Past Exhibitions
Urban Landscapes by Joe Taylor – June 2026
Taylor’s paintings capture the people and places of Chicagoland in vivid detail and color, transporting the viewer to scenes of State Street, the Chicago River, the El, and other iconic locales. His art is grounded in the human — with pedestrians, construction workers, delivery drivers, and everyday commuters taking center stage. The art of Joe Taylor is both refreshing and familiar, bringing gravitas and a new perspective to the moments we share on a daily basis.
Water’s Edge by Helen Dannelly – May 2026
Helen Dannelly: “I am interested in metamorphosis as a natural phenomenon as well as an interpersonal phenomenon. This interest is reflected in my work, whether in my paintings or abstract organic sculpture. My work is inspired by the natural world: light, shadow, color, plant life, sea life, water, earth, pods, seeds, cocoons, coral, sea anemones. The water lily paintings were inspired by my first trip to Claude Monet’s home and gardens in Giverny, France. I am a member of the Plein Air Painters Chicago and enjoy painting landscapes of my native California coast as well as Ireland, the country of my heritage.”
Jazz Visions by Ken Klopack – April 2026
Ken Klopack: “I’ve created a series of works that are visual inventions of compositions by jazz artists such as Nat King Cole, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Stan Getz and others. Taking a page out of Wassily Kandinsky’s artworks about music, I’ve interpreted the music of these legendary artists in a personal way. The colors, shapes and line that dominate my paintings convey the sounds that I hear in their performances and the visual puzzle on canvas entices the observer to be free to decipher.”
Charlene Moy and Jennifer Hauser – March 2026
Charlene Moy: “”I am drawn to the fleeting splendor of nature, capturing its transient beauty while addressing the damage that we are creating in our ecological landscape. In my artistic practice, I employ an intuitive and playful approach utilizing materials, destined for landfills or contaminating our waters, into compelling visual narratives. These would be discarded items become the foundation for a diverse array of textures, patterns, and colors. By repurposing these materials, I endeavor to challenge our perceptions of waste and value, fostering a dialogue on sustainability and ecological stewardship.”
Jennifer Hauser: “Think of a finely manicured lawn that somehow has a singular weed blooming proudly in the center. It looks like something went wrong, but upon closer inspection the blooming weed is a home and the yard is a neighborhood with a robust group of characters, the ladybug, the ant, a squirrel and a rabbit. It is the child’s eye that inspects the broken patterns of our surroundings with a fanciful gaze and explores the possibilities behind the organized chaos. Escape to a childlike vision for a moment and imagine secret worlds with unlikely friends.”
Samuel Leopold and Constance Volk – February 2026
Constance Volk: “‘Channeling’ is a painting technique I created that begins with a clay and cotton cord foundation on canvas, forming channels that allow liquid reactive oil to flow and marble as it cures. In my maze paintings, the channels function as the pathways of a puzzle, inviting the viewer to explore the landscape of the artwork. Liquid reactive oil marbles over a multi-day curing process, revealing unique mottled networks, whose subtleties emulate the vast array of nature’s organic patterns.”
Samuel Leopold: “Architectural ideas and spatial experiments live in my work. From fictional skylines to whimsical structures, I express the unique human condition of carving spaces.
Firoza Syed and Sandy Sadler – December 2025/January 2026
Firoza Syed is an oil painter whose work centers on cultural memory, identity, and the intimate rhythms of daily life.
Sandy Sandler is a Chicago-born and based fiber artist recognized for her innovative paper weaving creations.
TRIAD: Norman Baugher, Sandra Holubow, and Shel Howard Beugen (November 2025)
TRIAD
Triad featured work from three artists who call the Old Town Triangle home: Norman Baugher, Sandra Holubow, and Shel Howard Beugen. Each with unique methods and perspectives, the artworks from these Old Town Triangle artists are testaments to the artistic spirit of the neighborhood and truly inspiring works from dedicated creatives.
Katherine Lampert and William Mansfield (October 2025)
“A Sense of Place”
A Sense of Place featured work from Lampert and Mansfield inspired by the emotions embedded in memory and place. Mansfield’s paintings explore a deep and meaningful connection to his parents’ home, while Lampert’s artwork offers a connection to landscapes, both real and imagined.
You can find Katherine Lampert on Instagram at @katherinelampert.
Lynne Miller-Jones and James Bowden (September 2025)
“The Intersection of Here & Nowhere”
Lynne Miller Jones explores the boundaries between realism and abstraction in images of the natural world. From afar, her paintings appear realistic, sometimes photographic, but up close they also become about the oil paint itself and the variety of ways she applies it. Her current work is focused on water and the subtle interplay of light, color, and pattern, whether in a calm setting or during one of the frequent flood events impacting humans all over our warming planet.
James Eli Bowden is captivated by irregular, random relationships and how they shape everyday life. Rather than filtering out unrelated visual information, he embraces it—transforming the unexpected into paintings. Each of his works begins with a small-scale study, where composition and color choices are determined. These studies are created using collage—a playful, intuitive process that mirrors the unpredictability of life.
You can find Lynne Miller Jones on Instagram at @lynnemillerjones_artist and James Bowden at his website here.
Jeff Grunewald (August 2025)
Jeff Grunewald’s Artist Statement:
My subject matter is my hometown Chicago. I have always been fascinated with storefronts, mannequins and reflections of the street environment in the window glass. I try to find the beauty in a human-scale storefront, while it still stands. I treasure the local, the small-scale, the eccentric, the ordinary. My subject matter tends to be those fragmentary passages that reside within the mundane; something whimsical that may have not been intentional.
About Jeff Grunewald:
Jeff studied art in high school and was an art major in college. His career was always art focused, from catalog photography studios and his own commercial photography to computer graphics and digital illustrator. His work for museums included advertising illustrations and graphics production. After more than 40 years, Grunewald started painting again.
His use of his own earlier photographic subjects is evident in many of the paintings on display. That timeless quality is heightened by the medium. While a sepia-toned or black and white photo speaks to a specific time, the viewer is caught off-guard seeing the same in a painting. This unexpected turn provides just enough
You can find Jeff Grunewald on Instagram at @jeffgrunewald63
Julie Sulzen and Katie Vota (July 2025)
“The Intersection of Here & Nowhere”
An exhibition of liminal spaces woven from the fabric of urban lives by painter Julie Sulzen and weaver Katie Vota.
Artists Julie Sulzen and Katie Vota interpret worlds around them. Using traditional mediums of tapestry and oil painting, they examine abstract, symbolic, and built environments, transforming them into luminous visual experiences.
Katie Vota’s works function as abstract interpretations of inner and outer worlds, built-up as landscapes, spaces where Vota reinterprets the real through a playful flattening of space and environment.
Julie Sulzen’s work moves beyond mere representation and explores the emotional and atmospheric essence of space in the urban environment, using light as the dynamic force for communication.
Vota’s woven moon functions as a symbol for the body in flux. Sulzen’s urban oil paintings act as host for the eyes. Both artists steer the focus to the here and the nowhere, the liminal world, flattening space and developing form, creating community in color, light, and visual revelations.
You can find Julie Sulzen on Instagram at @Julie_Sulzen and Katie Vota at @katie.a.vota
Ken Minami – Fall/Winter 2024
“Night Shift” is a series of imaginary paintings exploring psychological states, more than actual physical
places. Although the paintings suggest actual places, the artist has freely altered the architecture and mixed scenes of various cities. The work suggests emotional places, and only vaguely references geographical ones. The title implies a shift from the visual world revealed in daylight to the more hidden interior world obscured in the darkness of night.
Ken Minami is a Chicago painter educated in the tradition of the 19th-Century Boston School. He continues to paint still life and figurative works from life with the intention of faithfully rendering the visual world as it presents itself. These nighttime urban paintings are a departure from that practice. It’s a shift into attempting to paint a scene that only exists in his imagination. His Instagram is @minami6275.
John Nicholas – September 2024
“I like to travel, and I take numerous photographs, almost always thinking they might become part of a painting. Favorite subjects: mountains and rushing water, waves, city life, panoramas, and vistas; sometimes people. My paintings are all of places I’ve travelled. Favorites are the American West and especially Colorado.”
John is an engineer by training and a college professor in business by trade. All of his paintings are pastels, and he devotes a lot of time to thinking about and planning each painting, though he frequently tweaks the painting and deviates from the plan. Working evenings and weekends, each painting takes 3-6 weeks to complete. John is largely self-taught and became interested in art before grammar school. He considers each painting to be a new learning experience and somewhat of an experiment.
Bruce Riley – August 2024
Phantasma is an exhibition of hypnagogic paintings by Bruce Riley. The paintings range in date from a couple of years before the Coronavirus to the present. Riley’s luminous visions blur the line between abstraction and figuration. Working without preconception, his paintings are developed as much as painted. With no sketches to guide him, Riley works on multiple paintings that help to define each other as they grow. Bruce would like to thank the city of Chicago for his 2023 Individual Artists DCASE grant.
Priya Tripathi – July 2024
With over 15 years of experience, Priya found her passion in the subject matter of still life (and occasionally, landscapes). Her love of vibrant color and impasto led her to the Old Masters and the style of impressionism. Through expressive brushstrokes and careful placement of color, Tripathi can portray three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface.
Michael Turner – May 2024
Mike Turner’s work revolves around the theory that what free time technology provides us with results in the need for more activities, entertainment, and distraction. This desire to not be alone in our own thoughts permeates into our architecture and landscape. Our needs and their physical expression then share an everbonded relationship growing and altering each other through time.
Patricia Patterson – April 2024
Patterson’s paintings create narratives with collected objects, collective memory, and a nod to art history. While the objects are chosen for their color, their placement results in relationships that suggest complex human relationships, archetypes and messages. The series was created in Mexico City and many of the rich cultural traditions of Mexico can be seen in the work.
Patterson, born in Illinois, is currently the Chair of Fine Arts at Loyola Academy. She worked and painted in Mexico City for the last 25 years and has a new studio in Evanston.
Angela A. McElwain & Sheryl Nieman – March 2024
Angela A. McElwain is a multi-media artist whose studio is in Chicago. Her media includes paintings, drawings, sculptures, and, recently, graphic novels. She was an Artist in Residence in Chicago when she created and installed a series of interior murals for the Logan Square Library. The selected work is from Angela McElwain’s NAL (Not A Landscape) Series. The work is drawn from real places which are then reimagined with color, texture, and atmosphere creating a sensation, mood or energy. No landscape exists here except for the one implied in the imagination.
Sheryl Nieman is a painter working in oils and acrylics. Her canvases are chosen to compliment the story being told and have varied from linen, muslin, board, and glass to walls, ceilings, floors, and objects. Her current style of painting has an obvious division of space, no longer a dash or a dot but a fragmentation using line and flow to divide areas of color. The effects of color and light are examined and explored to create the appropriate mood of the story.
Amber Keene – February 2024
Amber Keene is an art teacher in Northbrook. Her background includes a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Art Education From University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and a Master’s of Fine Arts in Art Education from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
“I am in constant awe of the beauty that can be found in this world we live in. As an artist I try to capture that feeling of inspiration, using oils and a mixed media approach. My landscape paintings are a result of my travels in the U.S. and abroad and the pieces in my self-portrait series consist of resin, oils, and collaged images from nature. The photo portraits were taken by photographer Bill Furlong, resulting in a beautiful collaboration between two artists.”
Beverly Alice Nash – January 2024
Beverly Alice Nash is a Chicago-based painter with a BA in English and an MA in Gerontology. She is also a member of the Chicago Alliance of Visual Artists (CAVA) and the Art Encounter Critique Group.
“I paint the things that come into my eyes. Lately I’ve been focused on full length portraits of my friends and family. I especially like to paint big men because I am moved by the solidity and sensuousness of their bodies. My portraits should penetrate the surface and recognize the temperament and personality of the person portrayed. I slightly alienate viewers from reality so that they can see reality freshly through my eyes.”
Annual Students & Instructors Show – December 2023
We are celebrating the return of our Student Show! Stop by for a wide selection of artworks in all mediums from our most proficient artists to our first-time students, and some items from the vault!
This exhibit and sale are a perfect opportunity to get started on your holiday gift list! Artworks in pastel, oil, acrylic pencil and charcoal will be on display.