EXHIBITIONS
BRADBURY ART MUSEUM
STIL/LEVEN, STILL/EVEN
August 21 - November 4, 2025
Mary Claire Becker
Nakeya Brown
Chenxi Gao
Kay S. Healy
Ryan Horvath
Audrey Rodriguez
Shelby Shadwell
CURATOR’S STATEMENT
Stil/Leven, Still/Even is a curated group exhibition exploring still life––artwork representing inanimate objects––as a genre which has both endured through the centuries and which has expanded beyond painting, the artistic discipline of its birth.
“The title of this exhibition is a play on the Dutch word for still life –– ‘stilleven’, which is a compound of ‘stil,’ meaning still, and ‘leven,’ meaning life. Combined this way, they resemble the English words ‘still’ and ‘even,’ both of which can be used to communicate longevity or persistence over time,” said museum curator Madeline McMahan.
The show brings together seven artists from across the United States: Mary Claire Becker, Nakeya Brown, Chenxi Gao, Kay S. Healy, Ryan Horvath, Audrey Rodriguez, and Shelby Shadwell. Their work explores various facets of objecthood and the still life through a variety of materials.
From artist Mary Claire Becker, “Stil/Leven, Still/Even” includes an installation of silkscreen printed vinyl wallpaper with three-dimensional cut paper elements, a digital video, framed silkscreen prints, and colored pencil drawings. Three other printmakers are included as well. Work by Chenxi Gao combines digital printmaking with quilting and bookbinding. Across the gallery are handmade silkscreen printed, painted, and sewn plush sculptures of household items. Also included are five small, intricately detailed intaglio prints of objects from the natural world by Ryan Horvath.
Sculpture, drawing, and photography are represented with ultra-realistic sculpted Latin American pastries by Audrey Rodríguez, alluring charcoal drawings of coal and space blankets by Shelby Shadwell, and photographic still lifes exploring Black womanhood and beauty culture by Nakeya Brown.
Within this variety of materials, painting is conspicuously absent. McMahan explained, “’Still life’ was initially used as a term for a genre of painting specifically, but this show was intentionally curated to not include painting as a means of exploring the expansion of still life over time; its roots may be in painting, but its branches reach across disciplinary boundaries. This mirrors what has happened in the art world as a whole. At one time, Fine Art was thought of as limited to painting, sculpture, and architecture. That viewpoint has expanded so much, and we want to honor that.”
“We’re surrounded by objects all the time, so much so that we can forget to consider them, but objects can so much about our lifestyles, priorities, histories, and identities,” McMahan added, “and so, still life continues to fascinate us, even still.”
Mary Claire Becker is a printmaker whose work rearranges and re-contextualizes human-made depictions of Nature. She grew up in Raleigh, NC and currently lives in Stillwater, OK, where she works as Assistant Professor of Printmaking at Oklahoma State University. She holds an MA and MFA from the University of Iowa, a Certificate of Book Arts from the UI Center for the Book, and a BFA from the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
Mary Claire was the 2019 Stephen L. Barstow Artist-in-Residence at Central Michigan University. She has also attended residencies at Iowa Lakeside Laboratory, Jentel Arts, and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center and served as a studio assistant at Penland School of Crafts. She has shown internationally at venues including Changsha Normal University (Changsha, Hunan, China), Tippetts and Eccles Gallery at Utah State University, the Stanley Museum of Art’s First Friday series (Iowa City, IA), the New York Center for Book Arts, and Blue Spiral 1 (Asheville, NC), and Manifest Gallery (Cincinnati, OH). Awards include the Curator’s Choice Award in Mid-America Print Council’s 2018 Members Juried Exhibition, as well as the Best in Show Award in Paducah School of Art and Design’s 2022 International Juried Print Biennial.
Nakeya Brown was born in Santa Maria, California. She received her Bachelor of Art from Rutgers University and her Master of Fine Arts from The George Washington University. Her work has been featured in exhibitions nationally and internationally. Brown’s work has been featured in Time, New York Magazine, Dazed & Confused, The Fader, The New Yorker, and Vice. Her work has been included in photography books MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, Babe, and Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze. Her photography is featured in A Trillion Sunsets, an exhibition at the International Center of Photography.
Chenxi Gao (高晨曦) is a printmaking-based artist residing in Fayetteville, AR. Born and raised in China, Gao earned her BFA from Baylor University and her MFA from the University of North Texas. By pondering her relationship with multiple living spaces since childhood, she explores her sense of self in the shifting of cultural and social environments. Gao has exhibited nationally and internationally in the United Kingdom, and her work has entered multiple permanent collections, such as the Bradbury Art Museum.
Kay Healy investigates themes of home, loss, displacement, and resilience with interview-based projects through her life-sized drawn, painted, and screen-printed fabric installations
Healy received a BA from Oberlin College and a MFA from the University of the Arts. Her installation Coming Home was purchased by the Pennsylvania Convention Center, and her work has been supported by the Independence Foundation’s Fellowship in the Arts and the Leeway Foundation.
Healy has had solo exhibitions at Gallery Madison Park in New York City, Gallery Septima in Tokyo, Japan, the Windgate Gallery in Fort Smith, Arkansas, the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts, the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, and other galleries. She has completed residencies at KKV Print Studios in Malmö, Sweden, The Cooper Union in New York City, and Moosey Gallery in Norwich, UK.
She created Casey’s Cases, a graphic novel series for children published by Neal Porter Books, an imprint of Holiday House. She is represented by Hannah Mann of Writers House.
Ryan Horvath was born in Peoria, IL and spent his childhood in rural, central Illinois. Horvath received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Bradley University in 2009 and his Master of Fine Arts from Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville in 2012. While studying at Bradley University, Ryan’s love of drawing and sculpture coalesced when he carved and printed his first relief print. At that moment, his obsession with printmaking was born.
Ryan spent his formative years hiking and wandering in the creeks and woods of central Illinois. This instilled in him a reverence and love for the natural world that continues to this day. Ryan’s passion for the beauty of nature is reflected in his meticulously-crafted woodcut prints that depict humble, iconic objects from the natural world. Ryan’s work can be found in galleries as well as public and private collections throughout the country. He currently resides in Edwardsville, IL where he is an Instructor in Printmaking at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
Audrey Rodriguez (b. 1990, Texas) currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, and teaches at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the New York Academy of Art. She was the recipient of the New York Academy of Art’s Chubb Fellowship in 2023 and earned her master’s degree there in 2022. Her painting Corona Plaza was featured in the Museum of the City of New York’s 2023 exhibition "Food in New York: Bigger Than the Plate." Rodriguez’s work has also been showcased in the Peto Biennial at the John F. Peto Museum in 2016 and the 47th International Art Show at the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art in 2019. She is one of ten finalists nominated to receive The Bennett Prize in 2025. An accompanying exhibition of the finalists will tour the Muskegon Museum of Art, Arnot Art Museum, Customs House and Museum Center, The Bo Bartlett Center, Studio Incamminati, and more through 2027. Rodriguez will exhibit work in Stil/Leven, Still/Even at the Bradbury Art Museum in Arkansas, on view from August 21 to November 19, 2025. Rodriguez first had a solo show with McLennon Pen Co. in June 2023 and has since had a two person show in January 2025.
Shelby Shadwell is currently a Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Wyoming. Born and raised in Springfield, Missouri, Shelby received his BFA in 2003 from Washington University in St. Louis and his MFA in 2006 from Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
A two-time recipient of the Visual Arts Fellowship from the Wyoming Arts Council, Shelby actively exhibits across the nation. His more recent exhibitions include LIKE AND SHARE IF YOU AGREE!!!, a solo show at the South Bend Museum of Art, DRAWN at Manifest Creative Research Gallery in Cincinnati, OH, and Drawing Discourse at the University of North Carolina Asheville. Shelby was awarded a solo exhibition at the APEX Space at the Portland Art Museum in OR in 2016, and his work is included in their permanent collection. For his research sabbatical from 2021 – 2022, Shelby accepted the Manifest Artist Residency Award, and he spent the year making new work at their Gallery and collaborating on educational opportunities at their Drawing Center in Cincinnati, OH.
Shelby was recently honored with the Stone & Deguire Contemporary Art Award in the amount of $25,000 from his alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis. Recent and upcoming solo exhibition venues include STRATA Gallery in Santa Fe, NM, the Kentler International Drawing Space in Brooklyn, NY, IA&A at Hillyer in Washington D.C, and the Bradbury Art Museum in Jonesboro, AR.