MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary)
Nancy Agati, Nathan Pankratz and Kate VanVliet
5/22/2026 - 7/2/2026
Read MoreLeft, Nancy Agati, The Color of Aether
Middle, Nathan Pankratz, Samemas
Right, Kate VanVliet, Theoretical Gore Point
Art for Social Justice! A Collaborative Printmaking Project by Students at Central High School
April 3rd - May 16th 2026
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt. Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce Art for Social Justice! A Collaborative Printmaking Project by Students at Central High School.
These linocut prints were made by Central's art students in partnership with students in the social science classes. The exhibition is about local public policy issues that impact students and their ideas for how to solve these problems. Central's social science students researched issues and foundevidence to support public policy that can help alleviate the issues and address some of the root causes. These students then collaborated with art students, and together they combined the visually persuasive language of printmaking with the "call to action" proposed in students' City Council legislation. The exhibition is a selection of the 60 prints that were made.
Central High School's art curriculum promotes the development of problem-solving skills and is built upon our students' passion for learning and their individuality. Each art course at Central focuses on hands-on learning that empowers students with the abilities needed to express themselves through the visual arts in a variety of media and techniques. The Civic Action Research Project is a curriculum written by PA Youth Vote and adopted by the School District of Philadelphia. Helping young people develop the ability to channel their intelligence and creativity into the issues they care about is key to PA Youth Vote's mission "to elevate youth voices, improve public school civics education, and empower youth as civic actors." This collaborative project between Central's art and social science students, coordinated and taught by Ms. Andrea Keefe (Art Teacher) and Mr. Tom Quinn (Social Studies Teacher), embodies the school's mission to build a cohesive, mutually supportive, academic community to serve as a model for the community at large.
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
Left, Rebecca Schultz, Lithostatic
Right, Cindy Stockton Moore, Strange-Scented Shade: Eastern Milksnake
Grounded: Cindy Stockton-Moore and Rebecca Schultz
January 16th - March 7th 2026
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt. Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce Grounded, an exhibition of artworks by Cindy Stockton-Moore and Rebecca Schultz. Both artists examine the natural world, exploring geologic and ephemeral time scales, fragmentation of time and matter, and collapsing the distance between subject and artwork by incorporating foraged materials and soil as the media itself, so that the work is grounded in the earth and flora around us.
Cindy says, “My work uses foraged and found materials to create paintings for atmospheric videos, immersive installations and handmade animations.”
“The ‘Strange-Scented Shade’ pair are recent works on paper that explore dissonance within an ecological art practice. They employ alternative printmaking techniques with seaweed, stencils and man-made polymers in contrast with natural, locally sourced color. Amidst the mark-making flora, an assortment of local snakes lie in wait. The prints were created while in a collaborative residency in New York; the resulting studio collages mark the beginning of my investigation into low-tech multiplane animation.”
“The Occlusion Series explores parallel themes of obstruction and imagery. Fragmented, large scale works expose and reveal botanical elements alongside remnants of tense cohabitation.”
Rebecca says of her work, “My creative practice aims to cultivate a sense of wonder for the interconnected ecosystems that surround–and include–us. For a number of years, geology has been a core inspiration for this work: rocks seem so immutable, but they are formed by some of the most dynamic processes on our planet. And recent research has advanced our understanding of the connections between rock-forming minerals and microbes, a relationship which created the conditions for life on earth.”
The works in this exhibition are inspired by the Wissahickon Formation, a unit of bedrock that stretches through Southeastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. It is composed of the metamorphic rocks schist, gneiss, and quartzite. The dramatic ripples and folds in these rocks occurred during the Taconic Orogeny–a process that takes place when converging tectonic plates compress and crumple to form mountains. The Taconic took place during the Silurian Period (approximately 440 to 420 million years ago), when life on land was just starting to evolve. To learn about rocks is to try to grasp the vastness of geologic (or “deep”) time. According to geologist and author Marcia Bjornerud, “Fathoming deep time is arguably geology’s single greatest contribution to humanity. Just as the microscope and telescope extended our vision into spatial realms once too minuscule or too immense for us to see, geology provides a lens through which we can witness time in a way that transcends the limits of our human experiences.”
These paintings were created using egg tempera and oil paint made with mineral, soil, and plant-based pigments, many of which started as components of the ecosystems that have sprung from the Wissahickon itself.
Some of the works in this exhibition are currently on view at the High Point Cafe at 7210 Cresheim Road, Philadelphia.
Cindy Stockton-Moore is a Philadelphia based artist who works with aqueous media to create multimedia animations, works on paper, and site-specific installations. Creating ink from natural materials and hyperlocal species, she connects to the landscape in tactile ways, cultivating themes of entangled resilience. Installations currently on view (2026) include ’an openness to all things lovely’ at Glen Foerd and ‘Other Absences’ at Eastern State Penitentiary. Her experimental collaborative videos have been screened in festivals and exhibitions nationwide and abroad. .
More of Cindys’ work can be found at cindystocktonmoore.com.
Rebecca Schultz is a multi-disciplinary artist living in Elkins Park, PA. She has exhibited nationally, with solo exhibitions at the Sawtooth National Recreation Area headquarters in Ketchum, ID; Abington Art Center; Patricia Ladd Carega Gallery in Sandwich, NH; and NoBa Artspace. Recent group exhibitions include Laudato Si: Caring for Our Common Home at the Maguire Museum, We Are All Compost at Big Ramp Gallery, and WANDERING: Observations of Our Watershed at Fairmount Water Works. Rebecca’s public artworks include two community murals and several community-engaged projects with Mural Arts Philadelphia and site-specific installations in public parks and gardens throughout the Philadelphia region and beyond. She has collaborated with scientists and environmental educators, including with the Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership and Riverfront North Partnership in the Philadelphia region. Rebecca holds a BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design, an MA in Community-Based Arts Education from San Francisco State University, and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from the Confluence program at the University of New Mexico. She has been awarded residencies in Canada, Iceland, Wyoming, Ireland, California, and Idaho.
More about Rebecca’s work can be found at rebeccaschultzprojects.com.
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
Left, Seher Erdoğan, Devotions No.11
Right, Kaya Wielopolski, Untitled #7
Placings: Kaya Wielopolski and Seher Erdoğan
September 12th - November 1st 2025
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt. Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce Placings, an exhibition of artworks by Kaya R. Wielopolski and Seher Erdoğan. Both artists work with place and environment through observation or personal history, as well as through formal composition that works with defining or recalling spaces. Kaya finds harmony between the lines, shapes and colors that she observes in her present environments. Seher is driven by the friction between creating order and breaking from it, as she connects to the material culture of her birthplace in Turkey.
Kaya says of her work, “Mini Abstractions are inspired by natural and man-made structures and patterns I observe and sketch in the environments around me. I work to create a harmony between them as I layer line, shape, and color into intimate and at times whimsical compositions that play with the push and pull of positive and negative space.”
Seher says of her work, “I explore this tension through patterns that juxtapose oppositional forces and reveal multiplicity within the seemingly singular. This conceptual approach is grounded in material explorations that connect personal history with formal structure. I make wall pieces pairing clay and wool—materials both timeless and ancient—that connect me to the material culture of my birthplace, Turkey. I grew up surrounded by mesmerizing kilims and exquisite tiles. While my work doesn’t conform to any single tradition, it is grounded in reimagining this heritage.”
Kaya R. Wielopolski is an art educator and artist. She received her BA in Environmental Studies from Binghamton University in 1997, her MFA in Printmaking from the University of Montana in 2003, and her art teaching certification from Pratt Institute in 2005.
During her time at The University of Montana, Wielopolski worked as an Adjunct Professor for drawing and was a print assistant for Matrix Press working with such artists as Miriam Schapiro, Tony Fitzpatrick, Peter van Tiesenhausen and others. She also assisted with a Sol LeWitt installation and painting at the Gallery of Valley of the Moon in Rock Creek, Montana.
For the past 21 years, Wielopolski has taught art in New York City’s public schools while also facilitating citywide professional developments for fellow public school art teachers and participated in developing and writing the NYC Department of Education’s visual arts curriculum.
Over the years her K-8th students have consistently be shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Queens Museum of Art, Times Square, Port Authority, Tweed Courthouse, Flushing Town Hall, galleries in Chelsea, local libraries and other venues throughout New York City.
Wielopolski has also shown her own work in various exhibitions across the United States, including “Art in the House” at The Easton Arts Council in Connecticut and the “Thirty-First Annual Small Works National Art Exhibition” at Harper College in Illinois. In the summer of 2009, she awarded The Cooper Union School of Art Summer Residency and participated in the “Summer Exhibition: Artists in Residence” at The Cooper Union School of Art in New York.
More of Kaya’s’ work can be found at https://www.flickr.com/photos/kayawielopolski/.
Seher Erdoğan is a Turkish artist, architect, and educator based in Philadelphia. Her sculptural wall pieces combine clay and wool—materials that echo the material culture of her birthplace, Istanbul—and explore the interplay between structure and intuition.
She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture from Yale University, and practiced in New Haven and New York before shifting her focus to teaching and visual art. After years of experimentation across media, she began to concentrate on her current creative practice in 2019.
Seher has exhibited her work locally and produces commissions for private clients across the United States. She continues to teach architecture at University of Pennsylvania and works out of her studio in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood.
More about Erdoğan’s work can be found at https://sehererdogan.com/.
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
Left: Julie Zahn, Floating Through Air, 2020
Right: Riley Fargione, Splish Splash Down We Go, 2024
Ephemeral World: Julie Zahn and Riley Fargione
February 28th - April 25th 2025
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt. Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce Ephemeral World, an exhibition of artworks by Julie Zahn and Riley Fargione. Both artists compose their work from fleeting moments using printmaking and collage, employing gestures and materials that imply ephemerality and a larger hidden universe. Julie works with material she has created through painting and printmaking to capture the quality of color and light in complex compositions that evoke a particular place and time. Riley uses found materials that give a sense of a greater movement, that what we’re seeing is a fragment of something unseen.
Julie Zahn says of her work, “I have been working to create a natural oasis on my urban property for many years. My surroundings permeate my work and I am constantly inspired by what I see or imagine might be there. The power of nature is and always has been my inspiration. As the challenges our planet faces mount, my dedication to creating a slice of nurtured nature in an urban environment continues to fuel my creative process. Leveraging a modern take on ancient techniques, my art is an ode to nature.
Several years ago, my dedicated work involving birds began. With their interesting poses, energy and antics, birds provided everything I want in my work: drama, design, beauty. Once I created my first piece centered around birds, I was hooked on a new muse, examining the complex nature of birds rather than landscapes more broadly. I aspire to deepen the joy, serenity, and magic experienced as people view my art, walking away with renewed hope for a world that places nature first.”
Riley Fargione’s work is intuitive and experimental and encompasses assemblage, collage, multi-media paintings and wood sculptures. She is drawn to found objects and old paper, and keeps an extensive collection in her studio, enjoying both the unexpected and deliberate meetings of these objects in order to spark conversation and meaning.
Through her work she explores themes of beauty, whimsy, medical hilarity, systemic failures, incurable diseases, identity, hiding in plain sight, the unseen and shifting reality.
Based in Philadelphia, multimedia artist Julie Zahn spent her formative years as an artist in a countryside town in Japan painting landscapes and still-lifes. After deepening her artistic expertise through the four year Certificate program at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she returned to Japan to work with an antique screen restorer, where she discovered katazome, or Japanese stencil dyeing, which is a paste-resist technique traditionally used for textiles. Taking a modern spin on this ancient technique, Julie collages katazome, woodcut, and painting with a mix of acrylics and homemade pigments to create distinctive work.
More about Zahn’s’ work can be found at https://juliezahn.net/home.html.
Riley Fargione is a multi-media artist and designer living in Philadelphia. Her work focuses on searching for answers, solving riddles, becoming comfortable in the unknown and exploring the often maddening issues of having a disability in America.
Riley completed a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and received her BFA from Luther College, in Decorah, Iowa. Her work has been included in many solo and group shows, and resides in many private collections internationally and across the United States.
More about Fargione’s work can be found at https://www.rileyfargione.com.
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
Left, Anne Schaefer, passionate but fickle, 2023
Right, Elyce Abrams, Thinking of You in the Sunshine, 2024
Cadence: Elyce Abrams and Anne Schaefer
November 29th 2024 - January 18th 2025
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt. Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce Cadence, an exhibition of artworks by Elyce Abrams and Anne Schaefer. Abrams and Schaefer both work from a process-based perspective where color, pattern and iteration play a part, much in the way music operates in a structured framework, each passage building on and informed by the sounds that came before. These works can be contemplative, calming or experimental and self-referential, sampling and resampling from previous iterations.
Elyce Abrams says of her work: “I started these works on paper when I was mourning the loss of my mom. I needed to work in a way that was repetitive, focused and calm. Painting has always been a stabilizing force in my life, and working in this ordered way was what got me through those first hard months. Sitting at my desk, drawing line after line, allowed me to process my loss. At times, I was completely immersed in the work and the decisions of where I wanted it to go and at other times the rhythm of the lines became automatic, allowing my mind to wander and grieve. These drawings brought me immense comfort and I fell in love with the way the paint from the markers flow into the paper, their precision, and the ability, because of their opacity, to quickly fix mistakes and create layers. As the work has developed, and time has passed, my love of color, pattern, structure and repetition remains central to these pieces. They feel filled with light and joy.”
Anne Shaefer says of her work: “I am dedicated to exploring materials, processes, and substrates to create a layered dialogue of experiential abstraction. My conceptual goals are aligned with the non-hierarchical modes of making - where I invite and resolve fresh visual challenges through rigorous studio practice. I employ painting, screen-printing and digital printed surface treatments interchangeably, mining meaning from the tactile act of making.
I am interested in the unique qualities of each material, setting up a series of prompts and experiments and then paying careful attention to the results. The approach is both responsive and disciplined, an intensive open-ended investigation. The end goal is never known at the beginning of a piece; it is realized in dialog with its creation. The solutions to each abstraction are internal and non-objective, yet they are discovered externally - sometimes through a direct action (a squeegee of ink, another pass of a screen) and sometimes culled from the image bank of prints and stencils I have amassed. The goal is to discover a non-prescriptive, psychic space that vibrates with the unknown. The process is asynchronous and tactile; cerebral and physical.”
Elyce Abrams is an abstract artist based in Philadelphia. Her work, in the last few years, has explored the relationship between happiness and deep concern; fear and acceptance; compliance and resistance; isolation and connection. Abrams received her MFA in 2004 from the University of the Arts and her BA/BFA from Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Her work has been included in many solo and group shows - a selection of which are: Spectral, Blank Space Gallery, NYC; Blaze Stochastic, Shenandoah Museum of Contemporary Art, Woodstock, VA; Connection-Isolation, Blank Space Gallery, NYC; Hybrid, Bertrand Productions, Philadelphia, PA; We're All Here, Philadelphia International Airport; Something New Every Day, NoBA Projectspace, Bala Cynwyd, PA; Les Chic, James Oliver Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; Lost in the Funhouse, Spring Break Art Fair, New York. Her work is included in public and private collections throughout the US and abroad, including the Microsoft Art Collection; Fox School of Business, Temple University; Royal Caribbean Cruise Line; Charles Library, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA; Wuhan Heartland 66 Development, Wuhan, China; Lankenau Medical Center, Wynnewood, PA. Recently she collaborated on a rug collection with Ruggism, a company based in India.
More about Abrams’ work can be found at https://elyceabrams.com.
Anne Schaefer's work has been featured in group and solo exhibitions throughout the United States. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Washington University and a Master of Fine Arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Schaefer is a former print fellow at the Fabric Workshop and Museum and has been a college-level art educator for the last 15 years. She has been a member of a number of artist collectives such as Vox Populi as well as Tiger Strikes Asteroid, where she served as director from 2011-2013. She lives and works in upstate New York.
Schaefer's work comprises painting, print and large-scale installation in which color and pattern are paramount to creating optically challenging and perceptually immersive experiences for the viewer.
More about Schaefer’s work can be found at https://www.anneschaeferstudio.com.
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
Left, Kensington, September 26, 2014, Stefan Abrams
Right, Bonavista, Newfoundland, Leah Frances
The Edges: Leah Frances and Stefan Abrams
October 5th - November 16th 2024
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt. Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce The Edges, an exhibition of works by Leah Frances and Stefan Abrams. Both artists have spent time photographing towns and neighborhoods affected by deindustrialization and depopulation, aware that the lens through which they see these places is often a reflection of themselves and what they bring to the camera.
For the series Seafever, during a residency in the sparsely populated village of Pouch Cove, Newfoundland, Leah Frances photographed people and places she encountered on long walks to mark time and stave off loneliness from isolation. “In Newfoundland,” she says, “I looked for some kind of correlation to where I live now, in the Rust Belt of America. Many of the towns around mine have lost what was critical to their economy: coal, steel, manufacturing. Here it was the cod fishery, shut down approximately 30 years before my arrival. In a town up the coast from Pouch Cove, I photographed a mantelpiece decorated with baubles from Christmas 1991. In the spring of 1992, the federal government banned cod fishing, creating the biggest layoff in Canadian history. People left. I was wondering if there would be the anger in Newfoundland that simmers close to the surface in my adopted home. I didn’t run into it. Not this time, anyway. I encountered a resigned and steadfast way of living: Walking, gardening, hunting, preserving, and preparing for the long winter. Weaving the fabric of existence. To quote photographer Robert Frank: ‘Good Days Quiet.’”
Stefan Abrams’ photography in this exhibition, from his series Borderlines, was shot over a number of years in the Kensington section of Philadelphia. Once a bustling industrial center of the city, Kensington experienced depopulation and increased poverty rates from subsequent deindustrialization, and in many senses its residents live at the periphery of political and economic power in the city. Abrams photographs people and places in this neighborhood, and says his camera “frequently acts as a borderline between me and these spaces. The photographs themselves act as a borderline between the viewer and what is pictured. Art is a mark, sometimes it is a line, sometimes it is a borderline.”
Leah Frances is a Canadian photographer born in Alert Bay, Canada, now based in Easton, Pennsylvania. Frances’ work has been featured in numerous print and online platforms including The Guardian, The Washington Post , The New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed and more and has been exhibited nationally and internationally. In December 2021 she graduated with an MFA in photography from The Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Her first sold out photo book, “American Squares,” debuted in September 2019 at the New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 and was quickly featured by T, The New York Times Style Magazine, in their “T Suggests: Things our Editors Like” column. Her second book of photography, “Lunch Poems,” was released in October 2022 (now sold out). Esquire named it a “Favorite Photo Book of Fall 2022” and it was the subject of a PBS “Short Takes” Documentary, Leah Frances — Lunch Poems.
An exclusive collection of Leah’s “American Squares” prints is now represented by The MF Gallery in Detroit, Michigan..
More about Frances’ work can be found at https://leah-frances.com.
Stefan Abrams is a Philadelphia based photographer. He was born in South Africa but raised in the United States. He holds a BA from the University of Vermont and an MFA from Tyler School of Art..
More about Abram’s work can be found at https://stefanabrams.com.
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
Left: Alyssa Fanning, Blue Flames Under the Whirlwind Sky, 2023
Right: Cecilia Whittaker-Doe, The Waters Around Us, 2024
Landscapes Within: Alyssa Fanning and Cecilia Whittaker-Doe
July 12th - August 24th 2024
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt. Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce Landscapes Within, an exhibition of works by Alyssa Fanning and Cecilia Whittaker-Doe. Both painters explore landscape as a medium for connecting to the natural world, either for exploration of the self or of the universe around us.
Alyssa Fanning says of her work, “Returning to oil paint for the first time in ten years, blue skies have rolled in, signifying clarity and optimism. Rounded forms of repeated hills reflect a dream-like, harmonious existence. Pockets of imagery populate the spaces creating texture and complexity. These ‘scenes within scenes’ hint at the connection between the cosmic and microcosmic worlds that reside within us and around us. My paintings depict euphoric spaces filled with joyful color and clear light. Clouds, trees, and spheres fill the surfaces. Trees appear as solid forms on terrestrial mounds, as transparencies, and inside globes and clouds. Are they flying away? Are we dreaming them?”
Cecilia Whittaker-Doe’s paintings are derived from experience and observation in the natural landscape. She says, “Within the inquisitive act of painting these experiences prompt an exploration of self amid the sometimes tumultuous relationship depicted between air, water and land. The presence of a weed, muddy and rocky earth, or a flower in the landscape takes on as much importance as any scene alluded to and metaphors are found in the desire for discovery in painting. Posing questions in a painting is important to me. I’d rather a viewer experience more curiosity than answers from my painting.”
Alyssa Fanning was born in 1985 in Teaneck, NJ. A graduate of Pratt Institute (BFA) and Montclair State University (MFA), Fanning has exhibited at AC Institute, New York, NY; the Glass House, New Canaan, CT; Newark Museum, Newark, NJ, Platform x David Zwirner, New York, NY; and Teckningsmuseet, Laholm, Sweden, among others. Recent solo exhibitions by the artist include A Thousand Moons and Suns at Platform Project Space, Brooklyn, NY and Alyssa Fanning: Drawings at Carlton Hobbs, New York, NY. She presented a new body of work this summer in the two-person exhibition, Alyssa Fanning & Kristin Cronic, at Pocket Utopia Gallery, New York, NY. Fanning has been published in Battery Journal, BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, Peer Review, and Two Coats of Paint. Her curatorial projects include exhibitions at ABC No Rio, New York, NY; Eagle Studio, Brooklyn, NY; and Radiator Gallery, Queens, NY. In 2024 she launched the artist lecture series, Show&Tell Art Talks, with artists Michael Aaron Lee and Patrick Neal, in Long Island City, NY. Fanning teaches drawing and design at Montclair State University in Montclair, NJ and Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ. In 2022 she received the Distinguished Teaching Faculty Award at Stevens Institute of Technology.
More about Fanning’s work can be found at www.alyssaefanning.com.
Cecilia Whittaker-Doe is a painter living and working in Brooklyn, NY, and Delaware County, NY. In addition to making and exhibiting her paintings, Whittaker-Doe, along with her husband, Don Doe, directed SRO Gallery, an alternative artist run space in Crown Heights, Brooklyn from 2016-2019.
Whittaker-Doe has shown widely throughout NYC and upstate NY, and her work is included in many private collections. Selected exhibitions include Further in Summer than the Birds Platform Project Space, Brooklyn, NY (curated by Jennifer Coates), Amor Mundi, Hurley Gallery Princeton University, NJ (curated by Su Friedrich), Not Belonging To The Place You Have Arrived At, NHFPL Gallery New Haven, CT (catalogue with essay by Archie Rand available upon request), Portrait of a Forest, Art Mora gallery, Ridgfield Park, NY, Art For Your Collection, Catherine Fosnot Gallery, New London, CT, Re-Ordering of Place, Upstairs Gallery at Hudson Beach Glass, Beacon, NY, Bocage, Flow/Glow, Landx, Red Fox art gallery, Pound Ridge, NY, Dandelions, 490 Atlantic Brooklyn, NY, Water Works Walter Wickiser Gallery NY, NY, Natural Impact Arsenal Gallery, Central Park NY, To You, The View To Me (two person exhibit with Don Doe) The Upstairs Gallery, Hudson Beach Glass Beacon, NY (catalog available upon request).
More about Whittaker-Doe’s work can be found at www.ceciliawhittakerdoe.com.
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
Scratching the Surface: Zoë Lukas and Paul Marrocco
Top Left and Right: Zoë Lukas, Pink Series: Uncharted and Pink Series, Heart of Darkness, both 2023
Bottom: Paul Marrocco, The upside of a misspent youth, 2021
December 2nd 2023 - January 13th 2024
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt. Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce Scratching the Surface, an exhibition of works by Zoë Lukas and Paul Marrocco. Both artists share an approach to non-objective painting that connects the superficial repetitive mark of paint on the surface to a gesture that digs deep into what can only be discovered when fully engaged.
Zoë Lukas spent the beginning of 2023 working on a new series of mostly small pieces focused on the color pink. She explains her choice, “I have been working on limiting the color range within each piece, which allows me to focus on the joy of the process, minimal color shifts and subtle layering.” Themes emerging in these pieces include mapping and wayfinding and the act of veiling or obscuring layers. Lukas uses repetitive markmaking as a meditative ritual, creating a shroud that quiets the constant interruptions and chaos of day-to-day life.
Paul Marrocco makes paintings that are non-representational and about the interplay between color, form, line, and texture. He states, “I want the audience to integrate their own personal narrative and draw their own conclusions from the paintings. The viewing experience should be open ended, expansive, and free from premeditated notions.”
Marrocco’s process is exploratory with unexpected outcomes. With the painted mark, he tries to tap into the myriad of internal and intangible forces operating in the subconscious beneath perception and purposeful thinking. Marrocco is inspired by Zen master D.T. Suzuki's statement, “Man is a thinking reed, but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. Uncluttered without words or instruction, a still mind makes for the best performance”.
During the day, Zoë Lukas designs custom cakes at Whipped Bakeshop, the award-winning Fishtown bakery that she founded in 2009 with her husband, Brennen. At night, Lukas can often be found in her home studio creating abstract paintings and collages. You can see more of her work on Instagram @zoe.lukas and @whippedbakeshop
Paul Marrocco was born in New York City and is currently working and living in Philadelphia. He returned to painting in earnest just a few years ago, after focusing on his career in video production for many years. Marrocco has been drawing and painting since he was a child and is largely self-taught. He creates work that is dynamic and expressive while balancing shape and line with color and texture. More of Marrocco’s work can be seen on Instagram @paul.marrocco
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
Left: Tremain Smith, Separation, Oil & beeswax on panel, 24” x 30”, 2021
Right: Jonathan Eckel, Elysium, Acrylic on canvas, 48” x 60”, 2023
Wellspring: Tremain Smith and Jonathan Eckel
October 7th - November 18th 2023
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt. Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce Wellspring, an exhibition of works by Tremain Smith and Jonathan Eckel. These artists work with the mystery of being human: The power of our inner selves and mythologies, whether mined from internal experience or from collective history, and the stories we tell for ourselves.
Tremain Smith says of her work, “I use my skills as an artist to facilitate healing, personal and collective. I want to make compelling works of art that create access to spirit. My paintings are an expression of what is within and are about the mysteries I find when I let what is inside come out. The lines, shapes and colors are mappings of the unseen as I visually explore internal landscapes. I explore, discover, and heal through the language of painting and writing. I have made public my practice of responding to my paintings with writing, and most pieces have accompanying poems. The writing spontaneously explores what is mined in the painting.
‘If you live by inspiration then you do what comes to you.’ This quote from the artist Agnes Martin has led me my entire career. I let the process take over, guiding and absorbing me. I take risks by expressing emotion and freedom in mark-making while simultaneously finding wisdom in structure and restraint.
My aspiration: I am a soul artist. I see into my own being. I have a source inside me. I make what’s blocked start moving again. I am a warrior of concentrated light.“
Smith’s website is www.tremainsmith.com.
Jonathan Eckel says of his work, “I’m in love with the act of painting - the entire process of starting from nothing, creating, problem-solving and resolving. These works reflect themes of ritual, metamorphosis, vernal phenomena and personal mythology. Walking the line between figuration and abstraction. I’m trying to tap into the vital force. The impulse of life.
This selection of paintings continues a decade-long series, reaching deep into our collective human history with a profound interest in anthropology and ethnography. Inspired by African, Mesoamerican, Oceanic Arts, and cultures, as well as European and American Modernism, these paintings draw from the rich tapestry of the past to chart a course into an uncertain future.”
Eckel’s website is www.jonathaneckel.com.
Tremain Smith has four works in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NewYork. Her work is in corporate and private collections across the country. She has had dozens of solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Scottsdale, Maine, Delaware,Florida and Hawaii. Group exhibitions include SOFA Chicago, Art Miami, the Painted Bride, thePhiladelphia Art Alliance, and the USArtists American Fine Art Show.
Tremain has been reviewed extensively including coverage by the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune and the LA Weekly. Her work is included in Encaustic Art in the Twenty-First Century by Anne Lee & E. Ashley Rooney, published by Schiffer Publishing, The Art of Encaustic Painting Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax published by Watson-Guptill, and in the art journal New American Paintings. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Tyler School of Art, Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pennsylvania. She received a Teaching Artist Certificate from the University of the Arts.
Alongside her studio practice, Tremain teaches, lectures, and leads workshops. She was a panelist at the Eighth International Encaustic Conference presenting on “The Roots of Contemporary Encaustic”. The technique she uses is composed of layers of oil glazes, collaged elements, and transparent beeswax. Her works on paper are made with a hand-ground recipe of gum arabic and oil emulsion. Tremain’s concerns center on art and healing. Her abstract works are mappings of an inner world. She responds to her paintings with writing, following a creative process that combines painting and poetry. Smith explores, discovers, and heals through both languages.
Jonathan Eckel was born in Glenside, Pennsylvania in 1980. He received a BFA from Tyler School of Art in 2003 during which time he spent one year studying abroad in Rome, Italy. Before, during and after his fine arts studies he traveled extensively in North and Central America, Eastern and Western Europe, Asia and Africa; spending one full year living in the Great Rift Valley. In 2010, he spent three months as an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center which greatly impacted his creative practice and painting style. Most recently, he spent another three months as an artist in residence at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation located on the sea coast of North County Mayo in the Republic of Ireland. Eckel is primarily focused on painting and drawing, exploring new subject matter and styles, often blurring the line between abstraction and representation. This constantly inviting and developing approach to art-making allows for experimentation, reconsideration and action; giving the artist the freedom needed to make an honest mark. The diversity of his imagery is strongly influenced by his world travels along with his deep interests in the history of art, anthropology, philosophy and music. Eckel’s work is included in many public and private collections including the permanent collection of the Woodmere Art Museum, the U.S. State Department Art Bank Program and the Ballinglen Contemporary Museum of Art in County Mayo, Ireland. The artist currently lives and works at Greene Street Artists Cooperative located in the historic section of Germantown, Philadelphia.
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
Left: Michael Frechette, Bathtub, oil on panel, 22'“ x 26”, 2019
Right: Kathleen Eastwood-Riaño, Coffee with Dad #3, oil on canvas, 15” x 12”, 2022
Rooms: Kathleen Eastwood-Riaño and Michael Frechette
August 11th - September 23rd 2023
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce Rooms, an exhibition of works by Kathleen Eastwood-Riaño and Michael Frechette. Both artists work with domestic interior spaces and the memories or ghosts that inhabit them.
Kathleen Eastwood-Riaño’s work explores interpersonal relationships and structures that emerge within the home. She is interested in family relationships, relationships to our belongings, and the spaces we inhabit. Her practice begins by digitally collaging drawings and photographs. She embraces the distortions that emerge from the process of layering these images and is interested in how these visual fissures parallel the way memories can fragment and blur the story. Initially her images can be easily read, but the more time you spend with them the less readable they become. Eastwood-Riaño’s website is kathleeneastwoodriano.com.
Since March 2020 Eastwood-Riaño has been working on a series of small paintings where she approaches relationships in a new way. Social distancing, virtual classes, and birthdays, watching her only sibling’s wedding, and hosting her father-in-laws funeral on Zoom, highlighted how precious connections are. This new work moves between past and present, looking across the table through still life and memory to the people who are missing. Eastwood-Riaño hopes this body of work will go beyond the personal and speak to a universal sense of connection and loss.
When Michael Frechette paints interiors, he’s looking for ghosts. The traces of the people who lived there after they move on are like portraits to him. All of these rooms in Frechette’s work are places that he is intimately familiar with, and in some cases actually built. All have stories. Frechett'e’s website is michaelfrechette.com.
Kathleen Eastwood-Riaño is a Philadelphia based artist whose paintings, drawings and installations investigate intergenerational memory and relationships.
In December of 2022, she was commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Mural Arts to create a mural in response to the exhibition Matisse in the 1930’s. Eastwood-Riaño is a 2022 recipient of a Soaring Gardens Artist Residency, a 2021 grant recipient from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and a 2020-22 recipient of the Fleisher Wind Challenge Solo Exhibition. Her work has been featured in both solo and group exhibitions nationally and has work held in private collections nationally and internationally.
Eastwood-Riaño received her MFA from The San Francisco Art Institute and her BFA from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She has taught as an adjunct professor at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, The University of the Arts, and Moore College of Art & Design. She is currently an Assistant Professor at The Pennsylvania College of Art & Design.
Michael Frechette was born in Detroit in 1965. Growing up, he watched the decline of a city that less than a century before was mostly farmland. From plowed fields and cows to boomtown workshop of the world to wasteland in 70 years. Neighborhoods, factories and skyscrapers abandoned and overgrown. The madness and magic of a city abandoned, the wonder of its stories has informed his work ever since - Frechette examines the landscape of the natural and fabricated worlds and its influence on the human experience.
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
Left: Ace Harlo, Molten Coast, acrylic and mixed media, 9” x 9”, 2022
Right: Bethann Parker, Convergence, oil on canvas, 20” x 40”, 2023
Visionscapes: Ace Harlo and Bethann Parker
June 17th - July 29th 2023
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce Visionscapes, an exhibition of works by Ace Harlo and Bethann Parker. These artists work within the context of landscape painting as a meditative practice that tap into hidden energies - life and loss, being present and seeing beyond the veil.
Since 1990, Ace Harlo (qy/qym/qyr) has made art in the mediums of sculpture, performance, poetry, painting, video, sound, photography, and social practice, often combining the mediums into live works of performance art. During the pandemic, Harlo leaned hard into painting. Qy wrapped up in a down blanket and painted for hours at the coast. Harlo solo road tripped the entire length of California painting along the way. All told, Ace made over 100 paintings and filled several sketchbooks. Harlo titled this body of work Avant-Rainbow because it is a colorful, prismatic expression of life energy amid the great loss of the pandemic.
In the rural Mountains of North East Appalachia, Bethann Parker runs a homestead that is rooted in traditional living and tends a studio which, through interdisciplinary research and material experimentation, expands the ways that she depicts her country narratives. Inspired by tactility, Parker explores the interlacing of time and emotion in visionary painting. Offered as a type of prayer, this series is influenced by an incessant devotion of restless searching. Repetitive brush strokes become clogged in meditation, outlining condensed pleas to break open ground and peel back the veils that blur pastoral views. Using thick impasto oil paint to build up conscious and unconscious memories, Parker submits to intuition and curiosity while leaving a residue of the domestic and spiritual landscapes that frame her life.
Shape-shifting and genre-bending, Ace Harlo ( https://www.aceofviolets.com/ ) is a transdisciplinary artist who works in a wide range of art media often combining them into live performance art. Since 1990, Ace has presented artwork at 85 venues in 42 cities in the United States, Canada and Scotland. Venues include Center for Contemporary Art in Glasgow, Scotland; Banff Centre of the Arts in Canada; MOMA, PS1 and PS122 in New York; and LACE and Highways in Los Angeles.
Bethann Parker ( https://www.bethannparker.com ) (b. 1984 Montgomeryville, Pa; lives and works in Saylorsburg, PA) received a BFA and Certificate of Fine Art from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and a Certificate from the Barnes Foundation. She was the recipient of The Kittredge Fund, The Fred and Naomi Hazel Art Scholarship, The Richard Von. Hess Travel Scholarship and twice awarded Venture Fund Grant for large project proposals. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and the Voice of America.
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
Left: Kellianne McCarthy, flower quasar
Right: Caroline Santa, Spaced Out, Phazed Out
Out of this World: Caroline Santa and Kellianne McCarthy
April 28th - June 10th 2023
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce Out of this World, an exhibition of works by Caroline Santa and Kellianne McCarthy. Both artists have a personal visual vocabulary from which they construct provisional spaces and worlds.
Caroline Santa (https://carolinesanta.com/ cuts apart her drawings and paintings, subtracting the language that is no longer relevant to her practice, and surveys the remnants. The studio walls are like one paragraph of many interchangeable words. Like written language, different arrangements of these units form alternate meanings.
Kellianne McCarthy (https://kelliannemccarthy.com/ wants to evoke a feeling of place where the elements of the world we know meet bizarre, reverent spaces that make dream sense: Strange, opulent worlds with relentless stripes, patterns, flowers and colors that are lavish and startling. Psychedelic color, references to spaceships, supernovas, pulsars and the spaces they occupy are meant to be welcoming but unpredictable.
Caroline Santa is a mixed-media artist based in Philadelphia. She earned her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the University of Pennsylvania and a BFA in Printmaking from the University of Delaware. Her work utilizes drawing and painting on paper, fabric, and other materials in a spontaneous manner which often becomes sculptural and performative. She has exhibited her work throughout the northeast in galleries in Philadelphia and New York, as well as in San Antonio, TX at The Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum. Internationally, Caroline was an artist in residence at the Lucy Tejada Center of Culture in Pereira, Colombia, where she also exhibited her work. Caroline is a co-founder of the network of art spaces, Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Caroline has collaborated with the Grammy Award-winning choir The Crossing and composer Joshua Stamper to create a multimedia installation in The Icebox Project Space, Philadelphia’s largest uninterrupted gallery space. She teaches at Germantown Friends School.
Kellianne McCarthy works with oil, acrylic, and collage on wood panels. She is known for her saturated color palette and blend of imagery, abstraction, and pattern. She uses those elements to create spaces where the concrete and surreal meet. Influences filtered into her work include the graphic design of Peter Max, the altar pieces produced during the Renaissance, and the ungraspable vastness of the universe. She was born in Philadelphia, PA. She received a BFA in Painting from Moore College of Art and Design in 1992. She is a RN currently working in Philadelphia.
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
top: Sarah Morejohn, Strawberry Lightening
bottom: Zoë Cohen, Collective Action 1
Drawn: Sarah Morejohn and Zoë Cohen
March 3rd - April 15th 2023
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce Drawn, an exhibition of works by Sarah Morejohn and Zoë Cohen.
Both artists work abstractly and use repetitive marks. Sarah Morejohn enters into her abstraction from a place of wonder and ways to explore the gaps between what is known and what is felt. Zoe is approaching abstraction and repetitive marking to synthesize her interests in what is beyond the individual self, such as collective power, Jewish history, and landscape.
Morejohn writes of her work:
“My fascination of non-linear patterns in nature drives my work. I consider how our relationship to nature is mediated both by our objective understanding and our subjective imaging of it. I think of how wonder is important to our connection to the world.
In 2020 I began exploring drawing intuitively in a sketchbook. Drawing in this way, or really doodling, allowed me to go beyond trying to render or "copy" things I observe. It allowed me empathize and imagine a narrative or event that I wouldn't be able to witness otherwise. Bridging the gap between what I know and what I feel, making a drawing through doodling is a way to understand my imagined relationship to nature. Engaging in this mode of drawing lets small decisions and chance affect the outcome of my work.
After experiencing a historic blizzard, I began making drawings based on snow crystals and their intricate structures. Snowflakes are not symmetrical; they are smushed together or broken apart by the time they fall to the earth. Perfect snow crystals are rare. I learned this as I grappled with the grief of having chronic illnesses, and snow crystals became a metaphor for the body. A perfectly functioning body is equally rare. Flaws and mistakes became central to the drawings, as I embraced them rather than abandoning them.
[…] my interest in nature and looking spans years. Learning about nature is difficult in this time of endless ecological problems and drastic climate change. Looking deeply and being immersed in details decenters the self and becomes restorative. My work is a search for connection through wonder.”
Cohen describes her work as:
“[consisting] of improvisational drawing, on paper and on wood. I make complex process-driven images developed through an accumulation of marks and an inquisitive approach to materials. My approach to abstraction is drawn from the intersections of my affection for the landscape, of an embodied presence in the world, and of my experiences of the power of collective human activity. I employ layered mark-making, in drawing, carving, and burning, to create meaning through repetition.
I intend for these works to be responsive to the quiet rhythms of the inner life, while also retaining an expansive scale that refers to the monumental movements of human activism and of the natural world. I’m interested in an abstraction that is active and activated, and that contains entire worlds. I thrive on complexity and invite the viewer to find resonance in both the small moments and larger movements of my work. The worlds that my projects reflect are those of organizing for power in the workplace, of contemporary and historical Jewishness, and of spaces that resonate with the past and live in the present.”
Morejohn (https://www.sarahmorejohn.com) grew up in rural Oregon, and currently lives and works in Oakland, CA. In 2011 she earned a BFA in painting and drawing from the University of Oregon. Her intricate drawings are a part of numerous private collections, and in the permanent collections at Montefiore Medical Center (Bronx, NY), Physics Department at the University of Oregon (Eugene, OR), and Project Art & Medical Museum, University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics (Iowa City, IA). Her work has been exhibited at Empty Set Gallery (Bronx, NY), Kenise Barnes Fine Art (Larchmont, NY), Collar Works (Troy, NY), The Drawing Rooms (Jersey City, NJ), and Schema Projects (Brooklyn, NY). She was awarded an artist-in-residence at Lacawac Sanctuary and Biological Field Station (Lake Ariel, PA) and has been published in Superstition Review and Hyperallergic.
Cohen (https://zoecohen.com) was born in 1977 in Boston MA. She received her BA in Fine Arts from Haverford College and her MFA from Brooklyn College. At Brooklyn College, she was a leader of the MFA 2006 cohort who successfully fought the censorship of their MFA Thesis Exhibition by the City of New York.
Zoë's work has been presented in a variety of exhibition spaces including The National Museum of American Jewish History (PA), The Ely Center for Contemporary Art (CT), GoggleWorks (PA), Underdonk (NY), the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (VA), The Abington Art Center (PA), Flux Factory (NYC), The Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art, The Painted Bride Art Center, and Arttransponder (Berlin), and is in the permanent collection of The Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art, The Philadelphia Cathedral, and the Museum of Art and Peace as well as private collections.
Zoë has taught as an Adjunct Instructor at Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Moore College of Art and The University of the Arts. Her Studio Residencies include The Vermont Studio Center, Philadelphia's 40th Street AIR program, and the Artist-in-Residence program at the Philadelphia Cathedral. Her studio practice is currently complemented by her work as a union organizer for higher education workers in the Philadelphia region. She lives in West Philadelphia with her two children.
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
Left: Elisa Jensen, Interior, Dreams and Reflections, Oil on Linen, 24” x 20”, 2022
Right: Kelly Popoff, Couple, Oil on oil paper, 15” x 11”, 2020
homeward: Elisa Jensen and Kelly Popoff
January 6th - February 25th 2023
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce homeward, an exhibition of works by Elisa Jensen and Kelly Popoff.
Three years into the COVID pandemic, our relationship to home has shifted; it’s been challenged and evolved - sometimes in fundamental ways. Jensen and Popoff both work from the perspective of the home, each having brought their own history to these bodies of work on the subject.
Jensen says, “My work in the last few years has been profoundly influenced by the global pandemic. COVID first forced us into our homes. I brought my painting practice to my home, and there it has remained. My home and my views of home life became my subject matter and my passion. I was particularly interested in how light changed over time. More recently, as I have had to clear out my parents’ house after their unfortunate deaths, I visited again my childhood home in my work, adding memory and time to this body of work dealing with home, light, life, loss and time”.
Popoff’s “American Snapshot Series” includes work from the last three years. “During this time I have been looking at images of Americana: doll collections, gun collections, antique furniture, clothing patterns, model home kits, yearbooks, toys, etc.. Perhaps as an instinctive response to try to make sense of our current culture by looking back. Or maybe, to find connections that may explain why our history seems so present and unresolved. More recently, I have been gifted a large collection of vintage snapshots that allowed me a more intimate look into America’s past. My current paintings and drawings use these photos as a reference to try to capture the essence of American life – with emphasis on family, memory and socio-psychological dynamics.” Popoff’s creative life has been most influenced by childhood and the injustices that she felt in the two areas that dominated during that time: home life and Catholic school education. The social dynamics of these two realms overlap in ways that fuel her desire to bring to light abuses of power. Popoff’s work addresses social concerns, often pertaining to children, animals and others in powerless positions that are susceptible to manipulation. Houses and clothing are recurring images in her work and address issues of being human without the presence of a specific person. They are intimate representations of those known and unknown to the artist. They represent sacred spaces of joy and pain.
Elisa Jensen (http://www.elisajensen.com) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The National Academy Museum, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has shown extensively in New York and in Europe and her work has been featured in Whitehot Magazine, Hyperallergic, Artcritical.com, The New York Sun, New York Daily News, she currently teaches at the New York Studio School and Pratt Institute.
Kelly Popoff (https://kellypopoff.org/) was born in Akron, Ohio. She lives and works in Greenfield, MA. Kelly’s recent honors include: Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Drawing 2020, The Clowes Fund Fellowship and Residency, Vermont Studio Center 2019, Millay Colony Fellow 2018, The Artist’s Resource Trust Fellowship and Residency, Vermont Studio Center 2017, The Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation Grant 2017, a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation 2016, Finalist Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Painting 2016. Recent solo shows include American Snapshot at Melhop Gallery, South Lake Tahoe, NV, At Home with Our Histories at The University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, O Children at Herter Gallery, The University of Massachusetts and Rock on Doily at Augusta Savage Gallery, The University of Massachusetts. Kelly has exhibited in international group shows including shows curated by jurors such as Jill Kearney (Founder and Head Curator of ArtYard), Carter E. Foster (Curator of Drawing at the Whitney Museum of American Art), Richard Klein (Director of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum), Trenton Doyle Hancock (contemporary artist), Camilo Alvarez of Samson Projects, Rachel Wolff (art critic and writer) and Deborah Rockman (contemporary artist).
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
Left: Laurie Frick, Green Tracking Time (center panel)
Right: Richard Garrison, Circular Color Scheme: Walmart, April 21 - May 1, 2013, Pages 1-6 "One in Six Americans Struggles with Hunger"
Filter: Laurie Frick and Richard Garrison
November 19th - December 31st 2022
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC
25 West Mt Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
info@mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce Filter, an exhibition of works by Laurie Frick and Richard Garrison.
We receive a deluge of information moving through a modern world - the physical terrain of suburban strip mall landscapes that surround us and the digital landscape we navigate daily. In traversing this world, we swim in tagged advertising, personalization, and tracking, at once anonymous and deeply, intrusively intimate.
Frick and Garrison both employ the practice and language of contemporary data analytics to filter and interpret their experiences - sunburst, pie and mosaic graphs. They share a common interest in translating this information by hand, using traditional picture-making practices like watercolor and collage - the physical human hand and eye performing their role as the original data processing tools, filtering and reinterpreting as a way to reclaim ownership of their place in this world.
Laurie Frick (www.lauriefrick.com) uses data to examine what we can know about ourselves. In her hand-built installations, drawings and small works she experiments with how we will consume the mass of data increasingly captured about us. Frick says of the work included in this show, “Many, many small collages were made on stretched canvas from found postcards, paperback book covers and heavy paper scrounged from everywhere. These were an intense study of time and the way you remember time forward and backward. I’ve worked for years from time studies from all over the world, how exactly people spend their time in the prior 24 hours. These are memory of time, the amount you take in everyday - what sticks and what is gone. Trying to make sense of how the feeling of time changes depending on what is going on with you.”
Richard Garrison (www.richgarrison.com) distills visual information from repetitive interactions with big box stores, parking lots, and online shopping. Observed data is systematically transformed into chart-like paintings and drawings that restructure the palette and imagery of daily and routine activities. The intimate, patterned, and colorful interpretations of this banal content reflects his perception and participation with the confounding beauty of the American suburban landscape.
Laurie Frick was recently featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, Atlantic and Wired Magazine; she has been invited to talk at Google, SXSW, Stanford and TEDx. Frick is a recipient of numerous residencies and awards, including Samsung Research, Yaddo, Bemis and Facebook. She holds an MFA from the New York Studio School, an MBA from University of Southern California and studied at NYU’s ITP program that melded art and technology into her current data work. Frick’s artwork has been exhibited in museums, galleries and art spaces across North America, including Musee de la Civilization in Quebec City, Science Museum in Oklahoma City, Pavel Zoubok Gallery in New York and Edward Cella in Los Angeles. Recent installations include public art in downtown Austin, CapitalOne, Facebook and Texas A&M. Born in Los Angeles, she lives and works in Austin, Texas.
Richard Garrison received his BS in Studio Art from the College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY in 1993 and an MFA from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY in 1995. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Clinton, NY; Kidspace at MASS MoCA, N. Adams, MA; The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ; the International Print Center, New York, NY; the Elmhurst Museum of Art. Elmhurst, IL, and the Queens Museum of Art, Queens NY.
Left, Donna Quinn, Conflict of Interest (5), right, Rick Lewis, 14_S01C1123
You are Seeing: Donna Quinn and Rick Lewis
October 1st - November 12th 2022
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC
25 West Mt Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
info@mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce You are Seeing, an exhibition of paintings by Donna Quinn and Rick Lewis. Both artists use a personal, largely non-objective visual vocabulary built on an ongoing engagement with the material and observations of their daily lives.
In Quinn’s panel series, she explores the challenges of relationships and how they become altered when placement and position are manipulated. For this work, she cut up sections of larger paintings on paper, reassembled the segments onto standardized squares, and arranged the results into a grid to create new relationships through juxtapositions and realignments. The result is a fluctuating field that creates an ever shifting yet contingently unified whole.
Lewis writes of his process, “My studio is located near the Brooklyn waterfront in the Sunset Park neighborhood. On my daily walks through the industrial zone and down to the shore I look for source material for inspiration. I make photographs, sketches, record audio, and sometimes collect bits of flotsam to carry back to the studio. This amalgam of source material is then assembled, catalogued, and rearranged to provide the impetus to begin painting.”
Donna Quinn (donnaquinn.com) makes abstract, textured paintings that are often inspired by themes central to relationships, the spaces we occupy, and the changes brought on by the passage of time.
She uses a materials-driven process to create layers of paint and collaged paper to create images that evoke the past, a sense of loss, and a reverence for memory. The result is a textured surface etched with marks and lines that signify both division and connection.
A graduate of Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia, PA, Quinn has exhibited her work extensively in Philadelphia and other cities such as Alexandria, VA, Washington DC, New York City and Miami. She has had solo exhibits at Rosenfeld Gallery and Boston Street Gallery. More recently her work was included in group shows at Stanek Gallery in Old City. She has received several grants and was a recipient of the Fellowship Award in Painting from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts. Her work is held in numerous private collections and is currently available at Gallery on Park in Swarthmore and the Art Shop at Moore.
Quinn is based in Philadelphia, PA.
Rick Lewis (ricklewisnyc.com) was born in Lumberton, Texas in 1965. He received a Bachelor of Science in Graphic Design at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas and completed an MFA at the University of North Texas in Denton in 1992. Lewis works primarily as an abstract painter. Additionally, he incorporates drawing, printmaking, photography and sculpture into his studio practice.
His work is represented in New York, Philadelphia, Texas, Connecticut, Hong Kong, and Indonesia. Rick is the recipient of the Carol Cook Memorial Foundation Arts Award for excellence in painting and Artist in Residency awards from the Millay Colony in Austerlitz, New York, the Bali Purnati Center for the Arts in Bali, Indonesia, Endless Editions in New York, New York, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation in Montauk, New York.
Rick Lewis’ influences include Alberto Burri, Antoni Tapies, Texan visionary painter Forrest Bess, Paul Klee, Arte Povera, and Process art. His work is held in numerous public and private collections throughout the world. Two printed survey catalogs of Rick’s work were recently added to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Permanent Library.
He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Yardwork: Melissa Dold + Anne Petty
August 12th - September 25th 2022
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC
25 West Mt Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
info@mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Melissa Dold and Anne Petty created as part of their partnership, Yardwork Artist Collective. Dold and Petty discover ways to bring collaboration and experimentation into their art practices through their mutual appreciation for the environment and landscape painting. Each painting is exchanged back and forth between the two artists until they determine that it is resolved. “Working collaboratively breaks old habits and challenges us to rethink our instincts by seeing the work through another’s eyes. It brings dialogue and interaction into a traditionally solitary craft”.
Melissa Dold and Anne Petty share the beauty of the natural world through their work, as well as use the collaborative work to help in the fight against climate change. A percentage of the proceeds is donated to organizations in support of the environment.
Yardwork is open to commissions based around landscapes meaningful to the buyer.
Please reach out to Yardwork via instagram with your inquiry.
www.instagram.com/yardwork_artist_collective/
Melissa Dold, left ,and Anne Petty, right, at work
Whidbey Island #6
10” x 10”
Oil on panel
2022
Melissa Dold lives and works in Seattle, WA. She teaches art at Seattle Preparatory School. She is married to the artist, Kyle Cook, and they have two daughters. Melissa was born in Redwood City, CA and she received an MFA in Painting from Boston University.
https://www.instagram.com/melissadoldart/
Lopez Island #1
10” x 10”
Oil on panel
2022
Anne Petty lives and works in Seattle, WA where she enjoys spending time outdoors with her husband and son. She was born in St. Louis, MO, and received her MFA in Painting from the University of Washington. She currently teaches art at Seattle Prep.
https://www.instagram.com/annepettyart/
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
All works shown are
10” x 10”
Oil on panel
2022
Top: Scenic Lookouts still, Arden Bendler Browning
Bottom: Transfer 01, Janos Korodi
Passages: Arden Bendler Browning and Janos Korodi
June 24th - August 6th 2022
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce Passages, an exhibition of works by Arden Bendler Browning and Janos Korodi. Both artists incorporate technology into their art making practices, exploring motion through geographic and painterly space to map memory and time. The works in this exhibition are dynamic and evocative; they invite the viewer to become a fellow traveller with the artists, an explorer of the moving worlds they have fashioned for us.
In Arden Bendler Browning’s own words:
”I am an explorer, marking my way with paint.
Walking, to get lost.
How can I travel somewhere new through memory?
I paint quickly but intently
while navigating layers of light, color, shadow, density, gesture, and infinite detail.
Time moves more slowly when I am painting fast.
I layer marks over marks over marks. There is no horizon.
The colors are more alive than we notice.
The world is overloaded and so am I
but it makes sense when looking carefully.
I invent new worlds and journeys.
I put on a virtual reality headset, and grow my body size paintings into distant and near walls.
Roaming within the vast space of my small travel drawings, I use virtual reality tools to paint in three-dimensions.
What was once the focus is now the backdrop, the floor, the unreachable island.
If you wear the headset, you too can walk through the paintings.
Moving through these immersive marks, you become part of an unseen world.
I record video while walking through my real but not real marks.
I paint while watching the video. The screen meanders through almost real shapes and brushstrokes : all aspects, all directions, monumental and miniscule.
The longer I look, the more I am noticing the ways the colors talk to each other -
like a still image that is moving.”
Janos Korodi says, ”I started to paint the first versions of the motion picture series by the time we arrived in Philadelphia in early 2015. Browsing through seas of screenshots from journeys I've made in Google Earth, choosing the ones that had the potential to become the desired piece – if turned into a painting. The images and the panning motion, as it is pushed forward, produces a footage that simulates (or mimics) velocity. The stills chosen from these footages made my harvest for a five year long painterly journey.
As a continuation to my ongoing painting and printing cycle of motion pictures, just before the pandemic hit, I started a project in 2020 instantly, by finding a new source material and medium to work with. The plywood sheets with their natural patterns showing up as repetitions of ornaments on the surface are perfect backgrounds for the distorted street views. I used dye sublimation to print a special selection of images for the wooden surfaces, where the panning layers create an intense, painterly atmosphere. It's a conceptual imaging process, with a fresh and playful outcome, that upcycles the industrial trash (raw plywood sheets) and makes a connection between "motion virtually and in reality" with the Google Street View images. At the same time the process places them on a new stage with strong synergy, the metaphysical marriage of substance and content. The whole process connects me with my new society, giving an opportunity of learning and teaching, that is formulating its culture, and with it the spirit of the place.”
Philadelphia based artist Arden Bendler Browning (www.ardenbendlerbrowning.com) creates large paintings, small works on paper, and virtual reality (VR) environments. Her work explores movement, the desire for travel, the effect of digital imagery on perception and memory, and finding wonder and escape through immersive spaces. Her work hovers between landscape and abstraction.
Bendler Browning’s works are included in several public collections such as the West Collection, the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Dream Hotel Nashville, Frost Tower Collection, Toyota, PNC Tower, amongst others, and numerous private and corporate collections. Her work is represented by Bridgette Mayer Gallery in Philadelphia, Galleri Urbane in Dallas, and Tinney Contemporary in Nashville. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, New American Paintings twice (2009 & 2013), The Studio Visit, Nashville Scene, I Like Your Work podcast (with an accompanying catalog), D Magazine, Philadelphia Style Magazine, The Morning News, the artblog, polisblog, Philadelphia Inquirer, Atlanta Journal-Constutition, and Drawing Magazine, among others. She has been featured in exhibitions at the American University Museum at Katzen Arts Center, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Weatherspoon Art Museum, James A. Michener Museum, Swarthmore College, Kutztown University, University of the Arts, West Chester University, Delaware Contemporary, Arlington Arts Center, and more. Public works include "Nonstop" (2017), a commissioned Percent for Art project for the City of Philadelphia at the Philadelphia International Airport, and "Elastic Geography" (2021), a Mural Arts Philadelphia project. She recently completed an artist residency at Interlude Artist Residency in Livingston, NY, and will be a resident artist at Pouch Cove Foundation in Newfoundland, Canada in summer 2022.
Bendler Browning holds a BFA in Art with honors from Carnegie Mellon University (1997), a Master of Studio Art with high distinctions from Sydney College of the Arts (2000), and an MFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art (2003). She has lived and worked in Philadelphia since 2001, with her husband, creative tech programmer Matt Browning, and their three children.
Arden Bendler Browning is represented by Bridgette Mayer Gallery (www.bridgettemayergallery.com) in Philadelphia.
Janos Korodi (korodijanos.com) was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1971. A visual artist, primarily a painter, Korodi also deals with different forms of printmaking, murals and occasional interdisciplinary collaborations. By the time he received his doctoral degree in visual arts from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in 2013, Janos was already in the process of relocation to the US. In the last 25 years his works have been shown in various venues in multiple countries of Europe and the US. He has spent a six-months art residency at TerraCycle Inc. in Trenton, NJ in 2015, awarded the 2010 Eötvös Scholarship of the Hungarian State – a 3 mo. studio residency in New York City, a 2008 scholarship at the Hungarian Academy in Rome, the 1999–2001 Derkovits Fellowship for emerging artists in Hungary and the 1996 scholarship for emerging painters from the Tóth Menyhért Foundation of Kecskemét, Hungary.
Korodi’s works are in permanent public and private collections internationally. Janos has lived and worked in Philadelphia since 2015.
Through the 2000’s Korodi has dealt with architecture and urbanism, and its visual and theoretical aspects for his Genius Loci – Spirit of the Place program, which concluded in his doctoral thesis. Later he found his new self in motion and started using the phenomenon of transition between places in his work. This shift was coded in and bound together with their own immigration, as well as the human exodus of the past decade worldwide.
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
Left: Kiki Gaffney, Ground Cover, 2020
Right: Björn Meyer-Ebrecht, Untitled (Chairs), 2021
Contemplating Space: Kiki Gaffney and Björn Meyer-Ebrecht
May 7th - June 18th 2022
Gallery Hours: 24/7
miniMAC (miniature Mount Airy Contemporary)
25 West Mt Airy Avenue, Philadelphia PA 19119
www.mountairycontemporary.com
miniMAC is pleased to announce Contemplating Space, an exhibition of works by Kiki Gaffney and Björn Meyer-Ebrecht.
Nature, with all of its intricate structures and hidden systems has been providing source material for Kiki Gaffney’s work for quite some time. She is interested in the slow cycle of growth and decay, as well as the spontaneity of movement when elements of time are considered, such as wind or light and shadow. Natural patterns and structures, or ‘architecture,’ don’t follow a particular order, yet these patterns can be translated into our constructed lives through organization (grids or pattern designs, for example), so there is a connection between these visual constellations. Gaffney’s work is about her observations of these systems the natural environment – taking elements from that environment to create a new context. She is also interested in exploring the notion of space – boundary-less/open space (the natural world) and defined/closed space (design elements) with the idea of ultimately creating a contemplative space. She is attracted to imagery that may seem visually banal (such as a fallen tree) and elevating it to a higher level of awareness, creating an equivalence between blandness and emotion.
Björn Meyer-Ebrecht’s work explores ideas and functions of social space. He is interested in public architecture – designed as places for people – as the venue where individuals can define themselves spatially as social beings in relation to others.
Meyer-Ebrecht was born into post-war Germany. Modernist architecture played a particular role in his upbringing, and the drawings included in this exhibition are always also an examination of his own biographical foundations. In Germany, in particular, post-war Modernism was as much a reinvention of space, as it was a cover-up of past events, especially the crimes of Nazism. As a German raised during the post-war era, Meyer-Ebrecht’s relationship to this space is by default a deeply ambivalent one.
Despite having created immensely fraught social spaces far beyond the borders of Germany, and especially in the United States, Modernism also represents the last analog model for the democratic and egalitarian organization of space, even if these utopian promises have rarely been fulfilled. Meyer-Ebrecht’s exploration of architecture from the past asks the active question of what role architectural space can play in the present to protect, improve, or re-imagine democratic structures and institutions.
The feeling of nostalgia in some of these images may be a yearning for a time that never existed; yet the mourning of loss for this idealistic organizational model is real. Meyer-Ebrecht’s drawings respond to this nostalgia, misplaced or not: his painting transforms the found image into a place where the built space is not merely reproduced, but rather ‘re-enacted.’ Each drawing becomes a stage for this historic reenactment. Yet he also wants this stage to extend beyond image and drawing into the real space, reaching for the viewer, who is invited to become an actor on this stage. This is a hopeful place in our present time – a momentary space for collective experience and communal interaction. For Meyer-Ebrecht, art is this place for people.
Kiki Gaffney (kikigaffney.com) is a Philadelphia based visual artist. Her work references landscape, and the juxtaposition of patterns, both organic and constructed. Gaffney has been a Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and has participated in several solo and group exhibitions, including The Woodmere Art Museum (Philadelphia, PA), Delaware Art Museum, and the Southern Utah Museum of Art. Her work has been recognized by John Ravenal, former Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; critic/curator Robert Storr; and artists Elaine Reicheck, Eileen Neff and Odili Donald Odita.
Gaffney received a BA in Studio Arts (Loyola College, Baltimore, MD), and an MFA in Painting (University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA.) She shares a Philadelphia studio space with her husband, artist Tom Judd and budding artist and daughter, Astrid.
Gaffney is represented by Pentimenti Gallery (pentimenti.com), Philadelphia, PA.
Björn Meyer-Ebrecht (meyer-ebrecht.com) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice extends from large-scale drawing, sculpture, and installation. In its different modes, his work creates different vantage points to exam the relationship between architecture space and communal interaction.
Born in Hamburg, Germany, he has been based in New York City since 2000. After graduating from the University for the Arts in Berlin in 1999, he received his MFA from Hunter College in New York City in 2002.
He has had solo- or two-person shows in a variety of venues in New York and beyond, including Owen James Gallery, NYC, Galerie Susanne Neuerburg, Hennef, Germany, Studio 10, Brooklyn, NY, Matjö, Cologne, Germany, Matteawan Gallery, Beacon, NY, Storefront TenEyck. Most recently he exhibited “Uprising,” a solo-show in 2019 at Owen James Gallery, NYC.
miniMAC is a project of MAC (Mount Airy Contemporary). MAC has been curating shows in northwest Philadelphia since 2009.
