The Greenville Arts Council is hosting an opening reception Friday night for two artists new to the Malkin Gallery.
Artwork by Nikole Dikon and Ke Francis in an exhibition called Deluge in the Garden will hang in the gallery beginning Friday until Sept. 30.
The opening reception is from 5:30-7 p.m. Friday at the Malkin Gallery in the E.E. Bass Cultural Arts Center. The showing is sponsored by Craig and Melanie Tucker; Lisa and Billy Percy; SouthGroup Insurance Services; and an anonymous donor. The gallery is also open from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays, or by appointment.
Francis was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1945. He studied at the Memphis Academy of Arts from 1964 to 1967 and earned his B.F.A. from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1969. Francis works in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, printmaking (particularly woodcuts) and photography, and often combines several media in a single installation. He has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Grant and a Rockefeller Foundation Grant.
Francis has taught creative writing workshops and painting, printmaking, letter press printing, book binding and sculpture at Penland School of Crafts, Arrowmont, and Haystack. He and his wife Mary are the co-owners of HOOPSNAKE PRESS, a fine art press that publishes artist books and prints.
Dikon lives and works between Oahu & Mississippi, making woodcut prints, installing edible & native gardens, writing poetry and making artist books. Her practice expands beyond the aforementioned list, but ultimately is a means of grounding her perspective in the principles of ecology.
In 2014 Nicole received her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts Degree in Painting at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, and in 2017 her Master’s of Fine Arts Degree in Printmaking from Temple University in Philadelphia. Her work has been collected by institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art, The Center for Rare Books at Temple University, Kapiolani Medical Center, Sheraton Waikiki Hotel & The Wagner Free Institute of Science.
