Tag: solo series

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 | 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

Coffee Break: Artist Talks | Bobbie Diamond Adams

From the Alchemy Series, Bobbie Diamond Adams

COFFEE BREAK: Artist Talks | Bobbie Diamond Adams

Saturday, September 28 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, 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.

DONATE

Coffee Break: Artist Talks | Grue Shackelford & Chau Nguyen

Memory Mountain II (detail), Grue Shackelford

COFFEE BREAK: Artist Talks | Grue Shackelford & Chau Nguyen

Saturday, May 11 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 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.

DONATE

Coffee Break: Artist Talks | Duwenavue Sante Johnson & Abbey Stace

Atmospheric Flight, Duwenavue Sante Johnson

COFFEE BREAK: Artist Talks | Duwenavue Sante Johnson & Abbey Stace

Saturday, May 4 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 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.

DONATE