Cheryl McKay Dixon

2008 Louisiana Role Model

Cheryl McKay Dixon is an artist, educator and curator with a background in advertising, arts administration and community development, whose personal motto has been to “Bloom Where You Are Planted.”.  Her career in the arts has taken a circuitous path from Museum Technician at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. to the Chair of the Collections and Acquisitions Committee of the LSU Museum of Art Advisory Board in Baton Rouge.  She recently retired after having served over 20 years at Dillard University where she served as Chair of the Art Department and Director of the Dillard University Art Gallery.  As Chair, she was instrumental in expanding the facilities and curriculum to include a Business Management and Arts Dual Degree Major, and art major concentrations in Computer Graphics, Art History, and Museum Education.

She has received Ford/Mellon grants to pursue research in cultural heritage preservation in South Africa and Senegal, with particular emphasis on comparative religious beliefs and material culture linked to Louisiana.  A long-time chair of the Percent for Arts Committee of the Arts Council of New Orleans, she was invited to lecture on Public Art in Louisiana at museums and universities Kwa Zulu Natal, South Africa.  A former director of the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles, she was a Curatorial Consultant for the New Orleans Treme Villa African American Museum and served on the Advisory Board for the Master of Arts in Museum Studies Program at Southern University in New Orleans.  She has curated over 35 exhibitions of African American artists, and published monographs on Southern Folk Culture.

Her watercolors and mixed paintings have been exhibited at various art galleries and museums including the W. E. B DuBois Center in Accra, Ghana.  Her many awards include the 2000 “Artie Award” in Visual Arts by the New Orleans Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority and the 1999 “Outstanding Artist” award by the National Conference of Arts. Her stencil paintings combine printmaking processes, textile patterns, and abstract expressionist influences, using movement and color to convey the healing energy of the creative endeavor, and the spiritual affects of art as process and ritual. A Baton Rouge native, Mrs. Dixon is a graduate of Southern University Laboratory School, Dillard University and Louisiana State University. The end result that she seeks is “a personal aesthetic that embodies the perceptions of color, light and sound as conveyors of healing energy.”