Ladies’ Auxiliary Exhibition

Artist Statement/Bio

Alexa Frangos (b. 1973) is a photo-based artist from Chicago, Illinois. Utilizing cut paper, photographic ephemera and found objects, Alexa creates constructed realities that seek to reflect on psychological states and identity.

Alexa studied Visual Communications and Photography at Washington University in St. Louis before receiving her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where her multimedia work evolved into a photographic practice. She then attended law school and practiced law for many years before returning to a full-time art practice. She has been showing work nationally and internationally since 2012. In 2021 she won a Julia Margaret Cameron award for her series Ghosts of Displacement. In 2024 she was one of Photolucida’s Top 200. Alexa is a member of Perspective Group and Photography Gallery in Evanston, Illinois.

www.alexafrangos.com

IG@alexafrangos

Artist Statement

My practice investigates how bodies are remembered, constrained, and reimagined through fabric, performance, and text.

In Fitting (Un)Bodies, I perform with a dress that once belonged to my mother, a garment I admired but never fit into. Forcing, hiding, and peeking through its seams, I re-stage the embodied memory of growing up under regimes of dieting, discipline, and expectation. Embroidered fragments of dialogue and memory transform the dress into both an archive and a ghost, stitching together absence, worth, and inheritance.

Pussy Telephone extends this inquiry through humor and participation. In a vulva-inspired phone booth lined with glowing lights, viewers are invited to leave a message to their favorite vulva. This playful installation reclaims language, intimacy, and bodily presence, shifting from silence and containment toward voice and celebration.

Together, these works situate the body as a contested site of memory and imagination, where weight, worth, voice, and pleasure are continuously stitched, unraveled, and reclaimed.

Artist Bio

Allison Coleman is a narrative painter from Raleigh, NC. She received her BA from the College of Charleston and her MFA from UNC- Chapel Hill. She currently teaches at Wake Tech. Allison has shown throughout the Southeast, including the Contemporary Art Museum of Raleigh, The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston SC, and the Ackland Museum in Chapel Hill. Many themes found in her work center around memory, the domestic, Americana and the American South.

www.allisoncoleman.net

IG@allisoncoleman_art

Artist Statement/Bio

I am a painter working in North Carolina. I paint because I need to express the mundane and the magical, the strange and the sublime. All of our life experiences are seen by ourselves through the prism of our unique perspectives. I paint how life feels to me. My paintings reside at the intersection between the natural outdoor world and private interior spaces. Sometimes it makes sense to bring a bit of wild nature inside, other times I paint a forest as if it were a living room. I paint the spaces that I feel around me metaphorically as well as the spaces I want to be in.

www.annapodris.com

IG@annapodris

Artist’s Statement

I’ve never maintained a disciplined practice nor been motivated by the same compulsion to create that drives the artists I admire and have had the privilege to work with for many years. However, I do live a life in which art is a priority and a prominent part of daily life. My own work tends to remain within the intimate sphere of my family and home often in the form of gifts, curated assemblages of collected objects or experiences. This print was a challenge to myself to create a woodblock that commemorates my son’s life through his drawings over the last 12 years. This subject was a conscious decision that allowed my lack of technical skill to add to the narrative of parenthood in all its messy joyful beauty. 

Artist Bio

Annah Lee is a mother, curator and arts enthusiast from Raleigh,NC. She has curated dozens of exhibitions in the triangle and beyond and currently manages the Holly Springs Cultural Center. This Spring she will guest curate the UNC Chapel Hill MFA exhibition at the Ackland Museum of Art.

IG@annahleenc

Artist Statement

In my studio I escape to an invented world of color, pattern, and impracticable structures. Ordinary objects and structures become vehicles of my imagination creating miniature landscapes that invite play, comfort, and delight. In my meticulous constructions, I combine the order of architectural elevation drawings with the comfort of my grandmother’s quilts through the application of machine-sewn fabrics, found paper bits and bobs, paint, and pencil on paper.

Artist Bio

Becky Joye is a visual artist based in Raleigh, NC. Becky was raised in Belmont, North Carolina and graduated from The University of North Carolina with a Bachelor of Architecture in 2003. Instead of architecture, she enjoys escaping to an invented world full of color, pattern, and impracticable structures. She is the recipient of numerous grants including the 2024 United Arts Council Artist Support Grant and the 2025 Snapdragon Project Grant, both for the creation of quilts as protective elements. Her work has a happy home in the collections of Fidelity Investments, Capital One, the City of Raleigh, and UVA Children’s Hospital. She is represented by Wally Workman Gallery in Austin, TX. Her past work experiences include developing production-scale natural dye services for TS Designs in Burlington, NC, and operating a small business designing and making sustainable women’s clothing. She is particularly interested in working with locally-available dye plants. Courtney has a Master of Fine Arts from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and a bachelor’s degree in English and a certificate in Visual Art from Princeton University.

www.beckyjoye.com

IG@beckyjoyeart

Artist’s Statement/Bio

Chieko Murasugi is a multi-media abstract artist and scientist who was born in Tokyo, raised in Toronto, and lived in San Francisco for 20 years before moving to NC in 2012. She has a PhD in Experimental Psychology and an MFA in Studio Art (UNC-CH). Her art practice, which encompasses textiles, painting, and photography, explores questions of history, identity, and chance. She has exhibited her work nationally in galleries and museums, and her paintings reside at Duke University and in the Durham and Raleigh municipal collections.

www.chiekomurasugi.com

IG@cmurasugi

Artist Bio

Slavick is an Artist in Residence at UC Irvine. She was Professor of Art at UNC, Chapel Hill for 27 years. She has exhibited her work internationally, and it is held in many collections, including Queens Museum, National Library of France, Library of Congress, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Author of Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography; After Hiroshima; Cameramouth; and Holding History in Our Hand, she has held artist residencies in Canada, France, Japan, and at Caltech. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, FOAM, San Francisco Chronicle, Asia-Pacific Journal, among other publications.

Artist Statement - SHE Collage

This large collage was made in a fit of feminist pleasure and rage during the first awful Trump presidential term. Using cut and curated images from magazines of girls/women/females/human beings, juxtaposed with hand-painted words (insults, titles, terms of endearment, identifications), I am trying to throw a visual party of liberation and solidarity or to write a cathartic poem of transformation and transgression.

www.elinoharaslavick.com

IG@elinohara

Artist Bio

Erin Ives has a background in photography and a BFA from Corcoran College of Art and Design. She combines multiple disciplines to create 3-dimensional collages. Her work revolves around portraits of women, nature, and woodworking, the latter being a predominantly male craft, but the work is soaked in a feminist perspective. She uses found materials, image transfers, paint, and organic materials to craft her artwork. Erin is a practicing artist in Raleigh, NC.

Artist Statement

Dendrology is the study of woody plant material. This artwork is meant to give the sense of movement to inanimate objects with the feeling that the subject is in control, but just barely. The work is from a series called “How am I not Myself”. In our complex and intertwining society, the roles we play and the facets we reveal are shaped by societal expectations. Particularly for women, historical connotations amplify these social assumptions. Through the interplay of 3-dimensional layers and image transparencies, the work encapsulates the dichotomy between what is shown and what remains concealed due to collective expectations. The use of found & organic materials encapsulated in resin or insects floating within symbolizes the decorative nature placed upon the feminine role. The use of organic matter within the work harkens to a past when women went to nature to find a sense of power in a world where they had none. This work highlights the discomfort inherent in presumptions about our identities and the feminine struggle with authenticity. The work is not intended to use photography to document or reveal something specific about the subjects, but rather to reveal parts of ourselves that we hide and our internal duality. And ask us all the question, “How are we, not ourselves?”

IG@s.erinives

Artist Statement

Harriet Hoover creates process-based abstract drawings, collages, and sculptures that explore place, memory, and materiality. In her recent body of work, Both at the Same Time, Hoover’s stitched works and collages offer an opportunity to consider the power of attention and how we mark time while inhabiting multiple spaces at once. We grapple with a world in which our attention is constantly fractured. Through careful observation, repetitive action, and formal problem-solving, Hoover carves a meditative pathway toward connection and reflection. Her process begins with slivers of sliced drawings, dyed paper, and bits of foil that are meticulously wrapped around cotton cord to form thin linear compositions. These units are intuitively sewn onto a reflective vinyl surface in repetitive lines; sometimes bending, swerving, and colliding. Other times, the linear elements are placed in more predictable rhythms. She punctuates this rich, vibrating surface with velvet circular elements that serve as a fulcrum; a place to land, pivot, and launch across the rich, ribbed expanse of the composition. Inspired by color, structure, and patterns in West African indigo cloth panel fabrics, Hoover’s abstract collages feature line, shape, and texture darting on inky blue surfaces. The works on paper are constructed quickly and intuitively and then manipulated by additive and subtractive collage processes to add complexity while unifying the surface. Hoover celebrates this slow working process as it secures space for silence and reflection. The exhibition title, Both at the Same Time, references the multiplicity of experiences as we navigate our increasingly complicated world. Through making, Hoover attempts to locate a fulcrum to process what is around and within us.

Artist Bio

Harriet Hoover is a visual artist and educator who creates abstract, process-driven drawings and textiles. She is an N.C. Arts Fellowship recipient and has exhibited her work nationally. She has a B.A. in Textile Technology and Art + Design from N.C. State University and an M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has worked as an arts educator and administrator in community, academic, and museum settings and is interested in social and participatory engagement focused on play, wellness, and the artistic process.

www.harriet-hoover.com

Artist Statement

My process is rooted in reclaiming and repurposing materials, transforming what is discarded into monumental artworks. The imperfections of these materials are integral to the final pieces, symbolizing the resilience and beauty found in impermanence and change. By incorporating techniques traditionally associated with women’s work, I bridge the tactile and the monumental, celebrating the power of small, deliberate actions to create something larger than the sum of its parts. While my identity as a bisexual woman, mother, and wife informs my perspective, my work reaches beyond personal narrative to address universal themes of transformation and empowerment. Joy, for me, is an act of creation and resistance—a celebration of possibility that reclaims spaces and reimagines boundaries. Through sculpture, installation, and two-dimensional studies, I explore the tension between vulnerability and strength, presenting joy as an essential and radical force. My work invites viewers to pause, reflect, and rediscover wonder, encouraging a shared appreciation for the transformative potential of creativity.

Artist Bio

Jane Cheek is a Raleigh-based installation artist recognized for her immersive, large-scale works that blend sculpture, light, and audio elements to transform institutional and public spaces. Born in Winston-Salem, NC, she earned a BA in Art Studies from NC State University and later obtained a K-12 Visual Arts Education certification from East Carolina University. Self-taught in installation art, she combines painting, sculpture, and textiles to create work that is both monumental and delicate. Cheek’s work has been commissioned by the North Carolina Museum of Art, Downtown Raleigh Alliance, and IBMA Live! and has been featured in major public art exhibitions such as Illuminate Raleigh and Artfields. She has exhibited at leading arts institutions, including Artspace (Raleigh, NC), Waterworks Visual Arts Center (Salisbury, NC), and Wilson Arts Center (Wilson, NC). Her installations often engage students and community audiences through artist talks, workshops, and collaborative projects. She is a two-time recipient of the United Arts Council’s Artist Support Grant and was awarded a 2024 Individual Artist Career Opportunity Grant from South Arts. In addition to her studio practice, Cheek serves on the Raleigh Arts Public Art and Design Board and previously, the board of Art For All, where she advocates for equitable access to the arts. She is passionate about supporting emerging artists and regularly mentors first-time installation artists, helping them navigate the complexities of large-scale public projects. Her work has been featured in Fiber Art Now and The Inspiration Grid, and she maintains a studio at Artspace in Raleigh, NC, where she continues to develop projects that explore themes of joy, resilience, and the intersections of art and community.

www.janecheek.com

IG@jane.the.artist

Artist Bio

Jean Gray Mohs is an artist, educator, and advocate whose practice spans over twenty years of contemporary artmaking. With a BFA and MAT from Georgia Southern University, she has exhibited widely with more than two dozen solo shows and over 100 group and museum exhibitions. Her work, rooted in object making, explores the body, its disruptions, and the fragile balance between control and vulnerability. Based in Raleigh, NC, Mohs is also the Co-Director of VAE Raleigh, a community-driven contemporary arts organization. Deeply engaged in artist-centered projects, she is also a founding member of The Grid Project and Stillmoreroots, and serves on the board of Arts Access, advocating for equity and inclusion in the arts.

www.jeangraymohs.com

IG@jeangraymohs

Artist Statement

My art presents oppositions—natural against synthetic, the individual voice against the modern hum, independence against regularity, action against paralysis, female power against oppressive conventions, present against past. Some of my recent works in paint, pencil and mixed media present subjects inspired by photos from the vaudeville era surrounded by mod wallpaper or painted patterns. Color is unashamed, defiance is pleasure, with an edge of surreal juxtaposition. The backgrounds can suggest the interior energy of the central figures or the exteriors they struggle against—viewers can decide the balance. My newest work—larger format mixed media pieces—show “ugly” subjects bedazzled with sequins, glitter and other sparkles, a surface attraction to what is under the glitz.

IG@jennifercliftonart

Artist Statement

Chaos IS disrupting whatever version of American representative democracy we each have believed in, threatening the comfort of many and amplifying fear for still more. For the past 5 years, my art has taken the form of a stampede of horses. I have painted horses as beasts of burden; broken horses; defeated horses; horses looking foolish or naive; horses valued for their parts, discarded. The horse has served as a metaphor for the working class, our nation’s engine as well as a metaphor for our collective rights. These horses preside over a variety of issues—systemic racism and homophobia, gun violence, capitalism, book banning, and toxic masculinity, to name a few. The liberties we have taken for granted are now disappearing at lightning strike speed. The world watches. 

Artist Bio

Jenny Eggleston is a Raleigh-based artist raised in Richmond, Virginia. Born into a family of

historians, she was immersed in southern, patriotic rhetoric and grew up with a deep love of

southern culture, food, and art. Her work is a reckoning with this whitewashed, patriarchal

upbringing. Eggleston graduated from the College of William and Mary and began graduate

studies at Virginia Commonwealth University before moving to Seattle and then to Raleigh.

Eggleston has exhibited throughout North Carolina and Virginia.

www.egglestonart.com

IG@jegglestonart

Artist Statement

I'm deeply interested in time, perception and memory ideas that have shaped my work for as long as I can remember. I often return to the sense of solitude and wonder I felt growing up surrounded by a vast untamed landscape. That environment left a lasting imprint on me, especially during a time of major transition: I moved from New York to Virginia to live with my grandparents while my father was away at sea, and my mother was ill. Those early experiences of absence and displacement continue to inform my practice today through immersive video and hybrid process-based painting, often incorporating photography. I explore embodiment memory and longing. I’m drawn to the spaces where materiality meets absence, and where the personal overlaps with the collective. Influenced by art history, speculative fiction, and emerging technologies, I use my work to imagine alternate futures and to hold space for what has been lost, remembered, or transformed.

Artist Bio

joy tirade lives and works in Oakland, California. She holds a MFA in Visual Art with a concentration in photography and video from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She earned a BA with Distinction in Studio Art, focusing on drawing and painting, and a BA with Distinction in Art History from the University of Virginia, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest academic honor society.

Her work is part of the permanent collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco) and the Ackland Art Museum (Raleigh). She has been exhibited internationally at venues including The Kamloops Art Gallery (British Columbia), Universitet i Oslo (Norway), Vilnius Academy of Arts and Ideas Block LT (Lithuania), and CICA Museum (South Korea). In the U.S., she has exhibited widely, including at The Mint Museum, Ackland Art Museum, CAM, The Carrack, and LUMP in North Carolina; The Garage, The Bridge PAI, WTVF/Radio IQ Gallery, New City Arts, Art Works Gallery, The IX Building, and Ruffin Gallery at the University of Virginia; as well as The Masur Museum (Monroe, LA), The Fluorescent Gallery (Nashville), The Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center (Covington, KY), Red Ink Studios (San Francisco), SFMOMA (San Francisco), and LACDA (Los Angeles).

Her work has appeared in publications such as The Third Coast, The Virginia Literary Review, 3.7, Summmer, and Mildred Pierce zine. Most recently, it was featured on a Routledge Press book cover.

www.joytirade.com

IG@joytirade

Artist Bio

Megan Sullivan lives and works in Raleigh, NC. She is an Artist, Non-Profit Finance Manager and Mother of one child, one dog, three cats and two snakes.

Artist Statement

Using disjointed narrative and off-beat humor, Megan Sullivan chooses images from the internet, her immediate surroundings and chance encounters to communicate her ideas. Her method often involves a variety of fiber processes to stitch together ham-fisted jokes and frayed materials into one final punch line.

Artist Bio

After completing an MFA in 2007, Meredith worked for a decade at the University of Chicago to develop campus-wide programming in mind-body medicine. Her programs explored the relations between art, wellness, education and spirituality, helping participants develop life and work patterns that promote physical and emotional well-being. This included site-specific yoga and meditation classes in galleries, gyms, and campus chapels that addressed themes like vulnerability, inclusiveness and acceptance. Meredith also worked clinically with students to relieve stress and pain and promote wellness. At the University of Chicago’s medical school, she collaborated with faculty to develop and teach a fourth-year empathy class and mind-body curriculums in the first year symposium and family medicine rotation. In 2013, Meredith was granted the Campus and Student Life Award for Outstanding Service to the Community.

Currently, Meredith explores similar themes through a solo studio practice and public participatory collage workspaces.

Meredith is the recipient of several grants from the Orange County Arts Commission and regularly exhibits her solo and participatory work in the Raleigh-Durham area. She has been in group exhibitions and offered participatory events at Peel, Lump, Rebus Works gallery and Coffee Shop and Eno Arts Mill. In 2019 she had a solo exhibition at Shelf Space Gallery which was located in a convenience store in Carrboro, NC. She is grateful to have been part of Rebuilding the Present at Weinberg Newton Gallery, Pathogeographies (or, Other People’s Baggage), Our Literal Speed, and The Pedagogical Factory. She has completed three residencies at NC public schools though the NCMA AIMS program.

Meredith lives with her daughter and husband in Hillsborough, North Carolina where she can be found co-leading arts immersion camps at Eno Arts Mill.

Artist Statement

Mer Haggerty makes collages and participatory events that are rooted in the value of becoming familiar with difficult feelings such as loss, fear, uncertainty, heartbreak and failure. She works with an imaginary skulk of foxes and a few of their friends to create illustrations from materials such as felt, salt dough, paper, paint and scraps. Her participatory events are free, public collage workspaces that feature scraps and failed pieces purchased from local artists. Within all of Mer’s work is the intention of cultivating a deepened understanding of our landscapes including spaces and materials that we take for granted, dislike or even throw away.

www.merhaggerty.com

IG@mer.haggerty

Artist Statement

Oami Powers is a visual artist based in Raleigh North Carolina who makes drawings, sculptures and installations. Her vulnerable and intricate work explores themes central to the human experience: memory, nostalgia, grief and connection to place.

www.oamipowers.com

IG@oamipowersart

Artist Statement

Inspired by Dada, Surrealism, & the American Southern Gothic, my work is composed of found materials such as text, image, & object, which possess a history of their own that support & inform the work. I collect these materials & incorporate them into mixed media assemblages, often introducing paint, graphite, & photographic elements. The process of collecting & manipulating found materials allows for an active exploration of an object or image’s history. My work is a conversation between materials; a discourse between the aesthetic of the American South & the deeper cultural conditions that plague it.

Artist Statement

Your Soulful Meal Remains reflects a memory that resonates deeply with many BIPOC families and cultures. The piece encapsulates the intimate sight of sisterhood as a family prepares a meal with love and tenderness. Featuring a scanned, edited, archived Polaroid of my grandmother and her sisters gutting fish, encased in a window panel, it symbolizes the times I’ve spent watching her cook. This kitchen window frames a memory of not just food, but family meals being passed down for generations. I aim for viewers to be transported to their own cherished memories of loved ones preparing precious meals. In Black Southern families, soul food provides comfort that transcends time.

Although my grandmother has passed, and I can no longer savor her unparalleled cooking, the title Your Soulful Meal Remains signifies that her essence and the warmth of her kitchen have and will continue to be cherished.

Artist Bio

Sanjé James (she/her) is a Raleigh, North Carolina based interdisciplinary artist with a focus on film photography. Her work weaves through the themes of nostalgia, mental health and the digital age. She received her B.F.A at Lesley University College of Art + Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2021. During her senior year she was awarded a scholarship to attend The Portrait: Expressing Identity, with artist Rania Matar at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, Colorado. In 2023 she was the Artist-in-Residence with the Black on Black Project and the Durham Art Guild where she created her Text Me When You Get Home exhibition. Sanjé engages the local community through installation work at art collectives and day festivals and has been a guest speaker with the Beautiful Project in Durham. Sanjé currently works as an Executive Assistant and Content Creator at Artspace in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina.

www.sanjejames.format.com

IG@moosekatt

Artist Statement

My work is deeply rooted in play and experimentation with my studio materials. I often work with found objects , fabrics and vintage craft books sourced from thrift stores and flea markets, always on the lookout for color, intriguing shapes, or handmade pieces that need rescuing. Amid the chaos of accumulated treasures in my studio, I seek to bring new life into the discarded and overlooked materials. Through this process, I create unexpected dialogues between elements, mixing them together into abstract forms that carry a peculiar emotional resonance. Using collage and found-object sculpture, I explore the expressive potential of shape, color, and texture, allowing the found materials to guide my compositions. Each piece is like a puzzle—one that I both create and solve throughout the making process.

Artist Bio

Tonya Solley Thornton is a mixed media artist who works primarily in collage, sculpture and installations. Her work is rooted in play and experimentation with the found object materials in her studio. She was born in Niagara Falls, NY but grew up mainly in the Florida Keys. She received her BFA from Florida State and her MFA from Mills College. She currently lives and works in Raleigh, NC.

www.tonyasolleythornton.com

IG@tonyasolleythornton