Can’t Hold Me Down

November 8, 2024 - April 30, 2025

About the Project

In Can’t Hold Me Down, Springfield photographer Ty Fischer partners with 17 students from Cliff Park High School to bring forth stories of personal challenge and resilience through dynamic layered portraits and story. Each student reflected on their educational journey, sharing experiences of struggle and strength.

Listening to each student’s story as he photographed them, Fischer let each student’s words guide his creative
approach in making their portrait. The resulting prismatic lenticular portraits combine three different images: a black-and-white portrait, a collage of each student’s most
impactful words, and an AI-generated image embodying the student’s positive emotions about their individual path of growth and perseverance.

About the Collaborators

High School Student Collaborators include Alyssa Allen, Lisa Baum, Peyton Berner, Walter Bostic, Anahstaciya Brown, Kamren DeArmond, Bradon Ervin, Jae’lyn Ervin, Kaylese Evans, Mireya Hammett, Samiya Hammond, Peter Hill, Montye Joyce, Ka’Miyah Robinson, Taylor Smith, Tre Walker, and Madison Wells.

Ty Fischer is a photographer and Springfield native. As an artist, Fischer is interested in exploring community narratives through his “Your Story” participatory storytelling and photography projects. Through this work, Fischer hopes that his portraits encourage conversation, connection, and the possibility of viewing others through their own lens.

Cliff Park High School is a unique learning environment serving students, ages 15-21, who have experienced significant life challenges necessitating a different approach to overcome each student’s obstacles to reaching graduation. Cliff Park offers flexible learning hours, accommodation around work schedules, hands-on technical and career training, and dedicated and specialized teachers. Each student can learn at their own pace, earning credits towards graduation as quickly as they can or as slowly as needed.

The Places We Return To…

September 28, 2024 - May 11, 2025

Eric Barth | Rod Bouc | Elsie Sanchez

In The Places We Return To, three Columbus-based painters explore evocative personal landscapes that reside deeply within. Colored by nostalgia, melancholy, and longing for something perhaps just out of reach, each artist wrestles with the complexity and intimacy of memory.

Though different in style and approach, each of the artists’ works hint at a tension just beneath the surface, a dark side, an unshakable feeling. By applying heavy pigments and then scraping them off the surface— obscuring and revealing—each artist uses methods that recall the intangible qualities of place-based memories.

 

About the Artists

Eric Barth grew up near Lake Erie, in the suburbs of Cleveland, where his early involvement in the arts began in the underground music scene. He holds a BFA from The Ohio State University and founded The Barth Galleries in Columbus and Cleveland, Ohio.

Rod Bouc was raised on a farm in Nebraska. He earned a BFA from the University of Nebraska and an MFA from The Ohio State University. For over thirty years, he served as a registrar and as an administrator of the Columbus Museum of Art.

Elsie Sanchez was born in Havana, Cuba, and immigrated to the United States as a young child with her family. She earned her BFA and MFA from The Ohio State University. She received the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Greater Columbus Arts Council Arts Partnership Award, and was selected to participate in the XIII Havana Biennial.

Color Fields: Andrea Myers

Andrea Myers
August 10th-December 29, 2024

I take up space as a female artist, reclaiming ‘women’s work’

 while pushing the boundaries of painting. –Andrea Myers

In Color Fields, Andrea Myers uses discarded, donated, and domestic clothing in ways that both reference and resist the rigid notions of work traditionally assigned to women. She approaches textiles differently. She uses the visual language of Color Field painting, including vibrantly saturated color over large swaths of a surface. She combines this with a gestural—and a bit rebellious—approach to quilt making to create large-scale panoramas, organic formations, and shifting shapes.

For the artist, colorful fabric functions like tubes of paint. Her sewing machine’s stitches are her drawings—dense, wild, and frenetic with energy and movement. Her color palette is not quiet; but instead, riotous neons and technicolor. Simple shapes suggest landscapes, sun, moon, mountains, rivers, erosions, contours, and topographies. These soft geometries push against the boundaries of the rectangular frame, spilling onto the walls and floors and over obstacles in her path.

Andrea Myers is an interdisciplinary artist who creates work at the intersection of contemporary color field painting, sculpture, and fiber arts. Having grown up in the flat farmlands of the Midwest, Myers’ artwork represents a joyous rebellion against the tight tedium of cross-stitches and the precision of traditional quilt making. Instead, hers is one of clashing colors, scribbling stitches, and joyously coloring way outside the lines.

Myers earned her BFA in Printmedia (2002) and her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies (2006) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Myers’ work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She lives and makes art in Columbus, Ohio.

Playground: Constructing My Identity

Ju Yun
March 9th-September 8, 2024

Ju Yun playfully explores her hybrid Korean-American identity in the studio–her creative playground. In this space, anything goes, as she uses tinsel, pom-poms, hair extensions and her sense of humor to construct fantastical new identities.

Born and raised in South Korea, Ju Yun immigrated to the United States and earned her BFA in painting from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington D.C. Her work has been shown in the US and abroad, including recent solo exhibitions—Evolution of Identity and Hybrid Identity–at the Susquehanna Art Museum in Pennsylvania, the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington in Virginia, and CICA Museum in South Korea. She lives and teaches studio art to children in Chantilly, Virginia.

Chronicles: The Great Depression and the Pandemic

Nov 4, 2023-Mar 30, 2024

Featuring two series of photographs taken a century apart, this exhibition explores how resilience can be born out of times of national tragedy and how documentary photographers are a valuable part of capturing the past and present. Chronicles originated at the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio and was co-curated by Dr. Christine Fowler Shearer and Arnold Tunstall.

Opening reception: Saturday, Nov 4, 6-7:30pm

Tigris

Amanda Love
Dec 9, 2023 – Current

Former bookbinder Amanda Love responds to book banning and the dismantlement of knowledge with Tigris, a new art installation of deconstructed books.

78th Annual Juried Members’ Exhibition

Apr 20 – Jul 21, 2024

The 78th Annual Juried Members’ Exhibition will be held earlier in 2024, from Apr 20 – Jul 21.

Make note of these other important dates:
Monday, Mar 4, 11:59pm: Deadline for entries
By Friday, Mar 15: Artists notified of accepted artwork
Friday, Apr 5, 12-6pm: Accepted artwork drop-off
Saturday, Apr 6, 9am-3pm: Accepted artwork drop-off
Saturday, April 20, 6-7:30pm: Opening reception
Sunday, July 21: Exhibition closes
Friday, July 26, 12-6pm: Artwork pick-up
Saturday, July 27, 9am-3pm: Artwork pick-up

 

77th Annual Juried Members’ Exhibition

Aug 5 – Oct 15, 2023

Returning for its 77th year in 2023, the Annual Juried Members’ Exhibition celebrates our community and region’s creative spirit. Featuring more than 100 member artists, this year’s exhibition includes 134 works juried by Ramona Bronkar Bannayan, former Senior Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Collections at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Opening Reception: Celebrate the opening with food trucks, live music, awards, and a cash bar on Saturday, Aug 5 from 6-7:30pm. Members free; non-members $5.

 

About the Juror

Ramona Bronkar Bannayan was the Senior Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Collections at the Museum of Modern Art retiring in 2021 after 31 years. During her time there, Ms. Bannayan participated in two major museum expansions. As a member of the senior management team, she oversaw the planning of MoMA’s exhibition calendar each year which included more than 50 annual on-site exhibitions as well as developing collaborative exhibitions at venues worldwide. In addition, she managed MoMA’s collection of over 200,000 works of art. In the past, she has been the subject of a BBC podcast, In the Studio with Paul Kobrak, profiled in Frame magazine, and interviewed on NPR’s All of It with Alison Stewart.

Ms. Bannayan is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at New York University, Museum Studies, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. She also serves on the Columbia University School of the Arts (SOA) Dean’s Council. An artist herself, she holds a BFA from Wright State University and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University, where she graduated with honors. Since graduation, Ms. Bannayan has maintained her studio practice. Her work has been included in exhibitions with Wolf Kahn, Lois Dodd, Emily Nelligan and Eric Aho among others.

Wright in Ohio

Thomas R. Schiff
Jun 16, 2023 - May 19, 2024

Featuring Frank Lloyd Wright homes of Ohio, this exhibition of panoramic photographs by Cincinnati photographer Thomas R. Schiff captures the spatial depth, undulating curves, and incomparable beauty of Wright’s designs.

Join us for an opening reception on Thursday, Jun 15th from 5:30-7pm. Light refreshments and drinks provided.

No Such Thing As Strangers

Lelia Byron
May 6, 2023 – Jan 2024

Based on in-person interviews with Springfield residents, this exhibition explores how individuals create and define the meaning of “home” in both a local sense and when considering the world as a broader, global place to live. Lelia Byron’s large scale paintings and outdoor sculpture delve into a wide range of topics including memories, personal narratives, social issues, and how a city experiences change over time.

Lelia Byron is an interdisciplinary artist who makes paintings, murals, installations, sculptures, and public art projects. Lelia’s projects often include an investigative component and frequently begin with interviewing diverse groups of people around different topics related to human rights, environmental rights, the complexity of communication between individuals, and the creative process. Lelia has a Bachelor’s of Fine Art from Carnegie Mellon University and a Master’s in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts (University of the Arts London).

Opening reception: Saturday, May 6, 1-3pm