Public Opening: Sunday, April 3, 3 - 5 pm
Masks are required inside the gallery.
A noted historian of U.S. women and social policy, Sonya Michel began her career in art after retiring from a professorship at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2016. Since then, she has been exploring and experimenting with many different media as she develops ways to express how she sees the world and responds to it. Starting with painting, she found herself drawn to less conventional materials—what she calls “the stuff of everyday life”: packaging and labels; textiles, paper and plastics; “found objects,” large and small. Incorporated into her work as-is or prepared by tearing, painting, crunching or other modifications, the results take the form of collages and assemblages as well as works on canvas.

Michel says she is “intrigued by modern domesticity and the colors, textures and shapes of items that compose it—not just the products themselves but the packaging in which they arrive.” But, she notes, “I can’t help seeing the perils of abundance: the stuff that enables our lifestyles also clutters the world and poisons our air and water. To borrow a phrase from William Butler Yeats, it is a “terrible form of beauty.” The exhibit will run until May 1.

Public Opening: Sunday, April 3, 3 - 5 pm
Masks are required inside the gallery.
Amy Sabrin’s art deploys a maze of complex surfaces and mosaic-like patterns to conjure the emotional essence of spaces with which she is familiar. Her work Intentionally avoids representation of any specific place or person, offering instead a complex visual and emotional experience. By building up a jewel-like puzzle pieces of simple shapes – crosses, Xs, dots, stripes, boxes, cells, cross-hatching and more – and suffusing the surface with layers of paint, shifts of hue, and texture, Sabrin‘s art captures the feeling of wandering (perhaps lost) between spaces, down city streets, or into dead-end alleys, only to make unanticipated discoveries. The intent is to seduce the viewer, consciously or not, to try to untangle the maze and see patterns that may or may not be there, much like reading a map or viewing an unfamiliar landscape; in other words, to infuse their own meaning into the pattern.