The Dodd recently gained Clyde Conwell as a first-year MFA student, whose work is currently on view in the group exhibition Queering the Mountains at the 130 Gallery located within Western Carolina University’s Fine Art Museum in Cullowhee, NC.

Curated by Chelsea Dobert-Kehn, the exhibition is organized in conjunction with a summer-long research project to engage with and explore queer community in Asheville and the surrounding Appalachian region. The purpose of the field research is to investigate what makes a space ‘queer.’ The exhibition includes 20 artists living and working in Appalachia who identify as queer. Conwell has two paintings featured: Untitled: Tongued Tired - when giving is harder than receiving (emotionally) (seen above) and Untitled: forlorn |/ plopped opaqueless skinned dollop \| fml (below).

Queering the Mountains is on view at the 130 Gallery through September 7.

Clyde Conwell is from Wilmington, NC. She received a BA in Studio Art from Bard College in 2008. From 2006-2017 she participated in various queer punk communities around the United States, playing in a variety of queer bands/projects, as well as, booked/promoted shows for women and queers. Conwell continues to write and perform music under her solo acoustic project Clyde Conwell. Both her art and music projects reflect the awareness, ambition, and struggle to understand how one can live freely with the pressures of mental health, social media, global warming, misogyny, heteronormativity, political arenas, Southern standards of tradition and pride (or rather shame), and American culture/counterculture. She pursues and is inspired by compassion, resiliency, and anger. Conwell chooses to focus on progression and transformation.