Invited Artists
The artists below were juried into our 2025 competition.
David Avery continues to exploit the constraints inherent in traditional black and white line etching in his studio in San Francisco for his own suspect purposes. His work is included in the collections of the Library of Congress, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, the New York Public Library, the Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts, and the Stanford University Library among others, and has been noted in the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Ron Beckham is an American contemporary painter, designer, and educator who lives and works in North Carolina, and Ohio. He received his B.F.A. in Communication Design at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and completed his graduate work at the New York City School of Visual Arts MFA Illustration program where he studied under Marshall Arisman, Robert Weaver, Steve Heller, and completed his thesis with Rolling Stone Art Director Fred Woodward. His work has been exhibited nationally in both solo and group exhibitions throughout the US. Beckham’s work has received recognition from Communication Arts, Print, Graphic Design USA, Artist’s Magazine, and the Society of Illustrators.
Kim Boerner is a San Francisco artist who paints figurative oils and watercolors. Her paintings tell stories of people in life-defining situations. The struggle for equality and the humanity of those who struggle are some of the themes she explores in her work. Kim's art reflects her life experience of teaching teens in under-resourced communities, and her union activism. Kim has participated in numerous group exhibitions and has held open studios in Oakland and San Francisco.
Instagram: @kimboerner
Austin J. Cuttino (b.1995) is a visual artist whose work centers around his biracial identity. Austin received his Bachelor’s degree in studio art and digital studies from Rutgers University and a prior degree in commercial photography from Antonelli Institute. In the Spring of 2025 Austin was an artist in residence at Camden Fireworks in Camden, NJ. He has exhibited work all along the east coast and in 2020 contributed to the Gigi Journal. In partnership with Gigi Hadid and Vmagazine.
Instagram: @awesometheaustin
Arnold d'Epagnier has been a studio furniture designer and maker for 45 years. Using traditional cabinetmaking methods and tools along with modern materials and machinery he has produced unique durable furniture, furnishings and sculptures of beauty and high quality. Talented in marquetry, steam bending, turning and laminating as well, he has found private and commercial commissions throughout the USA and overseas. His recent involvement with public art requires the same planning, customer communications, craftsmanship, materials knowledge and logistics skillsets as making furniture.
Steven Dobbin is a DMV area sculptor working in lead, copper, steel and found objects. His conceptually-based creations are informed by his experiences as a special education teacher.
His artwork presents themes of repetition, labor, and of the discarded. Dobbin’s sculptures have been shown nationally and internationally for over 30 years, and he was awarded the Maryland State Arts Council award for sculpture.
Selina Doroshenko is a Canadian artist living in Baltimore, engaged with fiber, human behavior, and the everyday. She is an adjunct professor of Graphic Design at Goucher College, Towson, Maryland. Doroshenko gained her MFA in Multidisciplinary Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2016. Currently, her fiber work is being shown in an outdoor gallery, Pennant Place, in Gainesville, Florida. Her roster includes institutions in the DMV such as The Baltimore Museum of Art, ICA Baltimore, but also, Current Space, Howard County Welcome Center Gallery, 2640 Space, Rosenberg Gallery, Decker Gallery, and Maryland Art Place. Themes present in her work are materiality, intrepidity, sensitivity and multiplicity.
Instagram: @selina__aliens
Andrea Finch creates botanical sculptural quilts, exploring textile textures, she has let go of the rules allowing the fabric to speak through texture, color, and design. She lives and works in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, is a juried SAQA artist, sits on the board & exhibitions committee of the Virginia Quilt Museum. Her work can be found at www.afinchsongcreation.com, Foundry Art Market, galleries, public & private collections, and exhibitions throughout the country.
Social media: https://www.facebook.com/afinchsongcreation
https://www.instagram.com/afinchsongcreation/
Emily Neville Fisher is a photographer based in Westchester, New York. She received her bachelor’s degree in Fine Art at James Madison University, her master's in Arts Administration from New York University and her certificate for the Track program at the International Center for Photography in NYC. She has worked in painting, drawing, jewelry and ceramics but has been concentrating on photography for the past decade. Emily lives in Bedford, New York, with her husband, three children, dog, snake, chickens, ducks and geese.
IG: https://www.instagram.com/emilyfisherphoto/
Ilene Gold creates collages using only National Geographic magazines. Cutting thousands of pieces of paper and assembling them into a new image.
The artwork has been referred to as a painterly style of collage. At first glance, many people admire what they think is a painting, then take a closer look and can’t believe it is all paper.
Solo exhibiitions of these collages include: The Hoffberger Gallery, Morgan Arts Council, Howard County Center for the Arts, and Monument/Sotheby’s. Recently featured on PBS Artworks and CBS Sunday Morning.
Prints can be purchased on Etsy: IleneGoldCollages
Darryl Halbrooks is an artist, writer and professor emeritus from Eastern Kentucky University as well as visiting professor at East Carolina University. His art work varies greatly in subject matter and style, ranging from abstract to hyper-real. He works every day in his studios in Kentucky or Colorado. His work has been included in over 200 exhibitions, including solo shows at the Huntington (WVA) Museum and the Memphis Museum of Art and elsewhere and is represented in many private, public and corporate collections. He is the author of twelve books of fiction and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Facebook/Instagram: @darrylhalbrooks
A native of NC, Anne Harkness is an alumnus of the Atlanta College of Art and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from The Maryland Institute, College of Art. Her work as an art director in NYC for 15 years has embodied her work with a graphic element that astute viewers can detect in her paintings. As a contemporary artist, Anne seeks to capture a distinct point of view, often finding some unexpected beauty in locations or views others might dismiss as ordinary. Appreciating what is local and slowing down to see, can lead to a painting which documents a time in history. It can also remind viewers of occasions during ordinary life and their memories.
IG: https://www.instagram.com/annephark/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/annepharkness?ref=tn_tnmn
TikTok: @annepharkness
Ever since fingerpainting in nursery school color, smell and texture have fascinated me. Such joy in the squishy, smelly paint on the slick paper! My senses were engaged.
Although many years have passed and things have changed since those memorable days, I still love intense colors, the smell of printing ink and the intriguing textures that can be created on paper. My medium now is primarily printmaking and I am never bothered by ink on my hands.
Over twenty years ago I wandered into the print shop at West Virginia University and I felt I had come home. Professor Joe Lupo introduced me to the joys of printmaking. It has been a great adventure ever since.
Bryson Iacoboni is a visual artist based in Washington DC. Bryson primarily works with paint, but will sometimes incorporate collage made from old skateboarding magazines in his pieces.
Bryson’s art draws on past experiences and feelings of isolation and escapism through fictional worlds of books, sitcoms, cartoon characters and skateboarding.
Instagram - @bryson_iacoboni
Joyce Jewell was born in Washington, D.C. and currently resides in Takoma Park, Maryland. She holds an A. A. from Montgomery College, a B. A. From American University, and an M.F.A. from George Washington University. Post graduation, she studied at The Tamarind Institute of Lithography. .She taught all forms of Printmaking at Montgomery College on the Takoma Park Campus where she designed printmaking facilities for two fine art buildings. Currently a Professor Emerita, her current work involves combining traditional printmaking techniques with drawings and photographs on polyester plates—a challenging new environment of aesthetic choice and possibility. Her work celebrates the beauty of the natural world surviving, even thriving, amid the consequences of human activity. Her work has been exhibited in many national juried printmaking exhibitions.
As a visual artist using found objects, I work in partnership with my materials to articulate memory inherent in discarded things. I use multiple seemingly mundane items to put into perspective the abundance of life and the capacity to keep things as if for a rainy day. These often vintage items are repetitively hand-stitched into meditative patterns on sections of old quilts, bringing an extraordinary new life to otherwise everyday things.
FB: https://www.facebook.com/susan.lenz/
IG: https://www.instagram.com/susanlenz/
Kai Lum is a nonbinary/trans, Chinese-American artist living and working Western North Carolina. Their handbuilt ceramic sculptures explore healing and spirituality in the context of Taoist study. Originally from Colorado, they moved to Georgia to study at the Savannah College of Art and Design. After earning a Bachelors of Fine Arts, they moved to North Carolina, where they completed an Artist Residency at Odyssey ClayWorks in Asheville.
Based in Frostburg, Maryland, Stephen Manger is a mixed media artist who often strives to remove evidence of his own hand via mono-printing on glass. Over the course of his career, he has amassed an ever-increasing collection of techniques and processes to create amorphous, highly active, and abstract images that are often torn or cut for subsequent editing to make larger collage pieces. When possible, he uses recycled materials — paint, fabric, wood — as a matter of thrift and sustainability.
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/stephenmangerart/
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/stephenmangerart
Stephen March, born in York, Pennsylvania in 1943, received his B.A. in Fine Art from Penn State University and his M.F.A. in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design. A retired upper school art instructor at York Country Day School, he has also taught at Elmira College, York College of Pennsylvania, and has been an artist-in-residence at the Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, New York. March has had solo exhibitions of his work in New York City and throughout the Northeast and his artwork has been selected for numerous national and regional group exhibitions. March’s most recent solo exhibition, “As I See It”, was a Retrospective in the main gallery of York College of Pennsylvania’s Marketview Arts Building in downtown York, PA, November 24, 2023 through January
20, 2024.
My focus is on capturing and translating more than the usual pastoral landscapes and still life compositions. I strive to convey the interplay of light and its effects on color, transparency, and reflection. My focus is on the forms, values, and textures of my subjects.
Linda Popp is originally from Chicago but has lived in the Baltimore area since 1974.
She retired in 2021 after a 45-year career as an art educator. Since retiring, she has been able to shift her focus full-time to her studio work. Linda exhibits her work in several galleries in Maryland and on the East Coast.
@lpoppart
Zoe Sauvé is a 24 year old representational mixed media painter based in Syracuse, NY. She earned her Bachelor of Art from Hamilton College in 2023 with majors in both studio art and economics. Her work centers around her identity as a fat woman and her analysis of the world around her through that lens. Often drawing inspiration from abandoned imagery, such as derelict houses and garbage, Sauvé aims not only to challenge fatphobic ideologies through her paintings but to question why certain spaces and people are disregarded in the first place.
Holly Simon is a multimedia artist from Los Angeles, California, currently living in Allston, Massachusetts. Their work is primarily focused on a world of their creation, entitled Bugzwurld, which is rooted in medieval mythology and aesthetics as well as bronze age artifacts and archaeological findings. A core focus of Simon’s work is expanding the rigid view society has of how bodies are meant to look and be lived in, exploring what it means to connect to one’s own body through decoration and alteration of form (i.e. piercings, tattoos, clothing, makeup). Simon’s work is made as a form of self-expression as well as a means of envisioning a universe in which corporeality can be toyed with.
Instagram: @bugzwurld333
I am a Maryland painter of vibrantly colored and highly detailed calligraphic abstractions. My images seem to me contemporary but tied to antiquity, sometimes evoking dreams and totems. Some address issues that move me strongly, but without explicit storytelling. I am influenced by traditional and modern art of the Islamic world, American painters such as Thomas Nozkowski and Charline von Heyl, and plants. From my Western perspective, I try to inventively incorporate elements of the Middle Eastern art I love in my own work.
Sandra’s work focuses on photography emphasizing human condition in social identity, culture, diversity. She has dedicated long-term projects on women, LGBTQI, minorities, and American pop culture. Sandra has received numerous distinguished awards and was nominated in Prix Pictet theme HUMAN in UK 2023, winner for OpenWalls in the Recontres d’Arles France 2023, exhibitions including at the Phillips Collection, the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Aperture Gallery, and more. Her work is in several private and public collections including Gordon Parks Foundation.
I am deeply drawn to the relationships between color, form, and texture. Much of my work originates from photographs taken on my iPhone, capturing moments of nature, serendipity, and occasionally, happy accidents. These images serve as a springboard for exploration, whether they remain as photographs or evolve into drawings, paintings, or relief prints.
Xinyan Yu is an artist based in Jersey City, working primarily in oil painting. Her work is rooted in female life experience, reflecting on the cycles of life—its fragility, resilience, and transformative power. She explores the relationship between the body, memory, and change, drawing inspiration from nature, feminine energy, and bodily intuition. Through organic forms and fluid gestures, she creates inner landscapes shaped by shifting emotional states. Her work has been exhibited in New York and across the Northeast, including venues such as Viridian Artists Gallery, Mills Pond Gallery, and Suffolk Art Gallery.