Each year undergraduate and graduate students are nominated by faculty to exhibit
their art works at The President’s House on the University of South Carolina campus.
2026-2027 Exhibiting Artists
Liwa Hamidi
Tiger Lilies, 2026 Acrylic Paint, Oil Pastel
Bio
Liwa Hamidi is a visual artist pursuing a career in medicine. Hamidi received an
art education from the Governor’s School for Arts and Humanities in Greenville, SC.
In the past, Hamidi has won first place at Artfields Jr Highschool division. They
are continuing their education at UofSC as a biochemistry major and art minor. Hamidi’s
work ranges in media, including painting, drawing, and metalwork.
Artist Statement
Tiger Lilies is an acrylic painting with oil pastel accents. The painting includes the central
figure of a tiger, tiger lilies, and a border reminiscent of Persian carpets. Complementary
colors of blue and orange were consistently utilized throughout the border and central
figures. Historical influences from the Shahnameh are combined with modern influences
of the Art Nouveau era. This piece is dedicated to a close friend of the artist, Becca
Smith, who adores tiger lilies.
Debbie Patwin
Queen Bee, 2026 Copper, Brass, Bee
Bio:
Debbie Patwin is a well-known ceramic artist and longtime leader in the local arts
community. She has served as both President and Vice President of the Midlands Clay
Art Society and was twice the Chair of the Society’s Holiday Sale, an event featuring
more than 20 artists each year. Debbie also taught sculpture at the Columbia Art Center,
sharing her experience and creativity with students of all skill levels. Her work
has earned top recognition at the South Carolina State Fair, where she won First Place
in Ceramics and Pottery in 2023 and 2025, along with First Place in Open Media in
2023. Through both her artwork and community involvement, she has made a lasting impact
on the Midlands arts scene.
Hope Sinclair
Subsurface, 2026 Oil on Canvas
Bio:
Hope is a native to South Carolina, born and raised in Greenville. Currently in
her second year at USC, she is working towards her BFA in Art Studio, emphasizing
painting, where she primarily works with oil paint. Her work explores the way light
is affected by water by using subjects relative to memories.
Artist Statement:
My work explores the dynamic between light and water, both as a physical spectacle
and a channel for memory. When light is filtered through this medium, it becomes fragmented
and softened, mirroring the way recollection of a distant memory shifts over time.
I am specifically intrigued in the way these visual qualities are translated into
painting. The bending of the light beneath the water, the distorted forms, and subtle
color shifts challenge the traditional approach when representing an image or idea.
Through this imagery of being submerged, I invite viewers to recall their own sensory
memories and emotional experiences.
Jay Poe
Untitled, 2026 Mono Prints
Bio:
Jaden L Poe is a multidisciplinary artist who has a focus on human connection and
experience. Through photography, printmaking, and graphic design, Jaden shares his
lived experience from the American South. Telling stories about race, gender, and
life.
Artist Statement:
Verdant represents a more simplistic place. In a world covered in concrete and technology
this work focuses on a more natural and real world place. The title Verdant placed
the intent of the work in its name “the culmination of knowledge” like a tree all
things are connected into one place.
Emma Laing
Overripe, 2026 Archival Inkjet Print
Bio:
Emma Laing is a recent BFA graduate from the University of South Carolina with a concentration
in Graphic Design and Illustration. Her work encompasses mediums from design and illustration
to photography, ceramics, and printmaking. With a background in traditional art practices,
she seeks to embrace both tactile and digital processes, often exploring themes of
identity, memory, femininity, and transformation, with an emphasis on visual storytelling
and the impact of narrative in her work.
Artist Statement:
In this photo series, I explore feelings of loss and transience, as well as the beauty
found within the mundane and domestic moments of everyday life that are often taken
for granted until they are gone. By photographing spaces marked by human presence
without the figure itself present, I am interested in what is left behind and the
lingering memory of something that was just there, now absent. In focusing on the
domestic and the ordinary, I draw from traditions of memento mori painting and the
symbols that remind us of our impermanence.
Sashi Vyas
Liminal, 2026 Archival Inkjet Print
Bio:
Sashi Vyas is a 21 year old photographer based in Columbia, South Carolina, whose
work embraces bold color, whimsy, and a fascination with the unusual and the mythical.
Her imagery often pushes beyond traditional technical expectations, exploring vibrant
palettes, surreal abstractions, and inventive manipulations that reflect both personal
experience and imaginative storytelling.
Artist Statement:
Liminal is a self-portrait performance series that follows my ongoing exploration of identity
as fluid, performative, and ever-changing. In each photograph, I transform myself
through makeup, gesture, and digital manipulation to embody a range of personas that
blur the line between reality and imagination. These portraits act as both documentation
and performance, capturing the shifting ways I see and construct myself. Through this
process, I explore how identity can exist in constant motion, how each version of
me reveals, distorts, and reimagines the boundaries of self. At the heart of this series is my experience with gender identity and the freedom
that came with understanding myself beyond the limits of who I was told to be. Coming
to terms with my identity as a demigirl, and realizing that I exist within the broader
spectrum of trans experience, opened a space for me to see myself as something not
fixed but continually evolving.
Natalie Hammond
Untitled, 2026 Ceramics
Bio:
Natalie Hammond is a recent USC graduate, graduating with a BFA in ceramics and a
BS in biology. She loves learning new things about the environment and using that
knowledge in her artwork. Studying to go to medical school, she wants to apply her
art skills in the medical field and continue to educate people on the importance of
art in combination with science.
Artist Statement:
Throughout my life, I have always been partial to being outdoors, and something about
the peacefulness of the plants and animals stuck with me into adulthood. I achieve
the same peace through doing ceramics and consider myself both a potter and sculptor. Art and sculpture have always been a way for me to work out the questions, thoughts,
and theories I have regarding the natural world and how it works together with society.
Through the process of making sculpture, I am able to investigate a subject, and through
my work advocate for all of the human and nonhuman beings on the Earth, I use ceramics
as a way to not only learn and achieve a deeper understanding of nature, but to also
find balance within myself and think about who I want to be in the future. I aim to inspire viewers to consider how nature and humanity meet, and the impact
we have on the creatures around us. I want to inspire other artists and thinkers to
see the larger impact small actions can make and how one small decision can cascade
into a larger problem or a solution.
Ceara Tellez
Lakeside, 2024 Oil on Canvas
Bio
Ceara Tellez is a painter and printmaker working in the southeastern United States.
Her work is an examination of the local landscape and tensions between the natural
world, human interference, and an evolving terrain of memory. Her work draws influence
from photography, poetry, collage, the history of botany and scientific colonialism,
and ecologic deterioration. Born and raised in Colorado, she received her BFA from Colorado State University in
2017. Ceara is currently pursuing her MFA in Studio Art at the University of South
Carolina. In addition to her graduate program studies, she teaches Introduction to
Painting courses and recently completed the SHARPGrads program at USC. In 2025, she
was a Rare Books Teaching Fellow at the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special
Collections. She is also the recipient of the McCausland College of Arts and Sciences
Graduate Enhancement Award. When given the opportunity, you can find Ceara wandering regional botanical gardens
and exploring many of the extraordinary state parks in the Carolinas.
Artist Statement
As a painter, my work intertwines my past and present, blurring the borders of where
I came from and where I am. In the act of attuning myself to my environment, I confront
the mortal anxiety of transition and impermanence. Absorbing the visual and atmospheric
details of the space around me happens through a meditative process of observation.
The temporality of my surroundings and the fixtures within have been a long-standing
fascination of mine. This awareness is both a continuous source of stress and an intrinsic
part of what it means to be alive. My practice studies these moments both as they were and how they are recontextualized
through memory. I work with a variety of processes and materials. Through painting,
drawing, printmaking, and collage, I am afforded the ability to revisit ideas and
imagery, allowing them to develop and shift with each iteration. The simple act of
revisitation means that I can curate, deconstruct, manipulate and re-construct my
memories. The process is an ongoing exchange between past and present iterations of
myself. In this way, my artwork contemplates the ways that place, time, and memory
intersect, and how they are constantly reshaped by the acts of recollection and revisitation.
Amelia Joyner
Untitled, 2026 Silver, Lab-grown Ruby
Bio:
Amelia is a junior Neuroscience major with a minor in Studio Art. While much of her
artistic background has been rooted in two-dimensional media, her university experience
has expanded her practice into a wider range of disciplines, including jewelry and
metalsmithing. Her work is inspired by a fascination with dimension and movement,
particularly as expressed through fashion. By translating these dynamic qualities
into wearable and sculptural forms, she explores the intersection of art and the human
body.
Artist Statement:
These earrings explore the relationship between structure and movement through forged
sterling silver and a central lab-grown ruby. The bezel-set stone provides a rich
focal point, while the surrounding embellishments create visual cohesion and draw
attention outward from the center. Elongated silver attachments suspended below introduce
movement, allowing the piece to shift with the wearer and reflect light dynamically.
Through this balance of form and motion, the earrings transform a static object into
a responsive, kinetic adornment.
Jordan Henderson
Craft, 2026 Linoleum
Bio:
Jordan Henderson is a third-year dual major in Art Studio and Civil Engineering.
She enjoys exploring different mediums and interactions between art and science, especially
within fiber arts.
Artist Statement:
This work is an examination of traditional fiber arts practices through the medium
of multi-block linoleum printmaking. I was inspired by the use of pattern and color
interaction found in both quilting and printing. The aim of this piece is to draw
attention to the delicate details that go into this craft and the skilled hands that
form each stitch.
Challenge the conventional. Create the exceptional. No Limits.
