Join The Jasper Project and Wilma Ruth King as we celebrate the opening of her exhibition in the gallery space at Harbison Theatre.
Beginning at 6:30 PM, guests are invited to explore the exhibition and meet King before the curtain rises for Mike Super's "Three's A Charm." Artwork will be available for purchase.
The exhibition is free and will remain on view through December 2026.
Artist Bio:
South Carolina native, Wilma R. King, endeavors to combine her experiences of living in 11 states (including Alaska) with her educational background into a visual storytelling collaboration through her painting. Her pursuit and passion goes beyond a daily practice of technique and development. She believes that universality — seeking common ground — is what makes art purposeful. She taught public relations, communication studies, advertising design, publication design, and photography for more than 30 years in American universities in Kentucky, Tennessee, New York, Virginia, Texas, and South Carolina, and taught Study abroad courses in Italy several years. She was an associate professor of Public Relations at both Western Kentucky University (Bowling Green, KY) and Rochester Institute of Technology (Henrietta, NY), and served on faculty at Benedict College (Columbia, SC), where she wrote the curriculum for, and taught the first courses in the college’s now defunct commercial art program; O’More College of Design (Franklin, TN); Texas Southern University (Houston, TX); The Art Institute of Houston (Houston, TX).
Artist Statement:
I am a contemplative contemporary painter. The context of my paintings is based on personal memories, and my style is described as a montage of times, places, and spaces. My goal as an artist is to give broader meaning to my personal experiences, build long-term relationships with communities, invite two-way communication, embody, expand, and present art and culture as significant and socially responsible. I seek to tell inspiring stories about the communities and cultures that were significantly changed, destroyed, or devastated, and to preserve the memories through my paintings.
I also share my love of art and my skills as an artist to positively affect others, particularly through portraits of children with special challenges or those in various stages of cancer, living out their dreams. In addition, some of the most important work I’ve done was commissioned to hang in private homes. Such works include a painting for a fellow parishioner who could no longer attend Eucharistic Adoration as she had done so for years, so wanted to create a prayer room in her home; a painting requested by a 9-year-old that represented his longing to hug his grandmother while she suffered with the shingles; and, a painting from my photographs of neighborhoods in Italy for a third generation Italian family who had never been there; a painting for a young woman who was able to purchase a house after living in a motel for two years, Portraits of children with special challenges or those in various stages of cancer living out their dreams. Of equal significance to me -- five of my paintings hung in the office of a mental health counselor, and another one in an office of a Ronald MacDonald’s House.