Farida Hughes

 

Statement of Mentoring Philosophy

My goal as a mentor is to help my protégé develop a strong studio practice, hone critical thinking skills and establish the foundations for a long and rewarding artistic career. I enjoy the creative process and feel feedback is necessary in the studio in order to maintain a healthy progression with one’s art. I believe a mentor should be genuinely interested, engaged, positive and supportive, and strive to understand their protégé’s interests and goals.  I aim to take a supportive role in the development of my protégé’s career in any way that I can through the knowledge that I have gained: whether by guiding in marketing and portfolio building, seeking out exhibitions and crafting shows, being a strong coach and role model for a continuous studio practice, advising in methods and materials, or sharing in general art world/art market knowledge based on my own experiences.

As a mentor I would encourage my protégé to understand art as a lifelong engagement and process of development, as I do in my own artistic practice. I believe it is important to work out ideas over time, starting with simple concepts and letting them grow in an organic way. Artists should continually question and think critically. Artists need to be aware of their work not only within the studio but in its place in the world as they strive to fashion a career. As an artist and a teacher I help students engage in a responsible attitude toward themselves as artists within a community of artists and the public. As a mentor I aim to help build an awareness of the artistic world, help my protégé develop career goals and plan strategically to meet them over time. I will encourage her to establish short-term and long-term goals in the studio as well as with the business part of being an artist, and to engage in regular self-evaluation to continue to grow.

Biography

Farida Hughes is a visual artist working primarily in oil paint on canvas and mixed media on paper. Hughes has an undergraduate degree in Studio Art and English from Fordham University in New York, and a MFA from the University of Chicago. Born in New York and spending most of her life on the East Coast, she currently lives in St. Paul, Minnesota and maintains a studio in the California Building in Northeast Minneapolis. Farida Hughes has exhibited her paintings nationally in solo and group exhibitions in commercial gallery, museum, university and non-profit spaces. Her work is included in several private and corporate collections. She has taught art both privately and at the secondary and college levels. She was also instrumental in developing a grassroots community arts program in southern Virginia. Hughes’ work is represented by Glave Kocen Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, Soho Myriad in Atlanta and Los Angeles, and Corporate Art Force in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Statement

At the heart of my work I am interested in group interactions in landscape. I explore painting spaces as formal exercises in color, collective shape and movement; conceptually my work is bound to ideas of viewing, natural and artificial boundaries, and community participation. My paintings are an abstract envisioning of crowds of people at events as seen from above. I am interested in the assembling and dispersing of crowds, the movements of a mass, and the spaces kept or left between people or groups.

My current work began with an exploration of parade routes and crowds lining up along them, spilling into the parade space and dispersing at the edges. Observations and research are leading me to further explore flow, traffic and crowd patterns at festival gatherings, street fairs, seasonal parades and occasional public celebrations where people of all demographics mingle. Within these paintings one can see emerging complexities: colors that indicate a flow of movement through the composition, groups that work together within the whole, forms that have been painted out to leave breathing space and a passage into the crowd. I consider spatial relationships and collective movements as things fall into place along paths, or bump up against the edges created by architectural and natural boundaries existing in our landscape. Emptying the space of these boundaries and pictorial references allows me freedom to focus specifically on the collective shapes and movements of and within a group.