Chantal Westby
Serene, 2017
Ink, natural minerals, branches, and silver
73 x 36 x 2"

Artist Statement
As an artist, my journey is fueled by a commitment to evoke emotions and provoke thought. My creations are not merely visual experiences; they are dialogues with the observer, designed to stir the soul and challenge perceptions. Rooted in the purity of white and the vibrancy of color, my art now breathes in three dimensions, embodying the essence of nature, the pulse of the universe, and the impact of human excess. Light is a central character in my narrative, manifested through the delicate dance of diluted inks and natural pigments that conjure ethereal auroras. My palette extends beyond the canvas, embracing mixed media to unlock new realms of imagination.
Inspiration is a mosaic of the world around me-a tapestry woven from diverse materials, evocative photographs, resonant music, and poignant texts. This collage of influences coalesces on my mood board, awaiting the moment they coalesce into art.

Artist Bio
Westby is a renowned activist and artist from Philadelphia, known for her immersive paintings, sculptures, and installations. With a rich background in art, textiles, and design, she is committed to diversity, social justice, and environmental stewardship. Awarded the United Nations Earth Day Impact Gala's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2024, she continues to use her art to raise awareness of environmental issues and inspire action.

Brian David Dennis
Regard (discard) No.8, 2024
Mixed media
30.5" x 20.5"

Artist Statement

As an artist, I crave the sweet moments while working when I slip beneath my own conscious control. While making art, I seek to lose awareness of the outside world and of myself. I am free when working from within, untethered to expectation and thought, even if what comes to the surface is the worst experience of my life.

Artist Bio

Brian was born in 1959. He was raised in a home with movable walls designed by his father, an aspiring artist. The openness and fluidity of the modular arrangement captured Brian's imagination. His mother, a kindergarden teacher encouraged Brian's free thinking and constant building.
As a student Brian considered following his passion for stage design, but sought the more personal expression the fine arts offered. He studied drawing and painting at the Pennsylvania Academy. He quickly settled into collage and assemblage. In the mid 80's he began to explore installation using the exhibition location as an essential part of the piece.
A life long resident of Pennsylvania, Brian has lived and worked in Philadelphia since 1984 with his life partner Keith Breitfeller. He began exhibiting with the cooperative gallery, Vox Populi and remained an active member for 15 years. He has held solo exhibits in Austria, the Philadelphia Art Alliance, the Sande Webster Gallery as well as a prestigious Fleisher Challenge. He has been granted an Independence Foundation Fellowship and other awards. In 2016 he was commissioned by Longwood Gardens.

Wendee Yudis
Male Gaze, 2024
Photo-silkscreen, acrylic and spray paint on wood panels
24" x 48"

Artist Statement

My art turns the definition of femininity on its head, challenging unconscious gender bias, sexuality, objectification, and body image. I question the roles imposed on women-both those assigned to us (child, wife, daughter) and those we embrace (boss, lover, vixen). Why must we be vixens or victims? Can we be both?

Through a playful yet provocative lens, my work explores power dynamics, featuring recurring female icons layered with nuance. I use typography to highlight gendered language-why is a bossy man a leader while a bossy woman is a bitch?

Influenced by Warhol and Pop Art, I merge feminist themes with a bold, retro aesthetic that critiques cultural norms while celebrating women's agency. Using photo-silkscreen, painting, and spray paint, I layer imagery to create new meanings. My silkscreen process mimics a paintbrush, producing originals that explore translucency, opacity, and pattern-revealing both seen and unseen relationships.

Artist Bio

Featured in Philly Style Magazine and CBS Philly online in April 2024, Wendee Yudis is a Printmaker/Painter whose mixed media paintings/photo-silkscreens have been exhibited in solo & group shows in NYC, Chicago, and Philadelphia since the mid-1990's. Select solo exhibitions include James Oliver Gallery in Phila, HMVC Gallery New York-Times Square, Ceres Gallery in NYC and Gallery 1633 in Chicago. A selection of group shows include Women United Art Movement: I am Woman, The Albright/Knox Museum (NY), Manhattan Graphics Center, Philadelphia Art Alliance, Penn Medicine, CFEVA and The Trenton Museum. Select work was in a national competition in the Pheonix Gallery in NYC by juror Thelma Golden, then curator of Whitney Museum of American Art.

Wendee Yudis received an MFA in Printmaking & Painting from Pratt Institute and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition to being a visual artist, Wendee has worked professionally as a Graphic Designer & Art Director for advertising agencies and non-profits in NYC and Philadelphia.

https://wendeeyudis.com/

Walter Francis Elling
Painted USA Flag VIII, 2021
USA flag and spray paint
40" x 30"

Artist Statement

This painting is the eighth in a series of ten, each using actual flags as the canvas. The inspiration struck one morning when I envisioned creating a portrait of George Floyd on a U.S. flag. However, unsure about tackling the portrait, I turned to calligraphy as an expressive medium instead. The piece is rendered in Pan-African colors, with both Chinese and Korean calligraphy intricately woven throughout, expressing a powerful call for "liberty and justice for all." The 10th painting in the series features a portrait of George Floyd on a Bicentennial flag, discovered discarded in Philadelphia's Brewery Town, adding a poignant layer of meaning to the work.

Artist Bio

Walter Francis Elling is an American artist who works in a variety of mediums, including assemblage, photomontage, and painting. His early work in ceramics grew out of a fascination with organic forms, using both thrown and hand built techniques, and developed into works with political, racial, and queer commentary.

His recent work is a commentary on cultural norms and political justice. Using spray paint, found objects and photo-montage, Elling references religious iconography, political messaging and graffiti to create a tension between the real and the ideal.

His latest series is titled "Redefining Democracy in Red, White, Black, and Blue." With homage to Jasper Johns, Elling uses actual flags as canvases to provoke a response to issues of race and queer liberation. Spray-painted messages interweave with a color-altered geometric landscape of the flags themselves, transforming the geometry of the stars and stripes into visual symbols that have lost their potency.

In "St. George of Minneapolis" George Floyd's portrait is painted in red, white, black, and blue on a trash-picked bi-centennial flag, with the stars and gesso appearing as a halo.

Carl Cellini
The Shaman, 2023
Acrylic on canvas
48 x 36"

Artist Bio

• Career History
Moonstone Art Center - center city Philadelphia 1980/1984 - help create and acted as art and music director
Allen's Lane Art Center After School Program 1984/1989 - created and acted as its director
Allen's Lane Summer Arts Camp Director 1984-1989 - directed
Mantis Computers, Inc. 1989/2022 - started, owned and operated
Mantis Show Room 2001 - owned and operated
Cellini Studios Gallery and Studios 2013/2019 - created, owned and curated
Cellini Show Room and Studios - 2019/current - created, owns and curates
(Showing works of Kindred Art Collaborative and Carl Cellini)
Villari's Martial Arts School of Ambler 2014/current - created, owns and operates
Kindred Art Collaborative 2019/current - created and collaborated with Mikel Elam and Richard Metz - (Kindred Art Collaborative is a group of three seasoned painters that have been working together for over four years - we all contribute to everything we create)

• Education
Temple University's Tyler School of Art 1980 - BFA Painting
Villari's Shaolin Kempo Karate and Jujitsu - Achieved Masters level (5th degree)

• Skills and Qualifications
Painter, sculptor, composer, proficient on over seven musical instruments, martial artist, gallery director, computer expert (servers and networks), instructor in all of the prementioned

Stephanie Rogers
Gitche Gumee, 2023
Mixed media
40" x 30"

Artist Statement

I begin a painting with a gesture, then on to contemplate composition, form and hue- a meditation of optimistic colorful motion. This painting , Gitche Gumee, evolved into what I imagine may be what the Ojibwe saw when they first encountered their great sea.

B. B. Olshin
CANNED ART - Canned Couture, 2025
Mixed media
8" x 24" x 6"

Artist Statement

"Canned Couture" is a set from a large collection of pieces that are indeed "canned art" - recycled metal food cans are used by the artist to "host" small scenes, constructed with watercolour, craft paper, and other materials. The pieces use irony (e.g., in the "canned fish" works) and humour, combined with the idea of playing with scale and choices of material, to engage viewers and ask them to think further about how art can appear in many different settings and contexts. One of these pieces was recently published in a French magazine, and the works have proved popular to audiences locally, as well. In "Canned Couture", I am experimenting again with alliterative titles, and also seek to capture - well, to "can" - some interesting aspects of couture or fashion. Here, we have a canned "catwalk" with a model in the latest fashion, as well as a canned shoemaker, dressmaker, and haberdasher: all the ingredients for a successful bit of haute couture... in a can.

Artist Bio

Olshin completed his M.A. and Ph.D. in the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (I.H.P.S.T.), at the University of Toronto, in September of 1993. His dissertation involved the history of cartography, examining early maps and sea charts. During these years, he also completed a series of watercolors in Toronto, did design and drafting work for an architecture firm in São Paulo, Brazil, and worked for an architecture atelier in Tokyo, Japan, designing, drafting, building architectural models, and doing restoration work. He also travelled through other parts of Japan during this period, and then journeyed to Hong Kong and Tahiti, doing numerous sketches, watercolors, and oil paintings.

Richard Metz
Elderly Oak Leaf, 2010
Egg tempera, damar, soil, pigment and gum arabic
20" x 16"

Artist Statement
Old Brown Leaf is from a series of leaf/face paintings done with experimental techniques. The concept was to push, in an intuitive way, a closeness with the land, the soil, and the flora.
This is done both with the image, a combination of a dried oak leaf, taken from the Wissahickon watershed, where I live and a human face, as suggested by the leaf form. This was also done with the medium, in which I created my own paint with both the soil where I was living, and also natural pigments and natural mediums like gum arabic and damar.
The resulting piece is intended to evoke an intensity of living, an expressive emotion from this strange creature that may physically exist somewhere, but certainly does inside me.

Artist Bio

Richard Metz is a 65 year old artist, writer, husband, father, environmentalist, and former art teacher. He has a BFA from Tyler School of Art and an MFA from Maine College of Art. He has been making work and showing in the Philadelphia area for 40 years. He has worked in a range of mediums including painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, performance art, costumes, and ephemeral outdoor painted installations. He has been selected for many art residencies around the country. His art work has appeared in almost a dozen literary magazines. Recently, he published a book of poems and paintings titled " A murder of Crows".
Richard has worked with Carl Cellini and Mikel Elam as the Kindred Art Collaborative for 3 years.

Susan Wallack
Self-Portrait With Obstacles, 2023
Mixed media
11" x 14"
16" x 20" (framed)

Artist Statement

The mystery of "Self-Portrait With Obstacles" is that I cannot say with certainty what about myself I've divulged or hidden. It is a choice in my work to keep the images unbound, and open to interpretation.

Andrew Conti
The Ochre Mound, 2022
Mixed media on wood panel
12" x 12" x .875"

Artist Statement

I create my work to memorialize life - from the everyday to the magical. From seemingly mundane moments to the profound possibilities of existence. I work intuitively, building with color, line, and shape to create flattened abstract forms - mountains, mounds, stelae, markers of life. I paint to slow the world down and create meditative moments of focus and calm.

Artist Bio

Andrew Conti is a painter and sculptor who creates large and small works that explore color, calligraphy, monument and markers of memory. A long time resident of Japan, Conti returned to the US in the mid 2000s and lives and works in suburban Philadelphia with his family.

Jen McCleary
Direction, 2019
Mixed media on wood panel
14" x 11"

Artist Statement

The roots of my art lie in the process of collecting images, ephemera, and found objects, which I layer, alter, or arrange to create something complex and symbolic. I work both digitally (photo-collage and graphic design) and in more traditional forms (mixed-media collage/painting and jewelry made from found and vintage objects). In 2019 I began to learn the craft of wheel-thrown ceramics, which I alter through decoupage and the traditional Japanese art of kintsugi (repairing broken items with gold and lacquer). For me, this process of creation, destruction, and repair mirrors the ups and downs of life and treats the inevitabilities of damage and healing as something beautiful to be celebrated.

Artist Bio

Jen McCleary attended Tyler School of Art (BFA Painting and Printmaking), University of the Arts (Continuing Education in Print Design), and University of Pennsylvania (MLA). She works both digitally and in traditional mixed-media collage and views the two seemingly different media as complimentary and rooted in the same process of collecting and arranging images. In 2019 she began to learn the craft of wheel-thrown ceramics, which she alters through decoupage and the traditional Japanese art of kintsugi (repairing broken items with gold and lacquer). This process of creation and destruction considers the inevitabilities of damage and healing as part of the beauty of an object. She also works as a freelance graphic designer specializing in book cover and layout design.