Tag: 2025

Nothing is as it was, 2025 | Barbara Brady | Oil on canvas

On View Sept. 12 – Oct. 20, 2025

Opening Reception | Friday, Sept. 12 | 6:00p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

Artist Talk | Wednesday, Oct. 15 | 6:00 p.m. – 8:00p.m.

Featured Artists: Barbara Brady, Mike John Murray, Teresa Shields, Lisa Kelley

ARTISTS

Barbara Brady – Marking Time

Tile Gallery

Barbara Brady creates expressionist paintings, drawing inspiration from her environment, world events, and personal experiences. Through expressive brushwork and bold color, Brady not only creates little worlds within larger spaces, but also captures glimpses of inexplicable moments within her work. Her paintings act as a visceral response to life and the world.

Brady lives and works on the coast of Maine. She received her BFA from Rosemont College and completed her post-graduate study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, PA. After a 30 year career working as an art director and graphic designer for publishing and healthcare organizations on both coasts, it wasn’t until moving to coastal Maine in 2001 that painting became her passion. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions within galleries, museums and cultural centers, and her work is held in corporate and private collections internationally.

Barbara Brady’s Marking Time is on view in our Tile Gallery.

Mike John Murray – Happily Imperfect Together

Book Room Gallery

Interdisciplinary artist, Mike John Murray, crafts objects that are intricate, unusual, yet whimsical. This is evident in how he plays with materiality and form, combining rough and smooth textures, stark colors, and recognizable and unrecognizable motifs. Murray’s work feels unreal and almost dream-like in how they are structured, leaving the viewer yearning for context. He acknowledges this ambiguity, noting “[my work] lingers at the edge of a more primal experience, quietly resisting the impulse to explain themselves.”

Mike John Murray was born in Vermont, and exposed to the Hudson River School of painters early in his youth, sparking interest in art. Murray received his formal arts education at a small university in rural Pennsylvania, and spent his time post-school traveling and learning from artists and craftspeople from across the Americas and Europe, influencing his studio work.

Mike John Murray’s Happily Imperfect Together is on display in our Book Room Gallery.

Teresa Shields, I Feel Seen

Kellner Gallery

Teresa Shields weaves her fascination with fabric, thread, and wool fiber into a unique and colorful artistic journey. Her work invites viewers into the intricate world of embroidery and wet-felting, where she skillfully interprets abstract shapes and unravels new dimensions in materiality. Drawing inspiration from nature’s intricate designs–plant forms, human eyes, and cell structure–and the female gaze, Shields’s exhibition presents her unique perspective on women’s experience. Her sculptural eyeballs follow and see the audience in a way that allows them to be observed while actively returning attention. The sculptural necklaces connect her process to the earliest adornment of human bodies and the manner in which women use external objects of beauty to create meaning. 

Teresa Shields is an artist based in Jenkintown, PA. She earned her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and her MFA from Mass College of Art. Known for her idiosyncratic work that beckons tactile engagement, Shields has exhibited across the country, accumulating over 20 awards and collections by eight institutions. 

Teresa Shields’s I Feel Seen is being exhibited in our Kellner Gallery.

Lisa Kelley, Respite

Community Arts Gallery

Lisa Kelley is a trauma-certified artist and advocate who is committed to building community through art-making. Inspired by the urban landscape she grew up in, as well as the fields and forests she takes respite in, Kelley sees the beauty “in decay, in rusted steel, in golden fields, in wings in flight, in the squeal of sirens, the rumble of the el, the rustle of the trees, the song of the birds.” Her artwork serves as a call to action, helping bring awareness to those struggling with addiction and giving them a voice through collaborative artwork. 

Lisa Kelley earned her BFA from Moore College of Art and Design and is a teaching artist at Prevention Point and Philly Home, organizations that serve people with substance use disorder and homelessness in the Kensington and Fairmount neighborhoods of Philadelphia. 

Kelley recently completed her 2 year artist residency at Abington Art Center’s Little Meetinghouse. Throughout her residency, she not only hosted free, monthly community art-making events, but also created a new body of work informed by the connections she has made as an artist in residence and continued connections with those in Kensington.

Lisa Kelley’s Respite is on view in our Community Arts Gallery.

For inquiries about work in our exhibition, please contact our Gallery Manager at acook@abingtonartcenter.org.

Primordial Soup, 2022 | Kristen Letts Kovak | Oil and acrylic on wood panels, $6,000

On View May 2 – June 9, 2025

Opening Reception | Friday, May 2 | 6:00p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

Artist Talk | Saturday, May 17 | 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Artist Talk | Wednesday, May 28 | 6:00 p.m. – 8:00p.m.

Featured Artists: Cecelia Grant, Kristen Letts Kovak, Mari Elaine Lamp, Athena Tasiopoulos

ARTISTS

Cecelia Grant, Mixed Media

Tile Gallery

Cecelia Grant is an interdisciplinary artist working in printmaking, sculpture, and painting. Her work is self-referential, utilizing instances and subjects from previous paintings that then become molded in ceramic and used as objects in her still life sets. The result of which is a group of automorphic works not siloed in ideas of still life, architecture, nor nature.

Grant creates her paintings on atypical surfaces, typically cardboard or translucent polyester film, also known as mylar. She developed a unique method of installing her translucent mylar paintings with air between the mylar surface and the wall, allowing for light to project from the wall through the translucent surface and giving the work the illusion of floating. When using cardboard as a surface, she labels the media in detail, allowing audiences to create associations between consumption of food and art materials, and creation.

Cecelia Grant’s work has been included in the nationally juried exhibition Crosscurrents at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ Annenberg Gallery in 2019. She has also shown work in both juried and group shows in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Italy, and solo shows in Kutztown and Ambler, PA. Grant was awarded the Board of Governor’s Scholarship to study painting at Kutztown University and earned her BFA in May of 2020. In her time as a student, she trained for a semester in Rome at Tyler School of Art. She currently serves as a faculty member at Gwynedd Mercy Academy High School and upholds her studio practice through visits to galleries and museums.
Cecelia Grant’s Leveled Ground, Unleveled Ground is on view in our Tile gallery.

Kristen Letts Kovak, Painting

Kellner Gallery

Kristen Letts Kovak is an artist, professor, and curator based in Pittsburgh, PA. She resists clarity within her work, shifting images into states of disarrangement that explore the uncertainties of living with chronic illness. Her drawings and paintings are evident of this; they balance opposing forces to arrive at harmonious states of disequilibrium. 

Out of Order, on view in our Kellner gallery, is a visual reflection on living with chronic illness and disability, where even the present is wrapped in uncertainty. Each painting, like each day, begins as an unsettled conjecture. While largely abstract, Kovak’s artworks begin with a threadbare link to representation in both form and technique. She then deliberately resists clarity and shifts the images into states of disarrangement and imbalance. The finished pieces are records of her visceral decisions and the accumulation of renegotiated visual pathways. She invites the viewer to join her on unexpected detours, “where a wrong turn can be embraced, rather than avoided.” 

Kristen Letts Kovak earned her BFA from Mercyhurst University and her MFA from MICA. Since 2012, Kovak has taught drawing, painting, perception, and applied aesthetics at Carnegie Mellon University, where she also serves as Senior Associate Dean of the College of Fine Arts.

Her works have been exhibited widely with solo exhibitions at colleges and universities, and her paintings and drawings have been featured in more than fifty group exhibitions, including the Center for Contemporary Art, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Williamsburg Art and Historical Center, SPACE gallery, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Wildling Art Museum, Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, IUPUI, Muskegon Museum of Art, Erie Art Museum, Museum of the Red River, Woodson Art Museum, and the State Museum of Pennsylvania.

Mari Elaine Lamp, Painting and Installation

Book Room Gallery

Mari Elaine Lamp is an artist living and working in Philadelphia, PA. Her training in representation has led her beyond the figure as an end in itself and into an investigation of the spaces that the figure inhabits, both psychologically and physically. 

Wish Book, on view in our Book Room gallery, is a site-specific installation that dives deep into Abington Art Center’s rich history as a former private manor and its ties to Sears and Roebuck company through the building’s original owner Lessing Rosenwald, heir to the Sears fortune. Interested in how one gets their ‘stuff’, the everyday objects one dreams about, acquires, and uses, Lamp explores material objects and their ties to history and the consumer. Her frottage installation hung in our Book Room gallery takes direct inspiration from the wallpapers, fireplaces, and artwork that was available for purchase in the Sears and Roebuck catalogs of the early 20th century. Her paintings reference a portion of the vast selection of objects available particularly in the early decades of the catalog, from tools and clothing to guns and bibles. She notes, “while what we dream about may have changed, [the] desire itself is always present, an interior catalog of wishes fulfilled and unfulfilled.”

Mari Elaine Lamp received her MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2017 and studied at The School of Representational Art in Chicago, IL. In 2021, Lamp presented a solo show at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, NJ, featuring her domestic interior paintings. She has also shown at Gross McCleaf Gallery, the Woodmere Art Museum, and Fjord Gallery in Philadelphia, On Stellar Rays in New York, the Workhouse Art Center in Lorton, Virginia, and the Katzen Art Center at American University in Washington DC.

Athena Petra Tasiopoulos, Encaustic

Community Arts Gallery

Athena Petra Tasiopoulos is a mixed media collage artist, who explores mental and emotional blueprints, the push and pull of interconnectedness, and the delicate nature of equilibrium through her encaustic works. 

Tasiopoulos works with recycled and found vintage papers, encasing them beneath a layer of encaustic, also known as beeswax. Her artistic practice acts as a form of meditation on transience, transformation, and the beauty of imperfection, gravitating toward soft and muted color tones. The repetitive patterns and primitive marks she carves and scrapes into the surface of the wax speak to the imperfections of the human hand and the vulnerability of materiality.   

Athena Petra Tasiopoulos is originally from Pennsylvania, but currently resides in central Vermont. She is represented by Soapbox Arts gallery in Burlington, VT, and her work is collected internationally. Her work has been featured in publications such as ELLE Magazine (USA and Japan), Frankie Magazine (Australia), and Collage by Women: 50 Essential Contemporary Artists by Rebeka Elizegi (published by Promopress, Spain).
Athena Petra Tasiopoulos’ Inner Spaces is on display in our Community Arts gallery.

For inquiries about work in our exhibition, please contact acook@abingtonartcenter.org.

Primordial Soup