Jim Neel

Appointed Associate Professor of Art at Birmingham-Southern College in 2008, where he has served as Chair and Director of the Durbin Gallery, Jim Neel was also Chair of the Visual Arts Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts from 1973–2002. He received a BFA in sculpture from Birmingham-Southern in 1971 and an MFA in sculpture from the University of Alabama in 1973.

Neel’s sculpture and drawings have appeared in many exhibitions both nationally and internationally, including shows at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC; the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center, LA; the Montgomery Museum of Art, AL; and the Alexandria Museum of Art, LA. His work has also been included in numerous exhibitions in academic settings such as Memphis State University, Mississippi State University, the University of Montevallo, Birmingham-Southern College, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham as well as exhibitions in Japan and the Czech Republic.

As a freelance photojournalist, Neel covered the conflicts in Central America during the ‘80s. His work for Dennis Covington’s Salvation on Sand Mountain has appeared in over thirty newspapers nationally including the Memphis Commercial Appeal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Birmingham Post-Herald. His photo credits also include features in the Oxford American magazine, Esquire, and Witness literary journal.

In 2008, Neel received an Arts/Industry artist residency in the Pottery from the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan,  WI, where he completed some sixty vitreous porcelain sculptures. Fifty of those figures comprise an installation entitled Babel, which has been acquired for the JMKAC permanent collection.

Neel worked on several projects including Blond, Blue-eyed and Full of Hate, which through photography, sculpture, and the written word investigates the growing White Christian Heritage movement and the KKK in the U.S. Another project, Children in the Line of Fire, is a series of digital prints, creative nonfiction, and terra-cotta sculptures of children that addresses the plight of children in war zones, particularly those in Syria. In the summer of 2014, Neel lived for a month on the Turkey/Syria border and, as a result, is working on the Suriya series of sculpture and digital prints.