Collection: Chatham Kemp

Chatham Meade Kemp has been an abstract painter in Hattiesburg, MS, for over 20+ years. She has taught painting and drawing at William Carey University for over 17 years. Chatham received her Master’s of Fine Arts degree in painting from Indiana University in Bloomington in 2007 and her Bachelor’s of Arts degree from the University of Southern Mississippi in 2004.  From early on, Chatham’s life was centered around making art, traveling to museums, and interacting with arts. She is the daughter of James W. Meade who has been an art faculty member at the University of Southern Mississippi for over 40 years and Myra Meade who taught art and ceramics to high school and elementary school students in addition to being a landscape painter.

It is her pleasure and privilege both in teaching and artistic production to give back to her native South Mississippi. Recently, Chatham was awarded an artist fellowship grant by the Mississippi Arts Commission and her paintings were also selected to be a part of the prestigious Mississippi Invitational at the Mississippi Museum of Art by guest juror Carla Hanzal. Her work was also recently featured in a National Juried Exhibition at the University of Southern Mississippi and invitational exhibitions at Southeastern Louisiana University and the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art. Chatham is also a  proud member of the Hattiesburg Women’s Art Collective.

What interests her in painting is composing an entire world made of fragments – a patch of light here, the suggestion of a color or a shape there –that flow together in a way that is not always logical, temporally or spatially. Chatham feels, as human beings, we have an amazing ability to revise, compress and fuse together elements that constitute the memory of our experiences. The tension of making these revisions and fusions happen on a canvas, whether it is through juxtaposing one color with another or suggesting forms that seem to jump from one moment in time to another, gives her paintings their bite. Chatham points out our world is increasingly fraught with instability while maintaining its beauty in spite of this.  Through her work she hopes to convey resilience despite not knowing exactly where our journey may be going.