Jere Allen
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Jere Allen is an internationally known artist, currently Professor of Art at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) in Oxford, MS.
His work can be described as figurative: strong colours, images, and symbols are often melded with portraits, providing a sense of an artist looking for answers and a reality that never fully materializes. His work is typically inspired by myths and symbolisms. These factors combined had him labelled in 1999 by a regional newspaper as "the Mississippi Rembrandt". Art and Antiques has described Allen as a "modern-day master" known for his "dramatic, electric colors."
Allen himself describes his work thus: "My paintings employ a reactive method in the search for an elusive notion that has perplexed me for many years. The (pictures) that stem from personal, social, political realities are often a foil to assist in the realization of feelings generated by that evasive notion."
His work can be found at the Huntsville Museum of Art and Mobile Museum of Art, both of which are in Alabama. They can also be found at the Meridian Museum of Art, Mississippi, and Coos Art Museum, in Coos Bay, Oregon.
In 2003, Allen's work, along with that of Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Wolf Kahn, toured Southeast Asia in the Washington-based Meridian International Center's exhibition, Outward Bound: American Art at the Brink of the Twenty-First Century, co-curated by fellow Mississippian Bill Dunlap.
Jere Allen has an artist son, Jeffery M. Allen, though their styles and fortunes vary considerably.
