Brent Funderburk

Thomas Brent Funderburk (born 1952 in Charlotte, North Carolina) is a long known visual artist and W. L. Giles Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art at Mississippi State University, where he has worked since 1982. He is an active artist, known for his large-format, exuberantly hued, often naturalistic watermedia paintings. His art has been displayed in many juried exhibitions, specialized art magazines and annual publications. Funderburk is also noted for his illustrated lecture performances, curation, and workshops. Funderburk acknowledges influences by watercolor painters such as Charles E. Burchfield, Walter Inglis Anderson and Edward Reep. In 2024, he was the recipient of the Mississippi Governor's Arts Award for Excellence in Visual Arts and Education.

Biography Funderburk is married to dancer/choreographer Deborah Wyatt Funderburk, a retired university professor in dance at Mississippi State University. They reside in Starkville, Mississippi, and have two adult sons. Series Solar Myths, and Flying World were both featured in an article about Funderburk's art in Watercolor Artist magazine (“Drama, Extravagance and Poetry” by John A. Parks, August 2016). His recent solo exhibitions include a forty-year retrospective, Here and There: Brent Funderburk – Paintings and Drawings 1981–2021, at the Cullis Wade Depot Art Gallery, Mississippi State University (Starkville, MS, 2021), Flowering Earth at the Mary C. O’Keefe Cultural Arts Center (Ocean Springs, MS, 2023), and Path of Light, at the Meridian Museum of Art (Meridian, MS, 2024). His work has been regularly shown for several years in a number of art periodicals and annuals, including Watercolor Magazine, Watercolor Artist Magazine, Artists Magazine, Creative Quarterly, Southwestern Art, Splash: The Best of Watercolor, and in museum publications. In 2019–2020, Funderburk's pieces “Soul House (Red)”, “Anteroom”, “Angelus Vitae” and “Oaxaca” were recognized at several international online juried art competitions. He has spoken on American watercolor painting and 20th Century visionary modern American artists, as well as on art and architecture in many US campuses, museums, national parks, as well as in Rome, Italy. As a curator, Funderburk developed the touring exhibition Ecstasy: The Mystical Landscapes of Walter Inglis Anderson, which traveled with his lectures to art museums in southern states from 2008 to 2010. He has also lectured about Anderson in association with the Smithsonian Institution touring exhibit "Everything I See is New and Strange" (2003).

Awards While at MSU, Funderburk received the John Grisham Faculty Excellence Award (1994), the Burlington Northern Excellence in Teaching Award (1986), the Ralph E. Powe Research Excellence Award (2015), and the Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award (2016). In 2015, he was named William L. Giles Distinguished Professor. In 2010 he was named "Official Artist" for the 2010 USA International Ballet Competition. Funderburk's work Flying World was selected into the 2015 Shenzhen International Watercolour Biennial (Shenzhen, China, 2015) and further juried to tour several Chinese museums in 2015–16.

Gallery