Drawing Marathon is a foundational course in the MFA Studio Arts program at UNCG. Through a four-week intensive course that meets for 14+ hours every weekend, students work through preconceived notions about their own image-making and artistic practices, spending large blocks of time drawing in response to prompts or guidelines and then discussing the learning process with peers and this year’s Drawing Marathon instructor, Jennifer Meanley. This exhibition is the culmination of the work produced during these four weeks by the graduate students, including a range of drawings from quick experimentations to fully resolved drawings.

More About the Artists

 Quan Apollo

Quan Apollo (b. 2001) is an African American and Vietnamese interdisciplinary artist. In the language of collaged installations, he explores issues of race, culture, and intersectionality to create a broader understanding of tense relations between groups of people in the United States. With the goal of education accompanied by the burning desire to uplift his community in mind, Quan uses his platform to connect and create opportunities to underserved communities by curating and providing fine art that accurately and blatantly explains the joy, history, and melancholic cycle minoritized individuals face.

Matt Fisher

Matt Fisher is an educator, artist, and maker from Greensboro, NC. As the director of the SELF Design Studio, a pre-service makerspace in the School of Education, he leads students through their exploration of combining art and technology. His art interests include cardboard and kinetic sculpture, pen and ink drawing, and watercolor painting.

Nhân Luong

Nhân Luong is a Vietnamese painter and drawer. Eleven years ago, he was a young foreigner who came to the States to study with an endless homesick. His art hobby is visualizing his feelings on hard surfaces to deliver his story, memory, loneliness, and adaptation in America. Nhan’s hands deliver the expression and connection of oil texture with his body, his mind, his feelings, and leaves the footprints on the board. Additionally, he has a close relationship through observation with "green" because the green is yellower, warmer where he comes from when it is bluer here, colder and sharper here.

Melanie McAllister

Melanie McAllister visual artist based in Greensboro, North Carolina. She received my Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from UNCG and is in my first year of UNCG’s MFA Studio Art program. Her affinity for art began with drawing, though she now primarily creates large-scale figurative oil paintings. Melanie creates visual representations of the timelessness of love, grief, and longing. Her understanding life’s complexities manifest through dreamlike portraits that examine her own experiences as well as those of others to which she relates. In depicting the human form, she confronts the beauty and brutality in existing.

Victoria Mercado-Lues

To document her coming of age, Victoria Mercado-Lues (b. 2003) makes art that focuses on tender curiosity, carnality, and vulnerability of her experience as a young woman through disturbing, uncomfortable depictions of the body. Through figurative ceramics and oil paintings, she explores loss of innocence, fragility, and naivety, probing the line where desire meets repulsion by focusing on the suffering of the body and the distortion of organic form. Through this lens, where figures become both subject and object, Victoria explores how morphed bodies are haunting, disturbing, yet intimate.

Victoria earned her BFA in Studio Art from the University of South Florida. She is a current MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Calvin Ulrich

Calvin Ulrich creates narrative paintings, drawings and prints, featuring nature and its turbulent relationship to humans. His work explores how climate change drives human vs nature conflict, and how those conflicts are metaphors and symbols of larger political and social histories. Through his paintings, he depicts nature, not as a passive and romantic symbol of environmental purity, but as a dynamic living system within our rapidly changing environments.

Alana Wilson

Alana Wilson is an interdisciplinary artist and educator who creates work about her multicultural identity, belonging, and environmental advocacy. She challenges anthropocentrism and reconnects to her ancestry and upbringing in Hawai’i. Alana grew up as a lei maker with influence from her mom and kumu. She employs the care of collection with permission and intentional processes from lei making with the ephemeral materials she often chooses to work with from nature. The meditative practices she utilizes ground and reconnect her to natural environments and her heritage. Alana often finds herself in interstitial spaces and investigates the consequences of societal binaries within her work.

Alana earned her B.A. in Studio Art and a minor in Art History with honors from Davidson College. She is a current M.F.A. student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.