News

I have received an acceptance from the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) for my digital exhibit proposal involving AI art made from Gertrude’s 18 lines that describe Ophelia’s death and some of the major images from Ophelia iconography. SAA also awarded me a $500 travel grant to the conference in Minneapolis, MN where I’m also participating in a seminar on Bob Dylan and Shakespeare.

A few months ago, I asked Emily Rosko, an editor at Crazyhorse (College of Charleston), if she might write one of my back-of-book blurbs for my second poetry chapbook. Not only was she kind enough to do so, but asked if I might submit artwork to be considered for the cover. And, here we are: Aphrodite as a Caterpillar in Seafoam (2020) made the cover. This issue is the final one using the title Crazyhorse (used since 1960) before it transitions to swamp pink next year.

Unexpectedly, I won the “Human Rights: Women’s Rights” art award for Not Much Has Changed: Tribute to Mary Richardson, which was part of The International FL3TCH3R Exhibit: Social & Politically Engaged Art, October 3 – December 3, 2022.

A violated appropriation of The Rokeby Venus, this mixed media piece borrows the famous said artwork to not only recreate Mary Richardson’s meat cleaver attack on its canvas—in support of tortured London suffragettes in 1914—but accelerates the feminist, political headspace to the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade with a coat hanger woven into the body of Venus.

Catherine McCormack of Sotheby’s Institute describes Richardson’s triumphant message as a needed violation of “the ideal representation of passive, beautiful and enticing femininity; [Richardson] tore open its painted surfaces and showed that it could not bleed or suffer [like the abused suffragettes]” (28). To this day, many art history commentaries that mention the painting’s attack and restoration still condemn Richardson’s action.

In October 2022 I was accepted in the Doctorate of Languages and Cultures Program at Universidad de Jaén, Spain. This opportunity further assists me in developing my ideas and sourcing funds and opportunities on an international level for Sight into Insight.

My Shakespeare portrait, Shakespeare in the Park, is featured on the cover of the new academic textbook, Performing Shakespearean Appropriations: Essays in Honor of Christy Desmet. The text can be purchased HERE.

This is an AI art project I’ve been developing. In the mission of utilizing the relationship of word and image through my educational art business, Sight into Insight, I’ve taken the eighteen lines from Hamlet depicting Ophelia’s death and plugged in the text with common artistic renderings–including my own from 2019–to render these images.
Each image was created from a variety of AI art applications by blending selected lines/phrases from Gertrude’s speech describing Ophelia’s death, as well as my own painting as a base, and a secret recipe of image data based on numerous past Ophelia paintings.
You can have a better look at the project in my Fine Art America collection.

I recently gave a presentation on illustrations of Anne Askew and their role in early modern domestic space at the annual Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies (SEDERI) which was hosted by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain, 11-13 May 2022. The paper is part of a project in which I’m expanding the coverage of Anne Askew in ENGL 3500, Women Authors, which I’ll be teaching for the second time this fall.

In the middle of a busy semester last fall, I completed my second poetry chapbook manuscript, We Are Mary Shelley’s Monster, and managed to submit it to Finishing Line Press’ chapbook contest right before their Halloween deadline. I just found out that, while I didn’t win, the judge recommended my chapbook for publication (out of nearly 400 manuscripts). My chapbook seeks to animate the space between memory and mythology, the in-betweeness where nostalgia has often ruled how we look at ourselves. I currently anticipate a 2023 release.

Accompanying painting mine: Dr. Victor Frankenstein Performs a Heart Transplant in the Living Room, 2022.

Per fulfilling my grant project, I’ve created and uploaded the first of six videos covering general applications of basic critical thinking questions.

Recently, I’ve been awarded a $6,000 grant from the East Tennessee State University/Tennessee Board of Regents Open Educational Resources (OER) Grant Project Team. My proposal involved designing my spring 2022 courses with OER that prevent the expense of textbooks, weekly supplemental videos that analyze the assigned readings, and a series of videos demonstrating tactics for applying general critical thinking questions like, “Who?,” “How?,” and “Why?” to assist students in their writing. This content will be accessible to everyone (those affiliated with ETSU as well as outside the university) in a digital commons. The videos are essentially based on the ones I’ve shared recently, specifically my “So what?” video (which was submitted as a sample). A big thanks to those who’ve shared some of the past videos with your students—it was very encouraging!

Following up with my last news post, I’m posting one of the three “Art and Poetry” videos I’ve created to discuss paintings which I’ve made as visual representations of poetry from my chapbook, The Absurdity of Origins. I plan to further complete these visual responses once the fall 2021 semester closes.

I’ve been working on some paintings that represent poems from my chapbook, mostly with the goal of turning those into art description videos to act as marketing. In this first video, however, I discuss my painting, Pieces of Helen of Troy (2018), which serves as the cover of my chapbook.

In this video I provide an art description of Dante’s Death of the Ego in the Dark Wood, a painting I had an opportunity to include in the Reece Museum’s exhibit, Illustrating Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Here, I break down the abstraction of answering the question “So What?” and what “understanding” could really mean when writing essays or reflecting on mission statements. I made this video as a follow up to a fellowship workshop with the Modern Language Association (MLA) Summer Institute 2021, in which we had to propose a year-long project. I proposed a project that utilizes social media videos of the general content used in my college-level composition and literature courses regarding how to think abstractly about the material so that it may be presented in both the formal headspace of coursework, as well as the informal setting of experiencing the content through social media so the viewers’ receptiveness to the content has the best of both worlds. The series, “Filling in Understanding,” will cover some of my tactics from classes for inductive reasoning by filling in a theta (explained in the video as representing “understanding”).

I’ve recently uploaded another art description video, part of an ongoing series discussing theory and cultural intersections in the things I create.

In the newest issue of Black Moon Magazine, Matthew Gilbert interviews me about my origins as a writer, the creative process, gender roles in my work, and the intersection of visual art and poetry. You can also read three of my new poems: “Aphrodite on Her Birthday,” “Commercial Break,” and “Zelda’s Place.”

Read HERE.

A special thanks to Hannah Dewitt and Vyncex Gorlami of the Chateau Gallery in Louisville, KY for making the time to offer me a showing and do a video discussing my painting, Jason and Medea’s Flawed Kitchen, included in their exhibit, Still: An Elaboration on the Inanimate.

On 20 April 2021, the original lineup for ETSU’s Creative Festival had a chance to present their previously scheduled work from the pandemic-postponed 2020 schedule.

In this video, I read a few poems from my poetry chapbook, as well as a couple of new ones from 2020 and 2021.

There was an error with the sound for the first few minutes, but the audio is present after that moment.

A review of my chapbook, The Absurdity of Origins, has been published by Black Moon Magazine. In this review, writer Abby N. Lewis highlights the appropriations and conflicts of gender roles which take place across the text.

You can read her review HERE.

My artwork, Lady Liberty Borrows Athena’s Plumed Helmet, has been selected for inclusion in the Johnson City Public Art Banner Exhibition. It will be part of other artworks featured on banners installed on the green light posts within/surrounding the Founder’s Park area April 2021 to March 31, 2022.

Art Statement: Liberty may be described as an essential human right. This rendering of Lady Liberty demonstrates the familiar details of her imagery, but also includes the recognizable plumed helmet of Greek goddess Pallas Athena. Said goddess served as a personification of wisdom—and in light of the January 6th Insurrection—her essence imperative alongside liberty so pursuits of freedom may be constructive rather than destructive.

My guest presentation for the Mildred Haun Conference, “In-betweenness in Our Writing,” was on 12 February 2021. This presentation examines the in-betweenness of where our writing ideas originate in a Jungian sense, the space between memory and mythology.

The Poetry Society of Tennessee (NE Chapter) invited me to provide a workshop utilizing my my research on word and image. You may request the PowerPoint or recording of “Looking at Ourselves in Our Writing” at daniellebyingtonATgmail.com.

My artwork, History’s White Head Ignores Her White Body (2020), is included in Las Laguna Gallery’s (Laguna Beach, CA) virtual exhibit, Political Discord, October 1 – November 3, 2020.

Art Statement: A personification of history looks away from her black body and Africa, gazing instead at the embellished folklore of monsters through her halo of American-flag ashes, her faulty sense of Western identity dumb to the people she’s used to hold up her head. This work demonstrates how white-washed histories only have their successes because of who they abused to gain such power. Core-curriculum history in the United States often details the chaos and pain of slavery, as well as its aftermath, through the lens of the American Civil War, but rarely spends equal chapters explaining the modalities of capture, transportation, and selling of BIPOC, creating a narrative of suffering that avoids pointing to who initiated racism in the United States of America.

My artwork, Athena Waters Her Flowers with Lightning, is included in the printed anthology, Women Speak, Volume VI,  by Women of Appalachia Project.

Art Statement: Pallas Athena is frequently associated with wisdom, and in this painting she metaphorically bestows growth to flowers confined in a vase with her wisdom through lightning. In mythology, Athena was born from a sudden severe headache experienced by Zeus, cracking from his skull like lightning to provide wisdom to the world. Sometimes, we are all like cut flowers in a vase, beautiful for a brief moment, but needing something that makes the brevity of our existence shock humanity.

My artwork, F. Scott Fitzgerald Heals Zelda from the 1918 Flu, was purchased by the Reece Museum for their permanent collection for their Local Art in the Age of 2020 Global Pandemic Collection.

Art Statement: My painting’s subject begins with 2019’s social media posts cheering for the second round of the Roaring Twenties, and Zelda Fitzgerald, iconically referred to as America’s first flapper, plays a role in this romanticized image of the Jazz Age summoned by social media. Much like 2020, however, the expectations of what her life would be like varied greatly from its tragic reality: Zelda’s marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald was plagued with alcoholism and his plagiarism of her writing; diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 30, she later died at 47 in a fire at Highland Hospital in Asheville, NC. The association of 2020 to the Jazz Age continued during the pandemic as a McSweeny’s piece satirizing F. Scott Fitzgerald—writing of sheltering in France with Zelda during the 1918 pandemic—went viral. While the author provided a disclaimer of parody, screenshots of the pseudo-letter cropped out the satire label and were shared by quarantined people perhaps charmed to see the Fitzgeralds endured a similar time. The situation, however, further illuminated the spread of pandemic misinformation, indicative of the larger so-called “fake news” issue, a circumstance I attempt to represent in my painting inspired by the fake letter.