Mana Hewitt
Artist’s Bio
Born in Tucson, Arizona in 1952, Mana Hewitt has lived in Florida, Illinois and Great Britain. Her career has been primarily in education having been an instructor at Columbia College and the University of South Carolina. Presently she is the Gallery Director of McMaster Gallery and teaches Digital Imaging and Introduction to Art in the Department of Art at USC.
Mana Hewitt’s artworks represent a broad range of media that includes metalworks, painting, and jewelry. Her work has been included in over 150 exhibitions and a number of solo and group shows regionally and nationally. She has received Individual Artists Fellowships from both the Cultural Council and the South Carolina Arts Commission. Her work is in the permanent collections of First Citizens Corporate Headquarters, the SCANA Corporation, the Columbia Museum of Art, the SC State Museum, the Spartanburg Museum of Art, the Lieberman Collection, the Federal Reserve Bank, Charlotte, NC, The Tree of Life Temple, Columbia, S.C., and numerous private collections.
Artist’s Statement
We live in an age where language is often deliberately constructed to disguise or distort its actual meaning. The term “Intelligent Design” when considered by an artist may describe the aesthetic or functional aspects of an object that has been created with considerable research and thought. Conversely we are increasingly hearing from groups promoting “Intelligent design” as a theory that living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection.
My works explore this play on words through imagery associated with technology, evolution and architectural environments. The works are composed of multiple layered metal collages that are based on rearranged appropriated images from historic engravings. The final compositions are a mix of social commentary coupled with whimsical imagery. My goal is to create images that are aesthetically pleasing and conceptually significant, playing off the meaning of the chosen images.