Celebration, 35th Anniversary Exhibition IV
The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma is depicted from the Bridge Tender’s House observation deck on the bank of the Alabama River. This unusual view and the high contrast abstraction of the image is intended to recognize the continuing importance of this icon of the civil rights movement in Alabama.
Scott Stephens is a printmaker and emeritus professor of art at the University of Montevallo, where he taught from 1983 to 2020.
He earned his BFA degree at Washington University in St. Louis,1976, and studied with Peter Marcus, an innovator in large-scale printmaking. During his undergraduate studies Stephens attended the Yale Summer School of Music and Art, and he began his graduate work at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He completed his MFA at the University of Alabama in 1983.
Laser engraving print
34 x 49 in.
Stephens has attended artist residencies at the Centrum vor Grafiek Frans Masereel in Kasterlee, Belgium, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France, the Hamilton Printmakers Arts Association in Ontario, Canada, and the Institute of Electronic Arts of NYSCC at Alfred University, New York.
His work has been recognized with a fellowship from the Southern Arts Federation/National Endowment for the Arts and two individual artist fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts in 1992 and 2002. Stephens was designated the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching CASE Alabama Professor of the Year for 2006.
Stephens’s long-term involvement with big prints lead to the creation of large format printmaking facilities at the University of Montevallo that feature a 44 x 84 inch Takach etching press. In 2002 he organized the Alabama Big Prints project where twelve accomplished artists were invited to campus to create new large-scale prints. A selection of the work produced was featured in a traveling exhibition that premiered at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and toured the state for two years.
Stephens’s work can be seen in many exhibition catalogues, as well as E. C. Cunningham’s Printmaking: A Primary Form of Expression published by the University of Colorado Press in 1992, The Best of Printmaking: An International Collection selected by Lynne Allen and Phyllis McGibbon and published by Quarry Books in 1997, and Alabama Creates: 200 Years of Art and Artists, Elliot Knight, ed., Alabama State Council on the Arts and the University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 2019.
Scott Stephens was born in Wichita, Kansas in 1954 and moved to Birmingham in 1977. He directed the Birmingham Mural Project through the Greater Birmingham Arts Alliance, which employed artists to create 18 public works in the central city. He also designed stage sets for the Birmingham Festival Theater and exhibits for the Discovery Place Children’s Museum, now the McWane Science Center.
Space One Eleven Involvement: Curator: Contemporary Australian Printmaking 1990; Exhibiting artist: At Arm’s Length 1990; Group Show 1990; Relationships: Toni Tully 2012, Multiple Methods: A Print Exhibition 2014