Visual Artist Residency Award

Educational Resources

We at the Lillian E. Smith Center are working to provide pedagogical resources and materials to educators and students. Currently, we have audio and video resources on our website. These contain recordings of Smith reading selections from her work and clips of Smith from various sources.

At this time, we are producing a Library Guide on Smith and her works. This guide will include five works by Smith ranging from one of the Laurel Leaf newsletters she sent to the parents of campers to a speech she delivered to graduates at Kentucky State College. Each entry will contain a brief introduction to the piece, five questions for students to consider, and some activities for students to complete based on the reading. There will also be photos and other items available.

Finally, our director, Dr. Matthew Teutsch, constructed a short graphic memoir on Smith which can be used in the classroom to introduce students to Smith’s life and work. On his blog, he has detailed how he constructed the work and the quotes that he used.

Teena Wilder McClure-Scanlin Visual Artist

Residency Award

Teena Wilder is the recipient of the 2020 McClure-Scanlin Visual

Artist Residency Award. Wilder is a multidisciplinary artist and writer from rural Summerton, South Carolina. She currently attends the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design focusing on New Studio Practice with a double minor in Humanities and Art History. Wilder has been a Yale Norfolk School of Art Summer Residence recipient and received the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship. She has had numerous exhibitions in South Carolina and Wisconsin, and her work has appeared in publications such as Jet Magazine. Wilder’s work, as she puts it, “seeks to disrupt and redirect space, time, and form through video, sculpture, performance, and critique.” She focuses on the ways that “the black body utilizes being an inconsequential spectacle as a way to navigate restricting systems and invisibility.”

On receiving the award, Wilder said, “After living in the Midwest, this award gives me an opportunity to return to the South and rebuild my relationship with my southern body and home. I will have time to reflect on how my body has navigated cultural migration and translation, gaining a better understanding of how my black body is able to move in a restricted space and system. I’m excited to engage and perform with the environmental setting of the residency, really implementing movement studies relating to diaspora and environmental racism.”

The McClure-Scanlin Award is made possible through a generous gift to Piedmont College from Tommye Scanlin and her husband, Thomas, who are giving the award in honor of their mothers. Tommye is a member of the LES Center Advisory Board and a long-time LES Center Fellow. The award recipient is selected in consultation with faculty members of the Piedmont Department of Art and receives a complimentary two-week residency at the Center.