ACNMWA Artist Award | Arkansas Committee of NMWA

Each year, the Arkansas Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (ACNMWA) selects an accomplished Arkansas woman visual artist to receive the Artist Award. This $4,000 award assists the artist in realizing her vision and makes her achievements more visible to the art community and the public.

2026 Artist Award Recipient: Laura Terry

Laura Terry 2026 ACNMWA Artist Award Winner

Laura Terry is a practicing artist and an associate professor of architecture at the University of Arkansas. Her work explores the relationships between the natural landscape and an idealized or abstracted landscape. Her work has been featured in national juried exhibitions across the country and is held nationally in public and private collections. In addition to teaching design, she has also taught courses in landscape painting, book binding and printmaking, all with an intention of introducing students of architecture to other forms and methods of visual communication. Terry holds a Master of Fine Arts from Savannah College of Art and Design and a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Design from Auburn University.

From Laura

The work I have engaged in for the last 15 years explores landscape narratives created through direct observation and memory, photography, drawings and prints. Most recently, the work has focused on landscapes as a complex collection of living beings and on the horizon as an idea of prospect and hope. These resulting paintings are an illustrated conversation between the landscape and me. Working on paper with water media is a sensual act, connecting me deeply with the subject. But the paper also allows me to cut and edit, or to stitch together pieces that had once been connected. This way of working is an analogy of the landscape itself: trees, mountains, sky, and flora are individual elements that co-exist in a particular place. In the way these individual elements create the larger landscape, the pieces of paper I compose also create a larger image. Each piece essential; each element dependent on the other. In this way, I have come to observe the landscape as a quilt.

This award will sustain me over the summer and allow me to focus on a project, started and tentatively titled "Atlas Arkansas." In this work, I use historical photographs, maps, alongside my own drawings, paintings, and photographs to create what I am calling "paper quilts." These composite images, quilt-like in their pieced compositions, tell the story and history of small towns and rural landscapes in Northwest Arkansas. These places, like West Fork, Winslow, and Cane Hill, have compelling histories and their landscape narratives deserve to be told. As a full-time educator, the summer months provide me with time to focus and extended time in the studio is necessary to complete this work. The award would allow me to travel to these locations, print photographs and maps, purchase supplies, document the work, and then create an installation of images to exhibit around the region and state.

www.orangeboxart.com