MAKING YOUR MARK
This exhibition features nine artists living and working in Northeast Ohio. These richly hewn artworks are contextualized by the artists’ own words, glimpses into their studios, and tools of their craft.
Amber N. Ford is a photographer/artist based in Cleveland, OH. Ford received her BFA in Photography from the Cleveland Institute of Art ’16. Primarily working in photography while occasionally exploring other mediums such as printmaking.
She is best known for her work in portraiture, which she refers to as a “collaborative engagement between photographer and sitter”. While always questioning “the truth”, Ford aims to establish a platform in which her sitter may present themselves as they please. She is interest in topics such as race, and identity.
Her work has been shown in galleries such as the Kent State University, Transformer Station, SPACES Gallery, The Morgan Conservatory, The Cleveland Print Room, Zygote Press, and Waterloo Arts located in Cleveland, OH. Selected as a 2019 Gordon Square Arts District Artist-In-Residence, you may find some of Ford’s work on the back of the Capitol Theatre Building located at the corner of Detroit and West 65th. Ford was also awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for 2017.
“I live in a place where ego and artifice don’t hold much water. There’s value in lasting power, sincerity and earnestness in a crumbling building or a weathered face. I’m drawn to these structures and people, admiring their steady dignity even while bare and vulnerable. My prints and photographs are about a slowly collapsing structure that finds potential amongst its disassembled pieces.”
Micah Kraus is an artist and educator living in Akron, Ohio. Since 2001, he has been an art instructor and Fine Arts department chair of Archbishop Hoban High School, where he is proud to contribute to the arts culture at the school. Kraus travels often with his wife, ceramic artist Kim Eggleston-Kraus, friends and students and is inspired by the people, places and things he experiences along the way. He has shown his work in group and solo exhibitions regionally and nationally and is art director of Akron Coffee Roasters, creating their packaging and merchandise. In 2018 Micah received the Juror Award for Visual Art in Akron’s High Arts Festival and was an Outstanding Artist finalist in the 2019 Arts Alive Awards. Micah Kraus has a BA in Art Education and an MA in Printmaking from Kent State University.
(Photo Credit: Tim Fitzwater)
Taryn McMahon grew up in NJ and received her BFA from The Pennsylvania State University. She attended the University of Iowa, where she received an MA and MFA in Printmaking. McMahon has received numerous awards for her work including a Knight Arts Challenge, Puffin Foundation Grant, and Denbo Fellowship. Her work has been shown at venues such as The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA; the International Print Center, New York, NY; Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY; Whitdel Arts, Detroit, MI; and Artist Image Resource, Pittsburgh, PA. She currently serves as an Associate Professor of Studio Art at Kent State University.
Michaelle Marschall
Michaelle Marschall has taught art to all ages in the Cleveland area since 2002, after completing her BFA at Lake Erie College. She is in her fourteenth year of teaching children’s art classes at The Cleveland Museum of Art. Michaelle is a printmaker and has been a resident artist with Zygote Press in Cleveland for over a decade. She most recently completed a certificate in less toxic intaglio methods at Zea Mays Printmaking Studio in Massachusetts.
Andrea Myers, born 1979 in Kettering OH, USA, explores the space between two and three dimensionality, hybridizing painting, sculpture and fiber arts. She received her BFA in Printmedia in 2002 and her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies in 2006 both from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Hyde Park Art Center, Evanston Art Center, Toledo Museum of Art, Art Prize, Art Miami, Steven Zevitas Gallery, Fiber Arts International, the Columbus Museum of Art, and coGalleries (Berlin, Germany). Current exhibitions include her first solo museum exhibition, Neon Speed, at the Textil und Rennsport Museum, Hohenstein-Ernstthal, Germany and Pieced+Painted, a two-person exhibition with Galen Cheney at the Haggerty Gallery, University of Dallas. She has participated in residencies at Ox-Bow in Saugatuck, MI, A Studio in the Woods, a program of Tulane University in New Orleans, Fortress Man Textile Symposium in Daugavpils, Latvia, the Textile Art Center in New York City, the Studios at MassMoCA and in 2018 traveled to Dresden, Germany for two months as part of the Greater Columbus Arts Council artist exchange program. Recent publications include TimeOut Chicago, the Boston Globe, New American Paintings, the Columbus Dispatch, and Cut Me Up Magazine issue 5.
Andrea was one of five 2011 Efroymson Fellowship recipients, receiving $20,000, and has also been awarded artist’s grants from the City of Chicago, the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council. She has work in the collections of Chase Bank, Capital One, Dayton Metro Libraries and Facebook offices in Chicago. She is represented by Hammond Harkins Gallery in Columbus, OH, GUT Gallery in Dallas, TX, McCormick Gallery in Chicago, IL and Galerie Klaus Braun in Stuttgart, Germany.
Currently she is Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Expanded Media at Kent State University at Stark in North Canton, OH and will be a Visiting Professor of Sculpture at Kenyon College in Gambier, OH in the fall of 2020.
Omid Shekari’s work captures stories which speak universally about how force and violence still determine the rhythms and laws of power within the human experience. His latest and ongoing projects investigate how the state, as the military institution, has the ultimate power to use fear in order to justify military action, policing, and violence for the sake of control and domination over depowered people.
Shekari has been an artist in residence at Ox-Bow, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Art OMI, Millay Colony For the Arts, MASS MoCA Studio Program, and Yaddo. His work has been exhibited in The Drawing Center, Marginal Utility Gallery, Pelham Art Center, NADA Art Fair, Gallery Joe, PAFA Museum, Fleisher Art Memorial, Tyler School of Art, Woodmere Art Museum, Greenfield Community College, and the Ohio State University. Shekari is currently a visiting faculty at Oberlin College.
Erykah Townsend, also known as E.T., is a multimedia conceptual artist from Cleveland. Her large-scale paintings and objects are heavily influenced by pop culture. She draws on slapstick content pulled from popular cartoon imagery from her childhood to create work with a definitive surrealistic tone. Her wacky narrations are interpretations of personal experiences and comments on consumerism. Characters and objects depicted in her work play as avatars of her allegories, while still retaining aspects of the original source. Townsend is a recent post-grad painting student from The Cleveland Institute of Art.
Rebekah Wilhelm is a professional artist and printmaker currently working in Cleveland Ohio. She completed her Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Delaware and has her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Cleveland Institute of Art. She spent a year teaching and developing her studio practice in Philadelphia and then moved back to Cleveland. She has shown her work in multiple group and curated shows and traveling portfolios throughout the U.S and has shown in two Group shows in Germany and has exhibited in a solo show in New York City at Salt Gallery. She was on exchange in Dresden, Germany for an art residency provided by the Ohio Arts Council and the City of Dresden.
Christine Zuercher is an astronaut and member of the American Interterrestrial Society. She was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio and received a BFA from the University of Dayton in 2011 and an MFA from East Carolina University in 2016. Her research is on shortwave radio, the Space Race, and transmission technologies with a focus in interdisciplinary and alternative photographic processes. She is a 2019 Ohio Arts Council Excellence Award recipient and 2019 Coca Art Prize finalist. She has a national exhibition record and was a featured performer at Harvard College and the Exploratorium in San Francisco, California for the Media Arts Xploration festival in2019. Her work can be seen in publications such as The Hand Magazine and Light Leaked. She enjoys photographing interplanetary adventures with collaborators and friends while in her spacesuit.