The Dodd Galleries at the Lamar Dodd School of Art is thrilled to announce the winner of the 2023 Margie E. West Prize, an annual award given to an esteemed alum of the Lamar Dodd School of Art who is invited to showcase their latest work in the Marjorie Eichenlaub West Gallery. The third recipient of the prize, Zipporah Camille Thompson, will present a new installation titled HIGH TIDE that will be on display from February 11 to March 30, 2023. Thompson graduated with an MFA from the Lamar Dodd School of Art in 2014, working in fabric design and ceramics. 

About the Exhibition

Zipporah Camille Thompson’s HIGH TIDE signifies the roller coaster of heights and depths of post-grief triumph. Exalted here in this fantastical space of meditation, cleansing, and renewal, are fluid bodies in crisis which have found fullness via loss, fullness via their dreams; through the stillness of night, here is the opportunity to embrace the pause while welcoming chaos and chance. Swallowed up in the shadows of the moon, thereafter outcast are nets of the summoning. Dusk and dawn, sway and swell, the peak of the wave encroaches and the summit emerges despite all it has endured.

About the Artist

Zipporah Camille Thompson (she.her.hers) is a ceramist, weaver, sculptor, and activist based in Atlanta, Georgia-land of the Muskogee. A native Carolinian, Thompson explores alchemical transformations through clay + textiles, examining marginalized bodies and eliciting social change through her work.  Sculpted shapeshifters and hybrid landscapes investigate otherness. 

She received her MFA from the University of Georgia and her BFA from the University of North Carolina Charlotte.  Her work has been featured in numerous publications and shown in spaces, nationally and internationally.  Zipporah Camille Thompson is a 2021 MOCA GA Working Artist Project Fellow, a 2020 Artadia Atlanta Awardee, a Watershed Zenobia Scholarship Award grantee, an NCECA Multicultural Fellow, and an Idea Capital Travel Grant recipient.  Thompson is represented by Whitespace Gallery in Atlanta, GA.  She is a history addict, roller-skater, and lover of unicorns, zombies, the moon, tarot and all things fantasy.

About the Margie E West Prize

The Lamar Dodd School of Art is grateful for the support for our programming and exhibitions in the Marjorie Eichenlaub West Gallery, which is supported by the Marjorie Eichenlaub West Gallery Endowment Fund. Margie’s contributions to the arts will be part of her lasting legacy. She will always be remembered as a voracious collector with a keen eye and unbridled passion for the arts.  
 
Margie served on the boards of The High Museum, the Georgia Museum of Art, and was a long-time member of The Forward Arts Foundation and a founding member of the Ceramic Circle of Atlanta. Her love of the arts was shared and passed down to her family, as her granddaughters attended Lamar Dodd School of Art.