NEW EXHIBIT FEATURING ARTISTS LAURA CHRISTENSEN & MELANIE MOWINSKI

OPENING RECEPTION THURSDAY JULY 17 FROM 6 PM

North Adams Artists' Cooperative Gallery is pleased to announce its second featured artists show of the season, highlighting the works of  Laura Christensen and Melanie Mowinski.

ABOUT THE CoOP

We are pleased to invite you to visit The North Adams Artists’ Cooperative Gallery at 107 Main St. The member-run gallery features fine art and craft from local and regional artists. The CoOp is currently made up of 16 member-artists from North Adams, Adams, Williamstown and Pittsfield areas, and 13 consignment artists from New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts. The gallery offers a lively mix of mediums from painting, printmaking, photography, drawing, ceramics, mixed media, assemblage, sculpture, handmade paper, artist books, textiles and hand blown glass. The gallery will be open Thursday thru Sunday 11 am - pm.

FEATURED ARTISTS SCHEDULE

Every three weeks the Co-op Gallery will be offering a highlighted selection of works from its' members. Below is our 2008 schedule.

Jun. 26- July 14 Debi Pendell, Martha Flood, Susan Manley

July 17- Aug. 4 Melanie Mowinski, Laura Christensen

Aug. 7- Aug. 25 Thor Wickstrom, Diane Sullivan

Aug. 28- Sept.15 Cindy Lewis, Rodney Wilkinson, Erin Ko

Sept. 18 Oct. 6 Sharon Carson, Colleen Williams, Andy Davis

Oct. 9- Oct. 31 Karen Kane, Jaye Fox, Kay Canavino

CONSIGNMENT ARTISTS

Along with its core membership, the Co-op Gallery has invited other artists to submit work . Current consignment artists are:

Sarah Pike - prints
Barbara May - drawing
Julie Wigg - jewelry
Steve Levin - Painting
Barry Goldstein - photography
Carmen Cuccia - photography
Karen Combs - wallpaper
Lisa Nilsson - assemblages
Leslie Kearsley - glass
Jen Flores - silk scarves
Emily Gold - artist books
Mary Wright - prints
Gregory Scheckler - painting
Deborah Combs - stained glass

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

The Co-op Gallery members are:

Kay Canavino
has been exploring themes of the natural world via fine art photography for over twenty years. Her haunting and mysterious night photographs of people and landscapes use a unique light-painting technique. In 2002, Kay moved to the Berkshires from the Boston area and now works from her studio at the former East Renfrew schoolhouse in Adams, MA.
www.kaycanavino.com

Sharon Carson
paints the rhythms of nature, exaggerating and playing with color and shapes until she arrives at a creative solution. Sketching outdoors first, she gathers information and ideas for her oil paintings and lets her imagination lead her away from realism. She aims for strong impact through rich colors and simple design. She believes that painting should be a process of discovery, decision making, intuition, and fun.
www.sharoncarson.com

Laura Christensen's
small sculptures combine handcrafted wooden boxes and old photographic portraits. She alters the old photographs with miniature hand-painted illusions.  You may have seen her work in the exhibit, Boxed Sets, in Kidspace at MASS MoCA last summer. You may have seen Laura, herself, in the lobby and galleries of MASS MoCA . She served as Education Coordinator there for seven years. Currently she teaches drawing at MCLA and works very hard designing, painting, and constructing her elegant sculptures.
www.laurachristensen.net

Andrew Davis
Andrew Davis received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. For the past decade, he has been active in New York, Los Angeles, and Massachussetts, participating in and organizing group and solo
exhibitions. He formed Davis Art Services to promote and contribute to
various artistic and cultural projects. As an oil painter, he creates
subjective, expressionist renditions of personally significant
individuals.
www.davisartservices.com

Martha Flood
specializes in the creation of new repeat pattern designs for manufacturers of decorative materials, primarily wall coverings and fabrics. This summer she is launching her own collection of fabric pillows and wall hangings called "Elements." Designs in the collection are inspired by the textures found in the New England landscape such as "Hoosic Water" and a "Black Cherry Bark." The fabrics are digitally printed in the US on a canvas-like fabric made entirely from recycled materials and are suitable for indoor and outdoor uses.
www.northadamsopenstudios.com/

Jaye Fox
works most happily in oils, but often finds it useful to
fight it out with watercolors, and she also draws. While primarily a
representational artist, she considers the distinction between form and
formlessness to be relatively insignificant compared the emotional
resonance that results from the conscious manipulation of plastic
space.  Ms. Fox studied briefly at the Rhode Island School of Design,
and at the Parsons School of Design, but received the preponderance of
her training from  several academic ateliers, including that of Andrew
Reiss in Brooklyn, and many others associated with the Art Students
League in New York City, where she received Board of Control and Merit
Scholarships. In 2004, she received the prestigious Phyllis Mason grant, has been a finalist in the American Society of Portrait Artists (ASOPA) annual competition, and has received numerous awards from a wide variety of juried shows.

Karen Kane
Karen Kane is a visual artist and writer living in Williamstown, MA.  Born in Philadelphia, PA, Karen discovered, as a youth, a passion for color in her crayon box, and thus spent many happy hours focused on burnt sienna and periwinkle blue, and, at approximately the age of twelve, began to use her paint-by-number color sets for her own creations.  After acquiring a bachelors degree in English from Kutztown University to satisfy the writer side of her nature, she began her pursuit of an independent path in the study of drawing, painting, calligraphy and design at Hampshire College, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and with unaffiliated teachers in Cambridge, Northampton, and Amherst, MA. She has made various attempts at acquiring a living wage, as a commercial graphic artist, illustrator, calligrapher, and owner of a mostly-used bookstore where she promoted the creative arts in the community of North Adams, Mass. She has participated in several area group exhibits.
www.karenkanestudio.com

Erin Ko
is a mixed media artist originally from Boston Massachusetts. Her interests lie in combining traditional methods of art making with new ones, resulting in unique process and result. Being a computer geek, she has worked in the video game and new media industries. When not engaged in her Berkshires studio, she spends most of her time cooking delicious things or stumbling through various parts of Asia. Her work can be viewed at
www.erinkostudios.com .

Cynthia Lewis
works out of the Eclipse Mill. Her space houses a production papermaking studio and a private studio for her mixed media (collage/paper) and woven textile pieces. She creates both large and small scale works on and of paper, combining collage and pulp painting on sheets of handmade paper, often creating customized pieces for specific spaces that evoke a contemplative atmosphere. Customized paper is available for many applications including stationery, invitations, printing, drawing, watercolor, etc.

Susan Manley
is a native New York artist started Dazzle Studios in New Orleans artist in 2000. Inspiration for the glass jewelry was taken from a trip to Italy, as well as from the many beautiful stained glass pieces displayed around the city of New Orleans at the time. Susan currently incorporates much beach glass into her work that is found in Mexico, where she lives during part of the winter. Susan has studied fine art at Hunter College and at the School of Visual Arts, both in NYC.  She currently lives and works in North Adams, MA. Her work has been exhibited in a variety of art shows up and down the east coast.
www.dazzlestudios.com

Melanie Mowinski
is an artist and educator based in Pittsfield. Her work has been exhibited in galleries throughout the U.S. and abroad, including San Francisco, Philadelphia, Venice, Tasmania, and Basseterre, St. Kitts, where she was a Peace Corps volunteer. Her work explores time, place and natural history within artist books and through papermaking, printmaking and collaborations with trees and other natural materials. This summer, she will complete a residency at Denali National Park in Alaska. Melanie holds an M.A. from Yale University and an M.F.A. from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. This fall, she will begin teaching full-time in the Fine and Performing Arts department at MCLA.
www.melaniemowinski.com

Debi Pendell
has her studio in the Eclipse Mill in North Adams. Her mixed media collage work is a dialogue between the accidental and the intentional, chance juxtapositions and planned elements; the unconscious and the conscious. Materials and process are the focus; the finished work is a physical record of search and discovery. Representational imagery is only implied and allowed to be personally perceived by each viewer.
www.debipendell.com

Diane Sullivan
lives in North Adams and has a studio in the Eclipse Mill. Since receiving her M.F.A .in ceramics from U Mass Dartmouth in 1990 she has been working with clay in many forms both functional and non-functional. Inspired by nature and her travels to Portugal and Italy, she creates figurative sculptures and architectural tile work. Her custom-designed tiles are in many homes in the region.
www.eclipsemill.com

Thor Wickstrom
lives and works at the Beaver Mill in North Adams. He studied painting at the Art Students League under American painters Robert Phil Levy and Joseph Hirsch, and at the Ecole Des Beaux Arts in Paris.
www.thorwickstrom.com

Colleen Williams’s
exploration of the ceramic medium began while apprenticing for an architect in Fort Lauderdale, FL, after completing her education at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia for a BS in Architectural Studies. In living above the studio of a friend's mother, a potter, Colleen found that the translation of designs she'd been making onto floor plans were easily achieved in clay by using graphic symbols made into clay stamps, which soon developed into overall textural patterning. Colleen exhibited the line of porcelain jewelry collectively known as "Local Texture" in the American Craft Council and the Rosen Group's wholesale events acquiring over 70 galleries, museum shops and boutiques across the USA and Japan before representing herself at many of the nation's most prestigious juried art festivals. Today, she is recognized for her unique surface designs on porcelain in her art jewelry and sculptural work, maintaining a studio at the Beaver Mill in North Adams.

Rodney Wilkinson
is an artist who has recently moved to Williamstown. In the past his work has been almost entirely representational, the vast majority being figurative. He has continued to move further, albeit slowly, away from strict realism toward a more open-ended mode of representation. This stems partially from an increased concern for mark making and the abstract qualities of the marks themselves. His drawing process involves creating structure through the systematic building up of marks and values while simultaneously subtracting them through erasure, in an almost sculptural approach. Rodney has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing and a Masters degree in Painting.