2025 Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Award Recipients announced
The Department of Art at Vanderbilt University is proud to annouce the recipients of the 2025 the Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Award and Merit Award.
Every spring, the senior art majors finish their senior year experience installing their thesis exhibitions in Space 204, the contemporary art gallery located in the E. Bronson Ingram Studio Arts Center, the home of the Vanderbilt University Department of Art.
The students who mount their exhibitons are given the opportunity to compete for two grants made possible by the Margaret Stonewall Woodridge Hamblet Endowment. This competition is a three part process – a written proposal, an exhibition of works, and interviews with a panel of jurors. This year’s Hamblet Competition jurors were Mona Bozorgi, Cheryl Goldsleger, and Amin Yeh.
To learn more about the award follow this link: The Hamblet Award
The 2025 Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Award Recipient ($25,000)
pẹlẹ o
Ifedolapo Ayewale
Ifedolapo Ayewale (they/them) is a Nashville-based multimedia installation artist whose work focuses on deconstructing and rewriting communication as a medium. Explored through their video work, photography, fashion, and performance, Ifedolapo pulls from both sociocultural and art historical roots, examining the intersection between their first-generation Nigerian heritage, American expectations, and queer identity.
With emphasis on design as a language, Ifedolapo leverages their time as a brand developer against past gallery experience to create organic, intentional work that bends established social rules to birth new understandings.
About the installation:
Ayewale’s installation pẹlẹ o is corridor of padded walls channeling the viewer to step into a path that widens and constricts the space around the body. Guiding individuals through a path illuminated by three monitors and surrounding them with sound. At its center, a white fabric skirt rests on a ground of soil.
Their work explores identity as a first-generation Nigerian, American expectations, and queerness.
The 2025 Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Merit Award Recipient ($10,000)
Mothers and Daughters and Mothers Again
Paulette DeJarnette
Paulette Dejarnette is an art undergraduate student working primarily as a graphic designer at Vanderbilt University. Throughout her time at Vanderbilt, she has created work chiefly pertaining to the intersection of blackness and femininity. Through her work, she hopes that the viewer will reflect upon the context in which they view and interact with black women and young girls. Throughout her fourth year, she has worked as a studio assistant to the artist Magdalena Campos-Pons, where she has contributed to Procession of Angels for Radical Love and Unity (2024) and another work set to be exhibited in May of 2025. In the Buchanan Fellowship: Experiencing Ehon Reading and Making Japanese Illustrated Books, she created a Japanese children’s book and fostered a love of text, image, and narrative storytelling, a love that shows up most in her video, print, and comic work. Serving as the president of Vanderbilt’s Entertainment Underground, she also crafts social and themed experiences, having worked on the experience and environmental design of multiple escape rooms, both virtual and in real-life, and a murder mystery dinner. She uses these experiences as chances to apply artistic and performance skills to real-life environments.
About the work:
DeJarnette’s work, Mothers and Daughters and Mothers Again, comments on the legacies intersecting with black motherhood and girlhood. DeJarnette explores the relationship between black mother and daughter and braided bonds that extend beyond a lifetime.
Braids woven of multi-colored yarn, twine with red rope, braiding hair, and thread are embedded with jewelry, beads, and barrettes. Braids and the braiding process are a stand-in for generational continuity and generational intimacy. The braid and braiding ornaments are representative of the diversity of life stages, extending the sentiment of generational closeness to the entirety of an inheritor’s life. The family photo wall display evokes the emphasis of familial relationships – where the individual mounds of braids exist within the borders of the frames with braids extending to others weaving the persistence of legacy.
The Senior Show 2025
The doors between the gallery spaces of Space 204 opened on Friday, April 11, to showcase the hard work of Vanderbilt University’s graduating studio art majors and their Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Senior Thesis exhibitions collectively showing under the title Where’d All The Time Go?!.
The exhibiting student artists are Shannon Felder, Faeid Hassan, McKenzie King, Jaylen Lee, Jeremiah Crosswhite, Kelsey Miu, Paulette DeJarnette, Joshua Kim, Ifedolapo Ayewale, Camryn Ruiz-Edwards, Keezia Dotimas, Frank Zhou, Jocelyn Ni, Samara McLain, and Chagyue Niu.
The 2025 Senior Shows will be on display to the public from Friday, April 11 until Friday, May 9, in Space 204, the contemporary exhibition space in the E. Bronson Ingram Studio Arts Center.
Gallery hours are Mondays thru Fridays, 10am to 4pm.
These exhibitions are free and open to the public.