Fri 6/12 @ 5-7:30PM
Akron Soul Train, the organization that offers artists in a wide range of disciplines short-term “residencies” to work on specific projects, is opening three new exhibitions at its downtown gallery this week. (They’ll be on view during the September 11 Akron Art Walk, but the official opening reception is the next day.)
Cleveland-based CIA alum and scientific illustrator Josh Maxwell’s Working Woods: Altered But Not Erased includes sculptural works and painting drawn from Northeast Ohio landscapes. We’re told he “treats forests as living archives—records of ecological change, human impact, and ongoing renewal,” as he attempts to bring what he discovers in the field into his work. “A hollow is not a void—it is an architecture of survival,” he says. “A fallen trunk can become a nurse log: a fallen body becoming ground for what comes next.”
Kristen Mimms Scavnivky’s Siting Ritual: Holding Renewal, Inscribing Resilience, is based on everyday rituals such as washing, eating and gathering with family and friends. She created an installation featuring elements she calls “soft architectures,” objects that exist both in intimate and within communal space. In them, she references bell hooks’ idea of the Black homeplace as a site of resistance and care, and the spatial injustice of the Jim Crow era. These references inform a practice that bridges the intimate and collective, asking how ordinary gestures can carry both trauma and resilience. She is an assistant professor of architecture at Kent State University.
Finally, in the CapSOUL Gallery, dedicated to emerging artists, akron painter Nick Lee has put together a show called Through Our Nikkei Eyes, of artists of Japanese descent working throughout the U.S. It includes painting, sculpture, printmaking and documentary as the five artists share their perceptions of what it means to be Japanese or of Japanese ancestry in this country.
The shows will be on view through Saturday July 18.