
Contact
Information
virginiashirley@telepak.net
601 707-3131
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Virginia
Shirleys award-winning artwork has been selected for exhibition
in over twenty museums and commercial galleries, as well as numerous
juried art competitions. Two pieces of her work are included in
the permanent collection of the Cottonlandia Museum in Greenwood,
Mississippi.
Virginia is a member of Mississippi Art Colony, The Montgomery
(AL) Art Guild, South Mississippi Art Association, and the National
Oil and Acrylic Painters Society. She studied art at the University
of Alabama, the Taos Institute of Arts in New Mexico, and under
a grant program of The Alabama Council of the Arts. She is former
executive director of the ArtsAlliance of Jackson & Hinds
County (MS), and former program director of the Mississippi Arts
Commission.
Primarily
working now in oil on canvas, she is also an accomplished potter.
Her works in clay use a hand-built, coil technique, finished with
her hand-mixed glazes fired in a gas kiln. Her work in clay has
been exhibited in commercial galleries in Florida, Alabama and
Mississippi, and received a purchase award at Cottonlandia Museum.
After
growing up in Montgomery, Alabama, Virginia attended Berea College
and the University of Alabama, where she graduated with a degree
in Southern Folklife Studies from the New College. She now lives
in Madison, Miss. with her husband Philip . She divides her
time between Jackson, Dauphin Island, Alabama, and the Blue Moon Lodge she and her husband
built on a mountain overlooking Paint Rock Valley in Northeast Alabama's
Cumberland Mountains.
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