Morgan Academy award-winning art teacher retires after 24 years

Longtime Morgan Academy art teacher Cam Walker Guarino will retire at the end of the school year.

“Cam has been a wonderful asset to Morgan Academy for the last 24 years,” Mogan Academy Head Master Bryan Oliver said. “She has dedicated 36 years of her life to art education.”

Oliver said Guarino will be able now to spend more time on her own artwork as well as run the Selma Art Guild Gallery, of which she is a charter member.

Guarino was recognized as Woman of the Arts Award winner for 2021 by the Selma Dallas County Chamber of Commerce. Over her career she has won 30 art awards, had eight solo exhibits and competed in numerous art shows across the state.

She won the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts/Montgomery Art Guild’s Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald Award in 2023 for her oil painting “Shall We Gather.” That same year she won her first ever Best of Show award for her oil painting “Color Cavalcade” at the SAG Juried Summer Exhibition. She won purchase awards at SAC’s Gallery and at the Prattville Art Guild shows.

Some of Guarino’s other awards include first place at the Montgomery Art Guild/Regions Bank Show, SAC’s Gallery and she was inducted into the Regional Arts Museum in Monroeville in 2002.

Her art was published in Montgomery and the River Region Sketchbook and in the SACs Gallery 20^th Anniversary Book.

Over the course of her career, Guarino taught art at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, SACs Gallery Montgomery, the SAG Gallery, the Selma Dallas County Arts Council, Marion Academy, and community education classes for Judson College and Wallace College.

She also taught in the Chisolm Community of Montgomery with the MMFA’s outreach program, as well as private classes for children and adults at the Selma Art Guild Gallery.

At Morgan Academy, Guarino taught elementary, junior high and high school art and art history.

“There is something nice about each age level,” Guarino said. “It is wonderful to see their development over the years. I try to expose the children to different types of art and mediums so they can appreciate a variety of art. One of the greatest pleasures is to have former students become artists themselves, majoring or minoring in art or art history. I have always thought of these students as my stars.”

Guarino said Selma used to have an Arts Council, and through that she taught workshops, after-school classes at Byrd School and weekend classes at the Selma Housing Authority, which was funded through the Geddie Foundation. She was also a demonstrating artist on the Smithsonian Art Train when it came to Selma.

Guarino studied art at the University of Montevallo; with Richard Mills, professor emeritus at Auburn University Montgomery; and at numerous workshops.

She said she had been interested in art since she was a child, and her first grade teacher told her mother that she needed to take art lessons.

Guarino works mostly with oil paints and some acrylics. As for her art philosophy, She said, “Creating a painting is going on a journey to see how it develops.” She said paintings should give the artist a feeling of peacefulness and make the viewer want to see more.

Guarino said she heard about SAG when she returned to Selma after college and has been involved in it for 42 years. She served as SAG president for nine years and in most of the other positions. As the current president of SAG, she wants it to focus on promoting and encouraging artists.

Guarino said of her own works, “My art has gone through many stages and changes over the years. Presently I have focused on landscapes that are somewhere between impressionism and abstraction.”

The artists who have influenced me the most are Claude Monet for his use of color, light and marks; Vincent Van Gogh for his mastery of marks; Paul Cezanne for his use of shapes and color; Henri Matisse and Wolf Kahn for their use of unusual colors,” Guarino said. “I used to paint from photographs, but now I paint from memory or imagination.”