MFA student Hail Holtzclaw featured in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

MFA student Hail Holtzclaw was recently featured in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for her debut solo exhibition GLOSS, on view at The End Project Space through January 10, 2025.

Hail Holtzclaw is an Atlanta-based artist who is currently an MFA candidate in Studio Art at the University of Georgia. She received her BA and BFA from Georgia State University. She primarily works in oil paint and charcoal.

Excerpt of “Pulp and parody collide in Hail Holtzclaw’s incisive paintings” by Felicia Feaster (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

In Norman Rockwell’s 1960 “Triple Self-Portrait,” the illustrator studies himself in a mirror, using his reflection as a guide to paint his portrait on a large canvas. In Rockwell’s characteristically whimsical, caricature-adjacent style, he acknowledges the history of artists painting themselves with the self-portraits of Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Picasso and others tacked onto his easel.

Inspired by “Triple Self-Portrait,” Grant Park artist Hail Holtzclaw’s painting “Playdumb” (2022) riffs on Rockwell’s Americana-infused work.

In “Playdumb,” on view through Jan. 10 at southwest Atlanta’s The End Project Space, Holtzclaw “plays” an artist gazing into a mirror, holding a brush aloft as she prepares to paint her own likeness.

Her self-portrait is a tongue-in-cheek spin on a Playboy magazine cover. Like Rockwell’s work, it comments upon an artist’s self-invention, while also engaging in a larger cultural critique of how women are represented in traditional men’s magazines.

“Playdumb” isn’t just a painting of a pretty blond wearing an artist’s apron and little else. It’s also a snarky takedown of the vision of women — as beautifully vacuous and inert — that a magazine like Playboy presents to the world. In Holtzclaw’s clever turnabout, women aren’t the joke, they’re in on it, lampooning the insipid stereotypes.

Holtzclaw’s solo show “Gloss” offers up six conceptual self-portraits that use magazines as their jumping-off point in humorous riffs on popular “glossies,” including National Geographic, Vogue, Heavy Metal and Guns & Ammo.

For Holtzclaw, magazines provide a rich artistic playground. “I feel like it’s a very flexible lens, and I really enjoy working through frameworks,” she said. “I’m really interested in remixing and taking either historical or more contemporary compositions and recontextualizing them to create a new story.”

A fan of old media and a collector of vintage National Geographics, Holtzclaw sees a real affinity between her work and the way Rockwell also depicted the good and bad of American culture, highlighting a country defined by abundance and material wealth but also sometimes lacking in empathy and justice.

In Holtzclaw’s satirical takedowns, these magazines’ covers have been juiced with the artist’s hyperrealist painting style and witty use of her own face and body to critique the many, often narrow, ways women are portrayed in popular culture.

Continue reading the article here.