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Artist Tracy H. Sugg Unveils New Mexico Sculpture


Tracy Sugg

An award-winning artist who learned her craft at Mississippi College, Tracy H. Sugg returns to her native New Mexico this summer to unveil her latest sculpture.

Her clay sculpture, Tres Amigas, is cast in bronze and depicts three women, a Native American, a Hispanic seniorita and a pioneer settler.

Her newest art work will be displayed beginning July 23 in Santa Fe at the corporate headquarters of Tres Amigas LLC. The company is seeking to unite the nation’s electric grids by using the latest advances in power grid technology.

The high-tech firm is focused on providing the first common interconnection of America’s three power grids to help the USA achieve its energy goals.

A Mississippi College graduate who studied under internationally celebrated artist Sam Gore, Sugg says she spent months looking at photographs from the mid-1800s to capture the essence of the women. She also visited museum archives to get ideas for their clothing and examined paintings from the period.

Sugg lives in WarTrace, Tennessee with her husband Robert, a potter, and their four children. But New Mexico is in her roots. That’s where Tracy grew up on a farm and discovered she wanted to be an artist.

“I was first inspired to be a sculptor on a trip to Ruidoso with my father when we visited a foundry there. I was eight years old and decided then that I wanted to sculpt,” Sugg said.

Her sculptures stretch from the South to the North and now to the West. They include one of the late U.S. Congressman Sonny Montgomery at his alma mater, Mississippi State University in May 2005. Her sculpture of General Tadeusz Kosciuszko was unveiled in October 2006 at Redbud Springs Park in Kosciusko, Mississippi and her portrait bust of the general is in the permanent collection at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. Her work depicting the Polish-born military leader has also won acclaim at the Polish Embassy in New York.

Gore, the former chairman of the MC Art Department, taught Tracy Sugg and her husband, Robert, in the 1980s on the Clinton campus. “They are like family,” he says. “Her four kids are her models.”

Sugg, who studied art in Italy and France after honing her craft at Mississippi College, is one of the “rising young stars” in the world of sculpture,” says Gore, a Clinton resident. “She does it so well, she’s kind of out of my class.”

Sugg’s exhibitions stretch from such venues as the Rotunda of the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington to the Gore Galleries at Mississippi College and the Marie Hull Gallery at Hinds Community College in Raymond. Since moving from Mississippi to Tennessee, newspapers and other media outlets in the Volunteer State are paying attention to the gifted artist who’s proud to call herself a Mississippi College graduate.

Sugg sums up her approach to her craft and her faith in a few words on her website. “I believe that the artist should be a servant to humanity. I feel that I have a responsibility to God and mankind to produce works of Beauty and Truth.”