• Mike Sleadd, Visiting Artist 

    Mike Sleadd, born and raised in Kentucky, currently resides in Columbia, Missouri. As the former Chair of the Department of Visual Arts and Music at Columbia College, he has taught a variety of art classes for the past 31 years. Sleadd works from numerous thumbnail sketches, beginning a drawing with expressive gestures using the ink-soaked plume of a feather. From those initial strokes, he begins to weave an array of patterns into detailed, whimsical abstractions. Intricate, expressive, and sometimes humorous, Sleadd’s work is complex and full of texture, evolving over dozens of hours spent dipping his pen into his antique inkwell.

    Sleadd is known for complex and highly expressive works in ink, wherein bold, gestural strokes form the boundaries around meticulously-marked fields of visual texture. New, ceramic wall relief works accompany those in ink on paper for the September Exhibit, these new objects manipulating physical space in a manner analogous to yet distinct from the works on paper.

     

    First Graders will visit the Exhibit during a September field trip. Following the field trip, Mike Sleadd will come to Locust Street to show students how to draw objects from Nature. This goes along with their Art Integration - Where the Sidewalk Ends.