Seth Clark
Clark grew up in Seekonk, Massachusetts and studied close to home in Providence at the Rhode Island School of Design. He earned his BFA in Graphic Design, focusing primarily on print design and alternative typography. During this time, he discovered collage. This method of hands-on, spatial development took a major role in his digital work as well as his physical works on wood and paper. His drawings and paintings have shown nationally including exhibitions in the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Chautauqua Institution, Recent honors include Best in Show at the Three Rivers Arts Festival and publication in New American Paintings. Clark is a 2012 Flight School Fellow and was named Pittsburgh’s 2015 Emerging Artist of the Year by the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. He is the recipient of three Design Excellence Awards from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, Pittsburgh.
Gary Jurysta
Gary Jurysta graduated from Butler Area High School in 1955. After serving four years in the US Navy he earned a degree in Art Education from Edinboro State University. Additional degrees were earned at the University of Pittsburgh and at Brooklyn College in New York City. Over the years Mr. Jurysta worked in several galleries and was a professor at universities in Pennsylvania, New York, North Carolina and Rhode Island. He and his wife June Edwards, also an artist, lived in New York City for twenty years and now reside in Pittsburgh.
During his long career as a fine artist and educator Mr. Jurysta’s work was exhibited widely. In 2013 he received the Master Visual Artist Award, with an exhibition at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts (view the MVA video). Currently on view until August 17, 2019 at the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art in Altoona, PA, Mr. Jurysta is showing a 50-year retrospective of his paintings.
Lisa Bergant Koi
Lisa Bergant Koi earned her MA in painting from Illinois State University and her BFA from Bowling Green State University. She has exhibited nationally, and her work is held in private collections as well as the corporate collections of both PNC Bank and The Benter Foundation. She is an exhibiting member of the following professional organizations: Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, Group A Collective, and Pittsburgh Society of Artists.
Kirby Krieger
I had long painted before I picked up a camera — and then one day I started to "take pictures" in addition to making them. I very much liked how the camera represented the visual world, the quickness of its perception, and the experience of being in the world as a picture-taker.
Still Life has always appealed to me with its quiet, steady, uninterrupted pace, and the open-ended possibilities it presents for formal and semantic experimentation.
The objects depicted in the Still-Life pictures are things I've collected over the years or recently purchased at a grocery store. None holds any fixed meaning to me — they are actors on a small stage, occasionally shown performing, more often seen simply for what they are and how they look. My goal is to give you a small but inexhaustible aesthetic experience: a moment of recognition, a connection.
I live with my wife in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
Elizabeth Lana
Elizabeth Lana is a native Californian, raised in the clear desert light of Los Angeles County and educated in the eastern-influenced Bay Area, where she received classical training at both the Academy of Art College and the University of San Francisco. The yin-yang duality of her early life (indeed, her whole life) is reflected in large, bold, abstract canvases powered by the creative tension between exuberance and restraint.
Her most recent series, “Order and Chaos,” presents saturated, mineral-bright colors overlaid with subtle grid patterns to provide structure for contemplation, creating a harmony of discord that teeters on the brink between vulgarity and sophistication.
Nicole Renee Ryan
Nicole Renee Ryan is a contemporary watercolorist, oil painter and muralist from Mercer, PA.
Nicole paints imagined landscapes but, surprisingly, she’s not all that interested in landscape paintings. She went to school for psychology and she uses landscapes to explore the concept of memory. Her goal is to recreate a place she felt she had been but can’t quite pinpoint. As memories move from reality to abstraction, it becomes easier to misremember things, or think they may have just been a dream. This hazy area is Nicole’s source of inspiration. She uses color and shape to create ethereal landscapes that illustrate the purgatory between memory and imagination, the real and the unreal.
Nicole Renee Ryan attended Washington and Jefferson College and graduated cum laude with a BA in Psychology and a minor in Professional Writing. She has been awarded a residency at the New York Student’s League at Vytacil, a fellowship at VCCA, and was nominated for Pittsburgh's 2016 "Emerging Artist of the Year". In 2017 she was awarded a Flight School Fellowship through the Heinz Foundation. Most recently, her artwork has been exhibited at Superfine! Art Fair NYC, Architectural Digest NYC, Gallery Oh! Chicago, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Chautauqua Institute of Art NY, and the Heinz History Museum in Pittsburgh.
Mia Tarducci
Mia Tarducci was raised in Newport, RI and currently lives in Pittsburgh, PA. She studied Art History at the University of Siena, Italy and minored in an art concentration at Georgetown University where she received her BSL in 1997. A decade later she began pursuing a career as an oil painter.
Since showing her work publicly in 2009, Tarducci has had solo exhibitions each year and has been in group exhibitions. Her work has been selected by jurors from the MoMA, Guggenheim, Brooklyn Museum, MoCA Cleveland, Carnegie Museum of Art, Andy Warhol Museums and Mattress Factory for exhibitions, which include both museum and gallery settings in Pittsburgh, Dallas, and New York City.
Recent notable achievements include being named the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts Emerging Artist of the Year in 2014, and winning the Leon A. Arkus Award as part of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh’s 2016 Annual Exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art.
Carolyn Wenning
Carolyn Wenning is a painter, printmaker and mixed media artist living in Pittsburgh, PA. She exhibits nationally and internationally; most recently at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Edgewood Farm Residency in Truro MA and at the Obras Residency in Estremoz, Portugal. She has been included in exhibitions at Sweetwater Center for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Museum and The Mattress Factory. Her work has won numerous jurors’ and special recognition awards and is included in both private and corporate collections. As well as producing her own work, Carolyn is a dedicated art educator. She has taught in the public school system and at various universities including Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Chatham University and the School of Education at Carlow University. She holds an MFA in painting and print media from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University.