LONG BREAKFAST by: Misty Bennett, Renee Hanan Plata, & Bryce Speed

Misty Bennett is a visual artist whose paintings combine realism and abstraction through the lens of kaleidoscopic color, pattern, and texture. In her current body of work beauty and repulsion are interconnected, leading the viewer to experience many different feelings at once as they form connections between food-inspired forms. Bennett received her BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design and her MFA from the University of Georgia. She teaches painting and serves as Art Department Chair at the University of Montevallo, and lives in Vestavia Hills, AL.

Renee Hanan Plata is an Alabama native and received her BFA from Atlanta College of Art, MFA from Tyler School of Art, and MSEd from Bank Street College. Hanan Plata maintained a painting studio in New York for twenty years, and in 1981, she joined a group of abstract painters represented in the exhibit Painting Up Front at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University curated by Thomas Leavitt. Hanan Plata’s work draws vigorously on the pathways of geometric abstraction and her methodology often employs a textural minimalist approach. In her paintings, color, form, and composition directly engage the viewer and her practice is a dedication to repetition and an exploration of the act of painting.

Bryce Speed creates paintings that are simultaneously both abstract and representational. His works are occupied with a larger idea of structure and parts, creating an image of containment and movement. Each piece uses a personal pictogram language that is steeped in the intersectionality of nostalgia, queer identity, and early twentieth-century abstraction. In 2017, Speed had a solo exhibition at the North Wall Arts Center in Oxford, UK. In 2022, his work was curated into the exhibition A Plot, Hatched by Two at the Warbling Collective in London, and Art of the South 2022 at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville. Speed is represented by the Cole Pratt Gallery in New Orleans, LA, and is currently an Associate Professor of Art in Painting at the University of Alabama.
Image: Bryce Speed