MFA Candidate Victoria Dugger Featured in Burnaway

The School of Art is pleased to announce that an essay by MFA candidate Victoria Dugger was recently featured in Burnaway. Images of Dugger’s recent work accompanied her essay which explores disability and the Black female body. Dugger was featured in Mood Ring, Burnaway’s artist column that features original artist projects and writings. 

“It’s easy to be overlooked when you don’t have a seat at the table, but thankfully I always bring my own chair. As a disabled Black woman, I have a desire for people to accept or appreciate me for both my surface and what’s below it; to humanize me because of my appearance, not despite it. It’s easier to feel a human connection to someone when you remember everyone has guts and bleeds just like you. I’ve found that the “Art World” tends to appreciate an “acceptable” or palatable disability, one that’s different enough to be “exotic” but relatable enough to not scare people away. People are afraid of what they don’t understand. The Black female experience of disability isn’t one that gets great—if any—representation, and if you’ve never seen it authentically represented, you can’t understand it.”

Read Dugger’s full essay here.

Victoria Dugger (b. 1991) earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Columbus State University in 2016 with a focus in painting and sculpture. She is currently a MFA Candidate at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia. Since graduating Dugger has exhibited in Georgia, Pennsylvania, District of Columbia, Virginia and New York. She was recently featured in New American Paintings South Edition 142 and in 2016 was chosen as the First Prize winner in the VSA Emerging Young Artists Award and the work is currently on national tour with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Image, top: Victoria Dugger, I See You (left) and You See Me (right), both 2020.

Victoria Dugger, Painting the Roses Red, 2020.