Join Historic Arkansas Museum in 2020 for another great year of 2FAN!

For the first 2FAN of the year, they’ll hold the opening reception for Vice and Virtue, an exhibit by Melissa Wilkinson. Providing the musical entertainment for the evening is Little Rock’s The Cons of Formant.

Beverages and appetizers will be served in the Stella Boyle Smith Atrium including Arkansas-made beer from Stone’s Throw Brewing.

2nd Friday Art Night is sponsored by the Historic Arkansas Museum Foundation, with special thanks to 107 Liquor. The exhibit and reception are free and open to the public.

Vice and Virtue
Second Floor Gallery
January 10 – April 5, 2020

Melissa Wilkinson uses the traditional processes of painting to meditate on issues of gender, identity construction, and beauty by embracing the tactile in an increasingly technological and dehumanizing time. Her works embrace dichotomies, such as obscuring and revealing, attraction and repulsion, good and evil, the past and the present, and masculine and feminine. Vice and Virtue consists of appropriated images sourced from disco, private Tumblr accounts, and late 70’s/early 80’s “tomboys” who informed Wilkinson’s identity and sense of self as a queer person. Wilkinson’s meticulously crafted watercolor and ink wash paintings straddle the line between abstraction and representation and invite the viewer to consider how gender is perceived and displayed.

Melissa Wilkinson received her BFA in painting from Western Illinois University in 2002 and her MFA in painting from Southern Illinois University in 2006. She serves as Associate Professor of Art-Painting at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro. She lives in the Memphis, TN area.