Tag: event

Artist Talk | Teresa Shields & Lisa Kelley

Iris #1, Teresa Shields, French knots and stitches on canvas, $3,000.

Wednesday, October 15 2025 | 6:00p.m. – 8:00p.m.

FREE | In-Person Event

Abington Art Center is proud to host an artist talk, featuring Fall Solo Series artists Teresa Shields and Lisa Kelley.

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. Tea, hot cider, and light fare will be provided.

Teresa Shields

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.

Lisa Kelley

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.

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 Fall Solo Series, on view from September 12 – October 20, 2025. Learn more about this exhibition 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!

DONATE

Artist Talk | Cecelia Grant

The One We Live In, 2023, Acrylic on mylar, $1,500.

Wednesday, May 28 2025 | 6:00p.m. – 8:00p.m.

FREE | In-Person Event

Abington Art Center is proud to host an artist talk, featuring 2025 Spring Solo Series artist Cecelia Grant.

Please join our artist for an evening of fruitful discussion, as she dives deep into her exhibition Leveled Ground, Unleveled Ground, on view in our Tile gallery. Our talk will be held in our Kellner gallery. Tea and light fare will be provided.

Cecelia Grant

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.

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 Spring Solo Series, on view from May 2 – June 9, 2025.

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!

DONATE

Artist Talk | Kristen Letts Kovak

Primordial Soup, 2022, Oil and acrylic on wood panels, $6,000.

The following video features one of our 2025 Spring Solo Series artists, Kristen Letts Kovak.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-hVzDeKVMU

Kristen Letts Kovak

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

For more information on a particular artist or piece please call 215.887.4882 or contact acook@abingtonartcenter.org.

This video was produced as part of our 2025 Spring Solo Series, on view from May 2 – June 9, 2025.

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!

DONATE

Artist Talk | Mari Elaine Lamp

How to make the universe finite, Oil on canvas, $1,250.

Artist Talk | Mari Elaine Lamp

Saturday, May 17 2025 | 10:30a.m. – 12:00p.m.

FREE | In-Person Event

Our Coffee Breaks are sponsored in part by the Jenkintown Lyceum.
Bagels are generously provided by Fill-A-Bagel in Jenkintown.

DONATE

Abington Art Center is proud to host this artist talk, featuring one of our 2025 Spring Solo Series artists, Mari Elaine Lamp.

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. Coffee and bagels are provided for free.

Mari Elaine Lamp

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.

For more information on a particular artist or piece please call 215.887.4882

This event is produced as part of our 2025 Spring Solo Series, on view from May 2 – June 9, 2025.

Our artist talks are sponsored in part by the Jenkintown Lyceum.
Bagels are generously provided by Fill-A-Bagel in Jenkintown.

DONATE

Coffee Break: Artist Talks | ACPS Artists Neila Kun & Jessica Barber

Underfoot / Overhead, Neila Kun

COFFEE BREAK: Artist Talks | ACPS Artists Coffee Break: Artist Talks | ACPS Artists Neila Kun & Jessica Barber

Saturday, April 12 2025 | 10:00a.m. – 12:00p.m.

FREE | In-Person Event

Our Coffee Breaks are sponsored in part by the Jenkintown Lyceum.
Bagels are generously provided by Fill-A-Bagel in Jenkintown.

DONATE

Abington Art Center is proud to host this artist talk, featuring two of American Color Print Society members, Neila Kun and Jessica Barber.

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.

Neila Kun

Neila Kun is a Philadelphia-based printmaker, who earned her BFA and MFA from Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Kun explores issues relating to personal history, cultural identity and the passage of time within her work, noting “art isn’t static, it is a state of mind, a set of feelings, a practiced craft, hard work.” Her prints, made with Akua liquid pigment, act as a visual exploration of change and impermanence, hope and loss, magic and longing. 

Neila Kun’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Her work is held in many public collections, including The Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, PA, MOMA in New York, NY, The Saint Louis Art Museum in St. Louis MO, Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, PA, and Swarthmore College’s, McCabe Library in Swarthmore, PA.

Jessica Barber

Jessica E. Barber is a mixed media artist and printmaker originally from South Central, PA. Her intuitive approach to the creative process includes the use of monotype and lithograph printmaking, pastels, and mixed media painting. Most recently, she has expanded her studio practice to include cyanotype photography. For the last ten years, Barber has had a heightened interest in the natural world, fueled by hiking throughout the Mid-Atlantic, South Florida, and American West. This interest was further enhanced through volunteering and work-related activities spent at local preserves, presenting her with more opportunities to gain awareness of the natural history and preservation of their diverse ecosystems. The exposure to and enjoyment of the pristine beauty of open space and its inherent contrast to gritty, ephemerally abandoned areas being reclaimed by the elements has fueled her most recent works.

Jessica E. Barber earned her B.S. at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and her M.Ed from Cabrini University. She is a co-founder/vice president of Art 504 Creative Collective in Delaware County, PA and a secondary Social Studies educator in Philadelphia. In addition to solo and group exhibitions in Greater Philadelphia, her work has been shown in New York, Miami, Toronto, and Kansas City.

For more information on a particular artist or piece please call 215.887.4882

This event is produced as part of our American Color Print Society Members Spring Exhibition, on view from March 14 – April 21, 2025.

Our Coffee Breaks are sponsored in part by the Jenkintown Lyceum.
Bagels are generously provided by Fill-A-Bagel in Jenkintown.

DONATE

Coffee Break: Artist Talks | ACPS Artists Alan J. Klawans & Bonnie Goldstein

Gliding, Bonnie Goldstein

COFFEE BREAK: Artist Talks | ACPS Artists Alan J. Klawans & Bonnie Goldstein

Saturday, March 29 2025 | 10:00a.m. – 12:00p.m.

FREE | In-Person Event

Our Coffee Breaks are sponsored in part by the Jenkintown Lyceum.
Bagels are generously provided by Fill-A-Bagel in Jenkintown.

DONATE

Abington Art Center is proud to host this artist talk, featuring two of American Color Print Society members, Alan J. Klawans and Bonnie Goldstein.

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.

Alan J. Klawans

“The ideas for my art come from my family, my travels, books that I have read, movies that I have seen, fishing, trips and flea market adventures.”

Alan J. Klawans has pursued a dual career as both graphic designer and printmaker. This included being director of design SmithKline Beckman Corporation, teaching at the University of the Arts and Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia, PA, and being a design consultant for corporations within the Delaware Valley Region.

Klawans received his bachelor’s in Advertising Design and Printmaking at University of the Arts (formerly Philadelphia College of Art). His work has been featured in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Villanova University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia, PA, and the Michener Museum in Doylestown, PA.
Two of Klawans’ original digital prints have been recently acquired by the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, Massachusetts.

Bonnie Goldstein

“Printmaking is the medium I have used to express myself in my creative process for the past forty years. I have only used non-toxic materials, being mindful of my health and the environment. My current body of work exemplifies my ability to take on new challenges and learn from my failures in order to reap the benefits. I have always collected boxes, deconstructing them in order to see how they were designed. I found the deconstructed shapes intriguing and decided to try using them as my printing matrix; carving into them using the drypoint technique. Conforming my compositions to fit within the shape of a box is always a challenge but, I have fun, enjoy the challenge each time, and always find it rewarding. Whether I am using tools to scratch a surface to create a drypoint print or tools to carve wood or linoleum to create a relief print, I enjoy the process of manipulating a surface. The print “Glide” in this exhibit was a drypoint print made on a small cardboard box that grew exponentially into a 5’ x 3’ woodblock print.”

For the past 40 years, Bonnie Goldstein has been printmaking, keeping her health and the environment in her mind by using non-toxic materials. Collagraphs, dry point, relief and monotypes have been some of the printmaking processes she has used to express herself. Goldstein has created multiple series of prints for artists’ books and continues to work on new book projects. 

She also taught art at The Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, PA for twenty-nine years, noting that teaching and being a productive artist go hand-in-hand and complement each other.

Bonnie Goldstein received her BFA from Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, PA, and her ME from Arcadia University in Glenside, PA. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Abington Club in Abington, PA, the Speer Gallery at the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr, PA, and the 705 West Printmaking Gallery, Jenkintown, PA. She has also won several awards, including the Esther Rose Fisher Printmaking Award; the Larmon Photography Award, Jurors Award: Best in Show, Cheltenham Art Center; Honorable Mention at the Riverfront Renaissance Center for the Arts and, the Mary R. Koch Art Center, Wichita, Kansas, Hugh and Dorothy Hutton Intaglio Award, Honorable Mention at The Plastic Club, Philadelphia, PA, and the Sarah A. Peters Fine Arts Traveling Fellowship Award from Moore College of Art and Design.

For more information on a particular artist or piece please call 215.887.4882

This event is produced as part of our American Color Print Society Members Spring Exhibition, on view from March 14 – April 21, 2025.

Our Coffee Breaks are sponsored in part by the Jenkintown Lyceum.
Bagels are generously provided by Fill-A-Bagel in Jenkintown.

DONATE

Artist Talk | Eric Anthony Berdis & Kate Strachan

“Mis Obey” and “Dis Obey”, Kate Strachan, Ceramic, felt, encaustic wax & wood

The following event was cancelled due to the SPS Technologies Fire Emergency.
Please enjoy the following video interviews with both artists!

Abington Art Center is proud to host an artist talk, featuring 2025 Winter Solo Series artists Eric Anthony Berdis and Kate Strachan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qquOjl26yY8&t=1s

Free programming like this is made possible by your generous donations. Please consider making a donation to the center today.

DONATE

Eric Anthony Berdis

Eric Anthony Berdis’ work simultaneously celebrates the contributions of queer artists and reflects on the violence and oppression that has lingered and continues to linger throughout queer history. This juxtaposition of celebration and reflection is evident in their childlike play of materials and connections to queer art history. Happiness and play are vital to survival, and Berdis, being a queer artist themself, is no stranger to this. They note “joy is an act of resilience—a critical method of subverting hegemonic narratives of suffering.”

Kate Strachan

Using a blend of materials—wax, wood, ceramic, and felt—Kate Strachan draws upon her Pennsylvania Dutch heritage to create work that comprises relics and manuscripts that convey and preserve the rituals of action, sexuality, and silence. Her artwork reflects the ancestral manuscripts that detail life, death, spiritual poetry, and house blessings, typical of Pennsylvania Dutch Frakturs. With an emphasis on materiality, Strachan notes, “I weave together ceramic for its fragility and coolness, felt for its capacity to evoke silence, wax for its encaustic technique symbolizing preservation, and wood for its primal origins…Through these materials, I tell my own story, layering meaning and texture to explore the depths of human experience.”

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.

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!

DONATE

Artist Talk | Alicia Finger & Jenna Hannum

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.

DONATE

Alicia Finger

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!

DONATE

Artist Talk | Bren Ahearn & Flora Wilds

School Shootings in the USA, Bren Ahearn

Wednesday, December 11 2024 | 6:00p.m. – 8:00p.m.

FREE | In-Person Event

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!

DONATE

Coffee Break: Artist Talks | Mick Ricereto

Cumberland, Mick Ricereto

COFFEE BREAK: Artist Talks | Mick Ricereto

Saturday, October 19 2024 | 10:00a.m. – 12:00p.m.

FREE | In-Person Event

Our Coffee Breaks are sponsored in part by the Jenkintown Lyceum.
Bagels are generously provided by Fill-A-Bagel in Jenkintown.

DONATE

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.

Mick Ricereto

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.

DONATE