2nd floor hallway
201 E Main St
Rock Hill
   ART EXHIBIT
Seymour Simmons—Seth Rouser—Stephen Crotts
AUGUST 1 — SEPTEMBER 23 OCTOBER 7, 2022 (extended)
RECEPTION: SEPTEMBER 8, 6:30-8:30pm
exhibit overview
The artwork in this exhibit showcases and celebrates three generations of artists influencing each other in putting hand to paper.
exhibit description
A group show representing sketchbook works in portraiture from artists Seymour Simmons PhD ED., Seth Rouser, and Stephen Crotts. This selection of artists is unique in the connection of education. Mr Rouser was a student of Dr. Simmons, and Mr Crotts a student of both Simmons and Rouser. All three artists have a deft hand, combining gestural line, tone, and contours in their delicate depictions of people. Subjects range from part-time models, passers by and/or folks unaware, to intimate portraits of persons in the artists’ lives. These drawings span from the 1970s and until the present. "Sketching a Lineage" is anticipated to be a catalyst for discussions on activities - whether personal or professional - and/or workshops related to drawing.
SEYMOUR SIMMONS
Seymour Simmons III is a Professor of Fine Arts emeritus at Winthrop University, where he taught art education and all levels of drawing, including figure drawing and illustration. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Colorado State University where he concentrated in Printmaking, as well as Masters and Doctoral degrees in Education from Harvard University where his concentration was in philosophy of education with a focus on education in the visual arts. His doctoral thesis traced the history and philosophy of drawing instruction in the professional preparation of artists, as well as in art education preK-12. During and after graduate school, he did research on arts education at Harvard Project Zero, a center for research on arts and cognition.
More recently, his research has been in drawing and cognition, holistic education, creativity, and semiotics. Among these projects was a grant through the Imagination Institute with Seth Rouser and educational psychologists Ellen Winner (Boston College) and Jennifer Drake (Brooklyn College), developing videos to teach non-art majors to enhance their imagination through drawing from observation and imagination. He brought this research together in his book, The Value of Drawing Instruction in the Visual Arts and Across Curricula: Historical and Philosophical Arguments for Drawing in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2021). Previously, he co-authored an instructional drawing book, Drawing: The Creative Process, with Marc S. A. Winer (Prentice-Hall, 1974). As an artist, his interests include figurative drawing and landscape painting in watercolor.
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SETH ROUSER
Born in 1976, Seth Rouser is a native of South Carolina. For the past 20+ years he has lived and worked in Rock Hill, SC where is a resident artist and professor of art at Winthrop University. He holds an MFA from East Carolina University, located in Greenville, NC, and a BFA in Painting from Winthrop University. Rouser has exhibited his work regionally and nationally in an array of venues that include commercial, non-profit, and university galleries, as well as film and arts festivals. He has been featured twice in the national publication, Studio Visit Magazine. Rouser’s work ranges in formal style, varying from abstraction to realism. He works in a broad array of media; producing works in painting, printmaking, mixed media, and digital media-including video. This particular show highlights observational sketches of people made over the past 15 years. The images portray students, strangers, friends, family members, and significant others in both formal and casual poses. Although Rouser’s work is typically more imaginatively driven, this type of rendering is intricate to his practice, as it engages the artist in a sensitive meditation on this most classic of subjects, the portrait.
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STEPHEN CROTTS
Stephen Crotts is an illustrator in Rock Hill, SC. After graduating from Winthrop University, he completed an artist residency in New Orleans before working with Rock Hill Economic Development and Social Design House. He worked for over ten years with York County Culture & Heritage Museums in marketing. His work there included the coordination of the Southern Sound concert series. Stephen’s illustrations have been featured in award-winning books, album covers, magazines, and on stage at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. His work has been a part of books for several publishers, including HarperCollins and Penguin Random House. He has received the ECPA Top Shelf Book Cover Award and two GMA Dove Award nominations for album cover art. Locally, Stephen has served on the Old Town Association, the Vernon Grant Committee, the Rock Hill Poet Laureate Committee, completed the Leadership York County program, and has volunteered with Friday Arts Project and Rock Hill Theatre. He and his wife, Erica, have two daughters. He enjoys cooking in giant iron pots, playing banjo, and reptile and amphibian conservation efforts.
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