Silver Spring, Alicia Finger, Acrylic on cut paper, collage
Saturday, February 1 2024 | 10:00a.m. – 12:00p.m.
FREE | In-Person Event
Abington Art Center is proud to host an artist talk, featuring 2025 Winter Solo Series artists Alicia Finger and Jenna Hannum.
Please join both artists for a morning of fruitful discussion, as they dive deep into their artistic practices and bodies of work. Our talk will be held in our Kellner gallery. Our artist talks are sponsored in part by the Jenkintown Lyceum. Bagels are generously provided by Fill-A-Bagel in Jenkintown.
Free programming like this is made possible by your generous donations. Please consider making a donation to the center today.
Alicia Finger encapsulates her memories and visits through a combination of painting and collage. Using water-based paints, Finger begins by developing a series of paintings on paper, inspired by places she has been to. She then begins the meticulous process of cutting, rearranging, and layering the material to create dimensional paintings that break beyond the bounds of the paper plane. This evolution parallels memory, noting “as my memories of these places and experiences evolve, so do these works.”
Flora Wilds
Jenna Hannum combines scientific illustration with unconventional portraiture to catalog childhood memories, family medical histories, and the biological journeys of loved ones. Following the tragic passing of both her mother and sister, her work stems from her desire to have spent more time as a caretaker. “Creating ink from the ashes of medical records and repurposing the tangible items left behind by [her] mother and sister”, Hannum’s careful renditions allow her to retroactively be a caregiver, even posthumously.
For more information on a particular artist or piece please call 215.887.4882 or contact acook@abingtonartcenter.org.
This event is produced as part of our 2025 Winter Solo Series, on view from January 16 – February 24, 2025. Our artist talks are sponsored in part by the Jenkintown Lyceum. Bagels are generously provided by Fill-A-Bagel in Jenkintown.
Free exhibition programming is made possible through your generous donations. Please consider making a donation to Abington Art Center today. Thank you for supporting the arts!
Abington Art Center is proud to host an artist talk, featuring High in Fiber artists Bren Ahearn and Flora Wilds.
Please join both artists for an evening of fruitful discussion, as they dive deep into their artistic practices and bodies of work. Our talk will be held in our Kellner gallery. Hot chocolate, hot apple cider, and light fare will be provided.
Bren Ahearn
Bren Ahearn is a Philadelphia-based fiber artist who uses textile crafts to explore masculinity’s conflicting messages and to document personal experiences.
His most recent series, School Shootings in the USA, on display in our Kellner gallery, combines his experience as an educator being trained for active shooter situations, and the ongoing issue of gun violence in America. Each pennant within his installation represents a school at which there has been an active shooting and is created in the school colors of each affected school.
Flora Wilds
Flora Wilds is a New York-based fiber artist who creates work from found materials and objects that are traditionally tied to femininity.
Wilds’ Bikini Quilt Column, on view in our Book Room gallery, is part of an ongoing series that reflects on the gendered histories and cultural associations of objects. Her artistic practice lends itself well to the reflection on American culture, the learned societal gender roles, and the material synchronicities that stretch through time.
For more information on a particular artist or piece please call 215.887.4882 or contact acook@abingtonartcenter.org.
This event is produced as part of our Fall Juried Show, High in Fiber, on view from November 8, 2024 – January 6, 2025. Learn more about this exhibition and the jurying process here!
Free exhibition programming is made possible through your generous donations. Please consider making a donation to Abington Art Center today. Thank you for supporting the arts!
Abington Art Center is proud to host this artist talk, featuring one of our 2024 Fall Solo Series artists, Mick Ricereto.
Our Coffee Break series is a casual conversation with the artists featured in our exhibition programming. Learn more about the exhibiting artists’ process and technique through a talk and a Q&A. Coffee and bagels are provided for free.
This event will also be live-streamed in real time on our Instagram page for those who are unable to attend in person. The livestream will begin at 10AM EST on October 19.
From dilapidated brick storefronts, to rusted fences and street signs, Mick Ricereto encapsulates the decay of the urban landscape in his intricate watercolor works. Ricereto uses watercolor to build each landscape layer by layer, a lengthy and intensive process that acts as a metaphor to the civil environment he captures: each layer is built upon the last. The fragility of the watercolor medium, he notes, doubles as “a nod to society’s delicate balance of survival.” This “tensionless state of constant entropy”, as described by Ricereto, is expressed through his paintings in both observed realism and idealized moments of repose.
For more information on a particular artist or piece please call 215.887.4882
This event is produced as part of our 2024 Fall Solo Series, on view from September 13 – October 21.
Our Coffee Breaks are sponsored in part by the Jenkintown Lyceum. Bagels are generously provided by Fill-A-Bagel in Jenkintown.
Abington Art Center is proud to host this artist talk, featuring one of our 2024 Fall Solo Series artists, Bobbie Diamond Adams.
Our Coffee Break series is a casual conversation with the artists featured in our exhibition programming. Learn more about the exhibiting artists’ process and technique through a talk and a Q&A. Coffee and bagels are provided for free.
This event will also be live-streamed in real time on our Instagram page for those who are unable to attend in person. The livestream will begin at 10AM EST on September 28.
Bobbie Diamond Adams
Bobbie Diamond Adams’ printmaking and papermaking works are abstract in concept.
From the hints of green that emerge from a sea of black textures in one piece, to the stillness and quiet of the lone green ellipse in another, her artistic eye is evident in the connections she makes amongst seemingly disparate or unrelated elements. The process of printmaking and papermaking are both labor-intensive and meditative to Diamond Adams, often layering over and reworking pieces for extensive periods of time. Following an intuitive approach, she notes “I use many different plates, and interweave many layers of transparent ink, assembling and embellishing, as well as overprinting.”
For more information on a particular artist or piece please call 215.887.4882
This event is produced as part of our 2024 Fall Solo Series, on view from September 13 – October 21.
Our Coffee Breaks are sponsored in part by the Jenkintown Lyceum. Bagels are generously provided by Fill-A-Bagel in Jenkintown.
Abington Art Center is proud to host this artist talk, featuring two of our 2024 Spring Solo Series artists, Grue Shackelford and Chau Nguyen.
Our Coffee Break series is a casual conversation with the artists featured in our exhibition programming. Learn more about the exhibiting artists’ process and technique through a talk and a Q&A. Coffee and bagels are provided for free.
This event will also be live-streamed in real time on our Instagram page for those who are unable to attend in person. The livestream will begin at 10AM EST on May 11.
Grue Shackelford
Grue Shackelford is a contemporary fiber artist based in Philadelphia, whose work explores the relationships between memory, intergenerational trauma, and the Appalachian identity.
A West Virginia native, Shackelford is familiar with Appalachian Fatalism, a “pervasive, inborn spirit that is found in everyone and thing that dwells in those hills”. This mentality juxtaposed with the never-ending cycle of trauma that befalls the Appalachian people is something that intrigues them. Through tufts and tangles of multicolored yarn and felt, each of Shackelford’s intricate wall hangings tells a story.
Chau Nguyen
Chau Nguyen is a first-generation Vietnamese interdisciplinary artist, whose work draws from concepts of translation, memory, symbols, affect theory, materiality, and research on Vietnamese histories. They work to convey this notable friction at the intersection of cultural identity, colonial fragments, and transnationalism through their art and their study.
Chau’s artistic practice allows for and relies on experimentation and material transformation as a way to combine their research into postcolonial transnationalism and their personal perspective as a Vietnamese immigrant. With an emphasis on material and its history, their work offers an open-ended and complex look into these concepts.
For more information on a particular artist or piece please call 215.887.4882
This event is produced as part of our 2024 Spring Solo Series, on view from April 27 – May 31.
Our Coffee Breaks are sponsored in part by the Jenkintown Lyceum. Bagels are generously provided by Fill-A-Bagel in Jenkintown.
Abington Art Center is proud to host this artist talk, featuring two of our 2024 Spring Solo Series artists, Duwenavue Sante Johnson and Abbey Stace.
Our Coffee Break series is a casual conversation with the artists featured in our exhibition programming. Learn more about the exhibiting artists’ process and technique through a talk and a Q&A. Coffee and bagels are provided for free.
This event will also be live-streamed in real time on our Instagram page for those who are unable to attend in person. The livestream will begin at 10AM EST on May 4.
Duwenavue Sante Johnson
Duwenavue Sante Johnson is a BIPOC embroiderer and contemporary artist, influenced by world travels, environmental patterns and textures, and colorscapes. Not limiting herself to any one medium, Johnson blends practices of painting, printmaking, textile, and craft to create dynamic works of art that encapsulate the human experience.
Art acts as a tool for Johnson, helping her process and understand the complexities of humanity, its divides and cultural histories, and engage with these pathways to create something positive that unites.
Abbey Stace
Abbey Stace is a contemporary abstract artist, whose material abstractions have developed over a lifetime of studying science, philosophy and art. Change and chance are fundamental to Stace’s artistic practice, creating work that is experimental and process-driven rather than literal and narrative-driven.
She starts with a simple composition and then allows the materials to interact with each other to create naturally-forming textures, colors and shapes. This approach directly parallels the constant change that is life, noting “this mirrors the serendipitous and unpredictable process that is life…The layers of matter built up and worn away…mirror the accumulation and loss of experiences and memories in the human psyche.” Favoring ambiguity, Stace invites the viewer to derive their own associations and connections from her work.
For more information on a particular artist or piece please call 215.887.4882
This event is produced as part of our 2024 Spring Solo Series, on view from April 27 – May 31.
Our Coffee Breaks are sponsored in part by the Jenkintown Lyceum. Bagels are generously provided by Fill-A-Bagel in Jenkintown.
Abington Art Center is proud to host this artist talk, featuring two of our 2024 Winter Solo Series artists, Karen Hunter McLaughlin and Summer Yates.
Our Coffee Break series is a casual conversation with the artists featured in our exhibition programming. Learn more about the exhibiting artists’ process and technique through a talk and a Q&A. Coffee and bagels are provided for free.
This event will also be live-streamed in real time on our Instagram page for those who are unable to attend in person. The livestream will begin at 10AM EST on February 17.
Karen Hunter McLaughlin
Artist Karen Hunter McLaughlin’s work uses symmetry to expand on long-held interests in the connections between natural science and art. This series investigates kinship with the more-than-human world, and a dive into “Ki”, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s suggested pronoun for other-than-human.
She employs a language of shapes that mimic the threadlike hyphae of mycelium, the same marks often used to illustrate galactic space, brain synapses, and other human, and non-human body systems. They are perfect symbols of the matrixes that support the essential nexus of human connection.
Summer Yates
Summer Yates assembles mixed media wall hangings and soft sculptures that are light, flexible, and brightly-colored. There is an emphasis on the material of her work and how it parallels her intertwined experiences as a woman, artist and mother.
She notes, “As a mother, I’m confronted with my own need to care for and nourish myself… the sculpture, installation, and wall hangings in this show reveal the catharsis I experienced in doing so…the soft, squishy quality of my materials and how I assemble them affirm how I embrace all the parts of myself.”
For more information on a particular artist or piece please call 215.887.4882
This event is produced as part of our 2024 Winter Solo Series, on view from January 19 – February 26.
Our Coffee Breaks are sponsored in part by the Jenkintown Lyceum. Bagels are generously provided by Fill-A-Bagel in Jenkintown.
Abington Art Center is proud to host this artist talk, featuring one of our 2024 Winter Solo Series artists, Mia Fabrizio.
Our Coffee Break series is a casual conversation with the artists featured in our exhibition programming. Learn more about the exhibiting artists’ process and technique through a talk and a Q&A. Coffee and bagels are provided for free.
This event will also be live-streamed in real time on our Instagram page for those who are unable to attend in person. The livestream will begin at 10AM EST on February 3.
Mia Fabrizio
Interdisciplinary artist, Mia Fabrizio, creates mixed media paintings, freestanding sculptures, and installations comprised of building materials and domestic items. Her work acts as an investigation into the relationship between physical construction and cultural paradigms, highlighting contradictions within domestic spaces with the intent of exposing the true fluidity of perceived binaries, such as masculine and feminine, public and private, and modern and traditional. She describes her artistic process as “[vacillating] between tearing apart and tenderly memorializing [her] personal family experience.”
For more information on a particular artist or piece please call 215.887.4882
This event is produced as part of our 2024 Winter Solo Series, on view from January 19 – February 26.
Our Coffee Breaks are sponsored in part by the Jenkintown Lyceum.
Acrylic Painting | Adam Jester Tuesdays 6:30pm – 9:30pm September 21, 28, October 5, 12, 19, 26, November 2, 9, 16, 30
Using acrylics is a great introduction to the art of painting because it is a quick drying medium that gives you fast results. You will create many energetic paintings that are full of lively brush strokes and bright colors.
$325 Non-Member | $292.50 Member
Intro to Oil Painting | Adam Jester Tuesdays 9:30am – 12:30pm September 21, 22, October 5, 12, 19, 26, November 2, 9, 16, 30
This Introductory course, geared toward the absolute beginner, will allow you to learn the direct methods and fundamentals of painting in oil. You will discover essential techniques and the application of paint.
Plein Air Painting | Julia Way Thursdays 9:30am – 12:30pm September 23, 30, October 7, 14, 21, 28, November 4, 11, 18, December 2
Enjoy the fresh air and sunshine while painting the grounds of Abington Art Center. Work with acrylic, oil or watercolor, and we can guide you to paint an image depicting the sweeping vistas and woods from the terrace or the perfect location that you choose.
Intro to Printmaking|Gene Anthony Santiago-Holt Tuesdays 6:30pm – 9:30pm September 21, 28, October 5, 12, 19, 26, November 2, 9, 16, 30
Introduction to printmaking is designed for any entry level student. Projects are designed to allow students to explore and demonstrate an understanding of printmaking’s history and several of its core methods. Projects will stress the technical aspects of creating an edition as well as support of the conceptual conversation of each student’s practice. Students will learn to properly use printmaking vocabulary, and will generate multi-state editions as a part of their research.
Music Theory for Adults | AJ Wright Wednesdays 6:30pm – 9:30pm September 22, 29, October 6, 13, 20, 27, November 3, 10, 17, December 1
Learn about music and why it sounds the way it does. By the end of the class you will have written a short composition and know the basics of how to write a classical piece of music. We’ll cover the circle of fifths, chord progressions, harmonies, and more!
$325 Non-Member | $292.50 Member
Tonight’s concert is on! We are excited to welcome York Street Hustle to our outdoor stage as we kick off our summer concert series. For the comfort of our guests, masks will be available at all welcome tables.
Tonight’s concert is on! We are excited to welcome York Street Hustle to our outdoor stage as we kick off our summer concert series. For the comfort of our guests, masks will be available at all welcome tables.
Abington Art Center is proud to host this artist talk, featuring two of our 2023 Faculty & Member Show artists, Jason Patrick Jenkins and Thomas Murray.
Our Coffee Break series is a casual conversation with the artists featured in our exhibition programming. Learn more about the exhibiting artists’ process and technique through a talk and a Q&A. Coffee and bagels are provided for free.
This event will also be live-streamed in real time on our Instagram page for those who are unable to attend in person. The livestream will begin at 10AM EST on December 9.
Jason Patrick Jenkins
Jason Patrick Jenkins is a highly-skilled painter and instructor at Abington Art Center, having earned his BFA Memorial University of Newfoundland in 2001 and having received additional study from the Advanced Fine Art Program of Studio Incamminati in Philadelphia.
Trained in several painting techniques such as alla prima painting and the dutch method, Jenkins’ oil paintings exude a life-like quality while maintaining a painterly style.
The rich color, dynamic compositions, and purposeful mark-making that is present throughout his artwork demonstrate technical skill, as well as a deep understanding of classical realism.
Thomas Murray
Artist and Abington Art Center member, Thomas Murray, earned his BS in Fine Art and BS in Art Education from the University of South Florida in 1996, and his MFA from the University of New Mexico in 2003.
Murray’s work is impressionistic, using bold brushwork and texture throughout his compositions. He maintains a studio practice in New Jersey, creating oil paintings that draw from archetypal imagery as a way exploring “the relations of globalization,… [the] subtle critique of the viewer/consumer, and our place in relocating histories.”
For more information on a particular artist or piece please call 215.887.4882
This event is produced as part of our 2023 Faculty & Member Show, on view from November 10 – December 18.
Our Coffee Breaks are sponsored in part by the Jenkintown Lyceum.
Abington Art Center is proud to host this artist talk, featuring one of our 2023 Fall Solo Series artists, Kathran Siegel.
Our Coffee Break series is a casual conversation with the artists featured in our exhibition programming. Learn more about the exhibiting artists’ process and technique through a talk and a Q&A. Coffee and bagels are provided for free.
This event will also be live-streamed in real time on our Instagram page for those who are unable to attend in person. The livestream will begin at 10AM EST on October 14.
Kathran Siegel
“I like to mix vocabularies, searching for the syntax that will allow the languages of two and three dimensions to coexist [and] synthesize in my work.”
Though trained as a painter, Kathran Siegel began creating sculptural work early in her artistic career. Using power tools and large industrial machinery, she carves organic forms out of wood, and uses her exacto-knife for precision. This manual approach slows down production and gives Siegel time to reflect and revise. She states that “it is this process that keeps [her] coming back to the work.” Siegel’s manipulation of materials creates two dimensional works that exude a painterly quality with their organic, freeform shapes. Adding paint to highlight specific areas creates even more visual interest. The evidence of the artists’ hand is present in her artwork making the objects feel like unique hybrid’s which exist as both paintings and sculptures.
