2025 Juried Fine Art Student Exhibition
March 24 – April 4, 2025
Biggin Gallery’s annual Juried Fine Art Student Exhibition features selected works by current art students, with an awards presentation featuring the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and a distinguished visiting juror. Included works are eligible for numerous awards, including the Dean’s Choice Purchase Award, the Davis-Frye Annual Award in Art, and the Department of Art & Art History Merit Awards.
Juror's Lecture, Presentation of Awards and Reception
When: Thursday, March 27, 2025, 5:00-7:00 p.m. CDT
Where: Juror's Lecture and Presentation of Awards in 005 Biggin Hall; Reception in Biggin Gallery, 101 Biggin Hall
This event is free and open to the public. 005 Biggin Hall and Biggin Gallery are handicap accessible.
About the Juror
Left: Sara Garden Armstrong. Image courtesy of the artist. Right: Sara Garden Armstrong, Airplayer XVIII, 2025; sprayed abaca forms, embedded plastic hosing, blower boxes, relay switching, video projection, digitized sound, interior LED lighting. Photo credit: Savannah Lowery (Gadsden Museum).
Sara Garden Armstrong is a visual artist whose creative practice spans a wide range of mediums and techniques, from large site-specific sculpture to artists’ books. Her work addresses organic change and transformation while exploring properties of materials, resulting in nature-based biomorphic abstraction.
Armstrong’s atrium commissions have focused on scientific phenomena and their interactions with the human condition, such as her installation for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society at the University of Alabama Birmingham (UAB) Medical Center. A past recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation's CALL (Creating a Living Legacy) grant through Space One Eleven, Armstrong’s national and international exhibition record extends over a period of more than 40 years. Her artist’s books can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), among others.
The monograph SARA GARDEN ARMSTRONG: Threads and Layers (2020) reveals
the influences and concepts that run through her diverse body of work. Its publication coincided with a traveling exhibition of the same name. The exhibition made stops in Georgia, Florida and Alabama.
Armstrong received her MFA from the University of Alabama and her MA in Art Education from UAB. After living in New York City for 36 years, in 2017
she returned to Birmingham, where she currently lives and works in her building, which provides space for Ground Floor Contemporary Gallery (an artist-run collective) on the first floor and 21st Street Studios on the 3rd floor.