Bachelor of Fine Arts Exhibition
April 29 – May 10, 2026
University of Miami Art Gallery @ The Chapel, Coral Gables, Florida
Artist Statement
My name is Charlize McCarter, my work is rooted in the complexity of identity and its formation through memory, culture, and lived experience. This body of work represents the first phase of an ongoing exploration. It serves as an ode to the values I have inherited from my Greek heritage.
I come from a family deeply tied to Greek traditions with some of my earliest memories bound especially to my Yiayia, Greek for grandmother. I remember the chaos of preparing feasts for Greek holidays, the presence of Orthodox icons in her home, her love for art, and the quiet strength she and my family carried while guiding me through moments of fear associated with my diabetes. These memories mark my earliest encounters with Greek culture, experienced both as a source of protection and inheritance, even as I remained distant from particular religious traditions having never been baptized into the Orthodox Church.
For this showcase, I have combined photography, painting, design, and AI to construct a personal mythology. The photographs and book on show are an ode to family and heritage where I document family events, dinners, and personal items, and mix these to tell the story of our relationship. My paintings, Byzantine-inspired and based on the icons gifted to me by my Yiayia, reflect themes of devotion and preservation. My quadriptych was developed through conceptual planning, symbolic research, and AI-assisted image generation. I refined its imagery through Photoshop compositing and color correction, and they trace stages of my life as a Greek myth, with accompanying booklets expanding on the symbolic and mythological references.
Together, these works invite reflection on how tradition, memory, and myth can be reinterpreted, and how identity emerges not as something fixed, but as something continually inherited, questioned, and ultimately reshaped into one’s own.
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Quadriptych
Quadriptych (2026) is a four-part digital image series exploring personal identity, memory, illness, self-discovery, and my Greek heritage through the visual language of Greek mythology. Each panel represents a stage of my life—birth and innocence, illness, adolescence, and young adulthood—using mythological narratives and symbolism as metaphors for personal experience.
Drawing from Renaissance and Baroque narrative painting, particularly the work of William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Raphael, Peter Paul Rubens, and Titian, the series developed over months of research, planning, and visual problem-solving. I established the narrative and symbolic framework of each panel before developing its composition, figures, atmosphere, color, and relationship to the series as a whole.
AI-assisted image generation was used as one tool within this process, followed by extensive visual direction, iteration, compositional adjustment, and refinement. My background in graphic design, photography, and painting informed each stage, allowing me to explore how emerging digital tools can exist in dialogue with longstanding artistic traditions.
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Quadriptych Booklets
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Photography
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In the Keeping Of
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Painting
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