Events
Artist Talk | Stephanie Manzi, Guizi Gao, and Ben Pranger
Event
Cloud Frame, 2023, paint on assembled wood $2,400.
Artist Talk | Stephanie Manzi, Guizi Gao, and Ben Pranger
Wednesday, April 29 2026 | 6:00p.m. – 8:00p.m.
FREE | In-Person Event
Our Artist Talk are sponsored in part by the Jenkintown Lyceum.
Abington Art Center is proud to host this artist talk, featuring all of our 2026 Spring Solo Series artists.
Our artist talks are a casual conversation with the artists featured in our exhibition programming and our community. Learn more about the exhibiting artists’ process and technique through a talk and a Q&A.
Stephanie Manzi
Stephanie Manzi is a painter and educator from Upstate, NY, based in Philadelphia, PA. Her work is rooted within ecology and presents itself as abstract spaces of color, layered marks, soft patterns, and material depth. She often searches for ways to show life at the infinity level, with images that can read as micro or cellular points of view as well as macro perspectives of mapped out land or road systems. She notes, “I like the tangle- it toys with grief inside the confusion of history and relationship to nature, as well as the celebration of material and color that paint has to offer.”
Guizi Gao
Guizi Gao is a figurative expressionist oil painter whose work explores the human body as a mutable vessel shaped by social, biological, and psychological forces. Working in large-scale oil painting, she fuses Renaissance and Baroque compositional structure with gestural distortion and layered, tactile surfaces. Her current series, Realm of Chaos – Amazing Grace, are inspired by Daoist cosmology, tracing cycles of vital spirit descending into the body, awakening, self-tempering, and spiritual renewal. Figures dissolve into organic geometry, translucency, and childlike symbolic forms, reflecting the flow of qi气, resilience, and the natural ascent of the heart-mind. The works engage themes of womanhood, pregnancy, breastfeeding, loss, and rebirth, presenting the body as both intimate and universal while highlighting the delicate balance between vulnerability and strength.
Ben Pranger
Ben Pranger’s wall-based constructions slowly grow into emergent forms. Small pieces of wood are stacked and glued, drifting off course to traverse the space in front of the wall. The work follows simple rules that unfold organically to create entangled, rhizomatic structures. Many of the constructions suggest futuristic cities rising out of the rubble of their own destruction. Fragments from previous work coalesce into stairways, passages, apertures, enclosures and pyramids, leading the viewer through labyrinthine architectures. These indwellings map a recursive mental space that morphs into evolving worlds.
For more information on a particular artist or piece please call 215.887.4882
This event is produced as part of our 2026 Spring Solo Series, on view from April 24 – June 1, 2026.
Our artist talks are sponsored in part by the Jenkintown Lyceum.