The Art on the Walls program is celebrating its third season of featuring visual artists in our region to display and sell their work!
Art on the Walls is a rotating exhibition program organized by the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council. The AOW program began as a bi-annual, solo exhibition opportunity for individual artists in the greater Pittsburgh region. GPAC opened the doors to its new office space and began displaying and selling the work of visual artists for over the past two years.
Art on the Walls is coordinated by GPAC staff members Christiane Leach and Dek Ingraham. Christiane Leach is an award-winning artist and is best known as a distinctive face and voice of the Pittsburgh art scene for over twenty years. Dek Ingraham is a theatrical director and designer with 14 years of experience in designing sets, costumes, and promotional materials.
Program Overview
Art on the Walls is open to emerging, mid-career, and established artists who work in two dimensional formats including printmaking, photography, fiber, painting, drawing, in addition to lightweight sculptures and video. Artists who submit an application should demonstrate a level of professionalism and provide work samples created within the past 5 years. AOW offers opportunities for individual artists to display and sell their work in non-traditional spaces such as offices, waiting rooms, and lobbies.
Eligibility and Deadlines
This program is open to artists who work in two dimensional formats including printmaking, photography, fiber, painting and drawing. While we are unable to facilitate the displaying of sculpture, lightweight sculptures will be considered as long as they can be displayed on the wall. Artwork must be appropriate for the general public. We are no longer accepting submissions for the 2012 - 2013 program.
Current Show
Ivette Spradlin
carbon first, then light
April 2013 - September 2013
Adaptation has been a consistent theme throughout my career. My subjects are those who have been forced to change their way of life, or have done so by identifying themselves with a sub-culture. Young, transient punk kids are in constant flux, living in ramshackle community houses with an ever-changing cast of characters. My family and their friends in Cuba have adapted to a lifetime of oppression, government bureaucracy and the American embargo in inspiring ways.
Two questions surface when talking about adapted cultures: ‘Why do they need to adapt?’ and ‘How do they exist?’ The answer to the ‘Why’ question is often explained through text, storytelling or moving picture - the element of time is inherent in these media. However, I am more interested in the ‘How’ question, and choose to explore it through documentary.
It is exciting for me to let the camera be a partial witness. My photographic essays provide clues, not answers. I am not preoccupied by why something exists, but am satisfied to know that it does exist. I hope the viewer dwells with this mystery not with blind faith, but with a skeptical optimism.
Visit Ivette's Pittsburgh Artist Registry profile
Access to GPAC: Notice anything different?
Past Shows
Fran Gialamas
Steel-Life II : photoassemblages
September 2012 - March 2013
Reviewers have called her signature style "photo assemblage" (one named it "photo painting").
What they are definining are textured, layered compositions in which Fran Gialamas combines archival photography, print media, hand coloring, drawing, and an endless variety of shards and fragments to capture aspects of America's past with authenticity and emotion.
In her new series, Gialamas looks at the daily life that existed alongside the mammoth steel mills in communities she once knew in our industrial heartland.
But since the artist's ancestral roots are in an Aegean Island, there are lyrical passages amid her cold gray millscapes of Ohio and Pennsylvania: welcoming tree, a stack that spews clouds of smoke as graceful as blossoms, a strip of gold leaf...
Immersed for years in abstraction in her painting and printmaking, Gialamas returned to the image in the 1990's inspired by the untapped treasures in historical archives, transforming the photographs in the a personal aesthetic. Her works are in a number of public and private collections, here and abroad.
She is a tireless arts activist. It is interesting to note that women-steel workers have starred in some of her previous exhibitions, effectively questioning gender roles, and she has written articles on women in art under the pseudonym Frannie Bernarde.
-U.S. Correspondent: Harry Schwalb, Art News
Fran Gialamas is represented by Ceres Gallery, NY, NY
Visit Fran's Pittsburgh Artist Registry profile
Gwyn Rohrer
April 2012 - September 2012
“I grew up surrounded by women. Everywhere I looked a woman was there. My mother, my two sisters, my grandma, my cats, all added to the pool of estrogen that was being pumped into the air around me. Though there were a few men around, their collective beings could not overpower the feminine environment in which I was submerged. I always believed that my father wanted me to be a boy and in order to connect with the man I so desperately wanted to be close to, I tried to run from my gender. However, because I was surrounded by women, I couldn’t run and I fought it instead. I pushed away from ruffles and makeup. I played softball and asked for a skateboard for Christmas. I cut off all of my hair and climbed trees barefoot. I avoided anything that could slightly label me as “girly”. And when my mother tried to teach me how to sew, I resisted. When my grandma tried to show me her cross-stitching I pretended not to care. I never cared about their crafts. I knew that they were considered feminine and I knew I wanted no part. My work is an attempt to reconnect with my socially rendered femininity, the part of women that was assigned to us through cultural norms. Through my work I hope to appeal to the feminine side of the viewers and create social awareness of eco-feminism.“
Gwyn is a digital and mixed media artist who graduated from Ashland University with a BFA in Digital Art and Sculpture in 2010. Currently she shows her work in several galleries and shops in Central Ohio and Western Pennsylvania. Her work focuses on the feminine and female struggles through the use of the human body, landscapes and sewing, embroidery, and fabric patterns. She works as an art instructor as well as a professional artist.
Visit Gwyn's Pittsburgh Artist Registry Profile
Seth Clark
October 2011—March 2012
"Abandoned houses have served as the central subject in my work for over two years. These enormous man-made assemblages--these huge forces of permanence-- they are deteriorating and collapsing in on themselves. Somehow however, among all of the clutter, there remains the most gentle resolve--it's as if the buildings were content with their circumstance. Dignity remains, as they turn inside-out"
Seth collects a considerable amount of his collage material from daily life in Pittsburgh. Just about anything that is flat and clean enough to be adhered to paper is layered, to create a dimensional foundation. As his work progresses, charcoal, pastel, paint, ink, and graphite bring definition and tremendous depth to these raw materials.
Seth 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 in print design and alternative typography. After graduating, he moved to Pittsburgh where he has resided for almost three years. The endless row houses and giant abandoned factories of the Steel City serve as an honest and readily available inspiration for his work. He balances a passion for art with a perceptive eye for design. Seth's work has been displayed in various galleries throughout the country as well as here in Pittsburgh.
Visit Seth's Pittsburgh Artist Registry profile
Brian Sesack
April 2011- September 2011
Right Brain
The intent of my work is to provide a vehicle for my creative self-expression and the transformation from looking to seeing. As a result I work from the inside out. I find myself moved by concepts that I cannot explain, but that I need to interpret by documenting textures and tonal qualities in an attempt to create images that bring the viewer into the subject.
The majority of my work is thematic, a story being told or a concept being explained without the use of the written language.
I have also discovered over time that as important as it is to produce a beautiful image, it is the process or the state of being creative that provides the joyfulness of being an artist.
Left Brain
The majority of my images are captured with traditional film cameras, either a Leica M3 camera and a variety of lenses or Leica CM. After the negatives are developed, they are scanned by a Nikon SuperCoolsan 5000ED scanner at 4000 dpi, 16bit depth, and 16x sampling rate. I then create a contact sheet and start the process of selecting which images warrant printing. When I do photograph with a digital camera, I’m either using a Leica D-Lux 5 or a Canon PowerShot D10. Regardless of the camera, all images are refined in Adobe Photoshop/Creative Suite using a minimum of processing.
Archival prints are created using an Epson® Photo R2400 printer with Ultrachrome K3 inks for optimum print finish and maximum life. Each image is printed for best fit on 13 x 19 inch archival paper. The exact image size varies, depending on the dimensions and the amount of cropping needed for each particular image in order to leave a small border.
Visit Brian's Pittsburgh Artist Registry profile
David Montano
October 2010- - March 2011
David Montano was born in Pittsburgh, PA in 1982. He attended the Pittsburgh High School for the Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA) before continuing his study in the visual arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
His work has been shown in various spaces in Pittsburgh, including the Mattress Factory, as part of their 2008 installment of Gestures, Illustrations of Catastrophe and Remote Times. In July of 2008, David was featured in Out of This Furnace at Braddock’s Unsmoke Artspace, where his installation Down Into the Easy Chair is permanently on view. Most recently, David’s work was shown in the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh’s 99th Annual at the Carnegie Museum of Art, where his collage I Escaped Through a Series of Loopholes won a purchase award from the Friends of Art for Public Schools.
"There is something that drives me to recycle and reinvent things discarded by both time and people. I have always had an impulse to collect, and I am inspired by the various connotations I may attach to even the most mundane object over time. Eventually, I translated this interest into collage work.
I began collecting pieces of paper scraps, ticket stubs, receipts, shreds of fabric, remnants of my daily life, as well as other people’s ephemera. As with the abstract expressionists, I feel that much of the personal meaning of the artwork comes out in the action of creating something.
When working on a collage, there is always an underlying narrative that is part truth and part fiction, that I feel comes from the grouping of personal items with the non-personal items that I collect, and finally the juxtaposition of these two in a new context. I am intrigued by the idea of subverting or embellishing real memories for the purpose of visual storytelling. I work on these collages daily, as I would a diary, but rather than being factual documentation, they are more accurately documentation of daydreams or reveries.”
