Munroe Family Community Gallery

September 3 - December 3, 2022

Working in pen and ink, watercolor, acrylic, clay, and graphite, Mary Sterner Lawson is most known for her portrait sketches, in which the artist uses essential lines to reveal the inner life of her subjects. Lawson effortlessly conveys the nuances of fleeting cultural moments in her works using a pen, graphite, and watercolor, to create clear lines to provide viewers with the sense that they are peering into scenes filled with vitality and movement. She writes of her myriad influences, “my extensive travels, and sincere interest in people, nature, history, literature, archaeology, oral history, small towns, and city scenes has provided me with a wide-ranging foundation... how I observe, interpret, and render the nuances of features and expressions…”. This exhibition enables visitors to observe Lawson’s fresh interpretations of artists, musicians, writers, and events of our time. Image: Mary Sterner Lawson, Chubby Checkers at the Mike, 2011, ink on paper.

Art Talk Live! with Mary Sterner Lawson

Thursday, September 15, 1:00 pm on ZOOM
Join Gadsden Art’s curatorial and education staff as they get to know artist Mary Sterner Lawson. Most known for her portrait sketches, Lawson’s new exhibition of portrait studies, features fast-paced works using only essential lines to reveal the inner life of her subjects. These portraits effortlessly convey the nuances of fleeting cultural moments using a pen, graphite, and watercolor. Join the conversation!

December 17, 2022 - March 18, 2023

Currently based in Havana, Florida, sculptor and painter Mark Georgiades began his art career in Tallahassee as a student at Leon High School. Early in his career, he started sculpting metal before engaging in other mediums like mixed media sculpture and landscape painting.

Visage is an exhibition of Georgiades’ welded metal sculptures and striking paintings. Georgiades intertwines his skills as a mechanic with his love of art to create his sculptures, utilizing construction grade materials such as copper, aluminum, and steel-cut nails. Welding steel rebar and flat metals to create their structural bases, he fashions the forms of his pieces using different types and gauges of wire, including non-stainless steel, stainless steel, and copper wire. Inspired by nature and fantasy, Georgiades’ paintings bring motion and expression to a variety of creatures and figures. While some of his works are more whimsical, depicting fanciful animals, the pieces presented in Visage evoke Georgiades’ flair for the edgy and psychedelic.

Mark Georgiades won Best in Show in the 2021 33rd Art in Gadsden Juried Exhibition for his metal sculpture, Behind the Façade. This life-size figure created entirely of handmade nails gently lifts her mask (or face) away from her body. The juror, Aja Roache, was intrigued by the sculpture’s dualities, and wrote that “the work is both mysterious and inviting, using masculine media and depicting a feminine form, the hard exterior, and the visible transparent interior---these binary dynamics are executed so effortlessly.”