy to history to metaphysics to logic and comparative religions but was put of by the need to categorize felds of study. She saw instead “so many subjects that seem like they are dissimilar but overlap in so many ways.”

Tat explains the cardinal that will sit in the hands of a female fgure at the entry to the Covid-19 Memorial. Te cardinal is, of course, the Kentucky state bird, and Matthews herself is a University of Louisville Cardinal. But there’s a deeper meaning that makes it appropriate for a memorial to the more than 18,000 Kentuckians the virus has claimed. “People throughout the world associate the cardinal with a visit from a loved one who has passed on,” she said.

Her dedication to research was evident in her work on a monument to Alice Allison Dunnigan, a Russellville, Kentucky, native who became the frst African American female correspondent to receive White House credentials. Te statue toured for several months before its fnal installation in Russellville in August 2019. At one of the stops, the Harry Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, Matthews read several passages from Dunnigan’s autobiography to explain decisions she made on how to present her clothing, including the scufs on her shoes, and her persistence in fnding and getting permission to use the edi-