Brad Thomas
Director and Curator

Brad Thomas is an artist and director of the Van Every/Smith Galleries at Davidson College. He is the recipient of several awards including a North Carolina Arts Council Visual Artist Fellowship and New Works Grant. His works are represented in numerous private and public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art. As a curator he has organized exhibitions ranging from the acclaimed retrospective of apocalyptic visionary paintings by the late Reverend McKendree Robbins Long entitled Picture Painter of the Apocalypse, to a presentation of narrative textiles by indigenous peoples of war-torn countries entitled Threads of Conflict and a survey exhibition of works on paper by contemporary American artist Robert Lazzarini. His critical reviews have appeared in the Chicago Tribune. Most recently, he co-authored a catalogue with Mark Sloan of the Halsey Institute for the highly acclaimed exhibition Force of Nature (http://www.halsey.cofc.edu/fon).

Jessica Cooley
Assistant Curator

Jessica Cooley earned her B.A. in Art History from Davidson College in 2005. Before she was appointed assistant curator of the Van Every/Smith Galleries, she completed internships at the Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago, in addition to the McColl Center for the Visual Arts and The Mint Museum of Craft + Design in Charlotte. She recently curated Davidson Collects: 1938 – Present and Collected Light: Photography from the Permanent Collection. She is currently working on an exhibition for January of 2009, RE/FORMATIONS: Disability, Women, and Sculpture, exploring the intersection between disability identity and female identity.