Tag: painting

Solo Series Fall 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.

ARTISTS

Barbara Brady – Marking Time

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

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

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

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.

Solo Series Spring 2025

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.

ARTISTS

Cecelia Grant, Mixed Media

The One We Live In, 2023 | Acrylic on mylar, $1,500.
Open Concept, 2023 | Ceramic, $350.

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

It Could Go Either Way, 2023 | Ink, acrylic, and oil on wood panels, $6,000.

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

Wish Book (detail) | NFS
Frottage Wallpaper (detail) | NFS

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

Withstand, 2023 | Encaustic wax, collage, and mixed media on panel, $2,500.

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

Solo Series Winter 2025

Fraktur “Trust”, 2024 | Kate Strachan | Ceramic, felt, wax & wood, $1,000

On View January 16 – February 24, 2025

Opening Reception | Thursday, January 16 | 6:00p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

Artist Talk | Saturday, February 1 | 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Artist Talk | Wednesday, February 12 | 6:00 p.m. – 8:00p.m.

DIGITAL CATALOG

ARTISTS

Eric Anthony Berdis, Fiber and Installation

Scarecrow-Gold Eyes, 2025 | Textiles, embellishments, handmade paper on wooden armature, $3,000
Scarecrow-Puppy, 2025 | Textiles, embellishments, handmade paper on wooden armature, $3,000

“Using personal secrets, queer history, and gay boy glamour, my work builds a world for my audience to enter.”

– 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.”

Eric Anthony Berdis’ Paper Bullies and Friends of Dorothy’s is being exhibited in our Community Arts gallery.

Alicia Finger, Painting

Another Place, Another Time, 2024
| Acrylic on cut paper, collage, $1,025
Beginning to Understand the Terrain, 2022
| Acrylic on cut paper, collage, $625

“Each piece has gone through a range of stages and appearances, reemerging as different works each stage.”

– 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.”

Alicia Finger’s Reconstructed Places is on view in our Tile gallery.

Jenna Hannum, Mixed Media

The dying of the light, 2022 | Oil, graphite, and embroidery on linen, $2,400
It wasn’t deadly (III), 2022 | Oil, graphite, and rabbit skin glue on paper, $1,800

“These new portraits on paper and linen, combinations of fine art and craft, are an elegy to the women I’ve lost and a way to retroactively be a caregiver through drawing and embroidery.”

– Jenna Hannum

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.

Jenna Hannum’s Elegy is on view in our Kellner gallery.

Kate Strachan, Mixed Media

Fraktur “Dis Obey” and “Mis Obey” (diptych), 2024 | Ceramic, felt, wax & wood, $900 (each)
Fraktur “Trust”, 2024 | Ceramic, felt, wax & wood, $1,000

“Our artwork serves as a curiosity cabinet, a repository where we place ourselves within the collected fragments of our existence. Much like the rooms we inhabit, our creations become filled with impressions of our identities and experiences.”

– 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.” 

Kate Strachan’s I n v i s i b l e  Sight is on display in our Book Room gallery.

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

Solo Series Fall 2024

Scission, 2022 | Benjamin Long | Oil, alkyd, and graphite on Dibond

On View September 13 – October 21, 2024

Opening Reception | Friday, September 13 | 6:00p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

Coffee Break: Artist Talks | Saturday, September 28 | 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Coffee Break: Artist Talks | Saturday, October 19 | 10:00 a.m. – 12:00p.m.

DIGITAL CATALOG

ARTISTS

Bobbie Diamond Adams, Printmaking and Papermaking

From the Alchemy Series | Mixed media, $600
From the Meditations Series | Collagraph Monoprint, $800

“I like to provide hints of subject matter in my titles, but leave specific narrative to the imagination of the viewer.”

– 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.”

Bobbie Diamond Adams’ work is on display in our Tile gallery.

Anna Bockrath, Interdisciplinary Art

days go, 2024 | Screen printed photograph, handwoven cotton, NFS
held, 2024 | Screen printed photograph on cotton twill tape, $400

“Though weaving, screen printing, trimming, and folding, I utilize techniques that lend themselves to transformation through accumulations of repeated gestures.”

– Anna Bockrath

Inspired by poetry, mythology, and her own personal history, Anna Bockrath explores the complicated concepts of loss, care, and time through her interdisciplinary work. Bockrath’s creations have an airy and ephemeral quality about them, achieved by using both materials and processes that allow for light and air to permeate. Driven by a fascination with process and materiality, her works are created through acts of iteration, layering, and repetition. This act of repetition in her creative practice parallels the repetitive cycles she experiences in her own life, citing “I relate this use of repetition to my own experience of dealing with loss and the repetitive cycles that are entangled with grief.”

Anna Bockrath’s a certain slant of light is on view in our Community Arts gallery.

Benjamin Long, Painting

K.O.O.K., 2021 | Oil and alkyd on wood, $1,500
Dot Dash, 2023 | Oil and alkyd on panel, $1,100

“Please just look and let your eyes have the experience…words can take a break this time.”

– Benjamin Long

Benjamin Long’s oil paintings are colorful, punchy, and both visually and conceptually intriguing.
Each piece comes with its own complex, almost dream-like composition, which leaves the viewer yearning for context. Recurring motifs of snowman-like figures, beehives, and lit cigarettes and pipes give the work an illustrative quality, reminiscent of the work of the late artist Philip Guston. Long acknowledges the ambiguity of his narratives, noting “maybe someday I will figure out a way to translate a personal visual language into a written one” and invites the viewer to derive their own meaning from the clues provided instead.

Benjamin Long’s paintings are featured in our Kelner gallery.

Mick Ricereto, Painting

Cumberland, 2024 | Watercolor on paper, $650
Stillman, 2023 | Watercolor on paper, $650

“I work in response to our disordered, beautiful and sometimes crumbling civilization.”

– 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. 

Mick Ricereto’s Corner’s Report is being exhibited in our Book Room gallery.

Solo Series Spring 2024

Glass Sea, 2022 | Abbey Stace | Plaster, acrylic, oil

On View April 27 – May 31, 2024

Opening Reception | Saturday, April 27 | 6:00p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

Coffee Break: Artist Talks | Saturday, May 4 | 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Coffee Break: Artist Talks | Saturday, May 11 | 10:00 a.m. – 12:00p.m.

DIGITAL CATALOG

ARTISTS

Chau Nguyen, Interdisciplinary Art

Asian Fusion, 2019-20 | Oil on unstretched canvas, bamboo
The Kiss, 2022 | MDF panel on wooden frame, lacquer paint, gold leaf

“My ethnographic approach goes against the grain of the Western art historical canon to embrace these fragments of archives.”

– 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. 

Nguyen’s Of Color is being exhibited in our Community Arts gallery.

Duwenavue Sante Johnson, Mixed Media

Seasonal Resilience, 2022 | Handmade paper, collage
Abound, 2020 | Handprinted, handcut and sewn paper

“Creation comes from an intense emotional state involving uncomfortable, non-cooperative responses to perceptions and resilience, while searching for joy and beauty.”

– 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. 

Johnson’s Seasonal Resilience is on display in our Tile gallery

Grue Shackelford, Fiber Art

Holler of Recollection III, 2023 | Tufted yarn
Vista II, 2023 | Tufted yarn

“Each piece is a fragment of a memory, a place recalled through a haze of blazing sunset and screaming fury.”

– 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. 

Shackelford’s Montani Semper Liberi is on display in our Kellner gallery.

Abbey Stace, Painting

Glass Sea, 2022 | Plaster, acrylic, oil
Smoke and Ember, 2024 | Plaster, acrylic, oil, sand

“There is only becoming; a permanent state can never be reached.”

– 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.

Stace’s Salt & Stone is on view in our Book Room gallery.

Solo Series Winter 2024

Pareidolic Figure, 2023 | Karen Hunter McLaughlin | Indigo dye, watercolor pencil, interference watercolor, on botanical dyed paper

On View January 19 – February 26, 2024

Opening Reception | Friday, January 19 | 6:00p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

Coffee Break: Artist Talks | Saturday, February 3 | 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Coffee Break: Artist Talks | Saturday, February 17 | 10:00 a.m. – 12:00p.m.

DIGITAL CATALOG

ARTISTS

Mia Fabrizio, Mixed Media

True Grit, 2023 | Found tables, carved drywall, silkscreen, cement and twigs
Brick House, 2023 | Brick, wood, dirt, cement, artificial grass and paver
Mama Liked The Roses, 2021 |
Aluminum wire, leather lace, fabric, wire, silkscreen, collage, spray, wood, drywall, foam core, digital photographs, acrylic paint, latex paint and found objects

“My work operates at the intersection of architecture, sociology and visual art.”

– 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.” 

Fabrizio’s work is on display in our Tile gallery.

Karen Hunter McLaughlin, Mixed Media

Filagree, 2023 | Indigo dye, watercolor pencil, interference watercolor, on botanical dyed paper
Earth Embrace, 2023 | Rust, Monotype Print, Collage with pronto plate litho on Rives
Pareidolic Figure, 2023 | Indigo dye, watercolor pencil, interference watercolor, on botanical dyed paper

“This work is motivated by a fascination with the mycorrhizal network – the symbiotic association between the plant world and fungi, drawing on the deep connections between trees, plants and mycelia. The new work draws on concepts of how they invisibly share what the other lacks, how they rescue each other.”

– 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.

Hunter McLaughlin’s new series, Golden Thread, is on view in our Book Room gallery.

Nicole Santiago, Painting

Shifting Celebrations, 2018 | Oil on linen
Caregiver, 2019 | Oil on panel
Second Time Around, 2019 | Oil on canvas

“My work is autobiographical, its content thinly veiled by the mundane domestic debris that clutters the picture plane.”

– Nicole Santiago

Artist Nicole Santiago creates paintings that are rooted in personal experiences, yet read universally. Her use of familiar scenes, a desk littered with empty soda cans and medicine bottles, help stretch her compositions beyond the limits of her own experiences and engage with broader audiences. She notes, “while storytelling is an integral part of my work, it always remains subservient to the broader formal concerns of the picture itself.” 

Santiago’s narrative paintings are on display in our Kellner gallery.

Summer Yates, Sculpture

Surrender, 2021 | Foam, stake flags, plastic table cloth, and hanger
Dine, 2023 | Photograph of platter, polyester, and hanger
Get Outta My Mouth, 2020 | Acrylic, vinyl, and ribboning

“In a celebratory fashion, the work reflects the complexities of ‘holding it all together’ and total surrender.”

– 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.”

Yates’ series, WAM! (Woman Artist Mother), is on view in our Community Arts gallery.