lisa olson & mary beth muscara: family, creativity, continuity + art | interrupted
December 7 - 28, 2024
Lisa Olson and Mary Beth Muscara share two grandchildren, but their lives and art practices are as far apart as their studios in Lexington, MA and Baltimore, MD. They both explore the fragility and danger of life and the relentlessness of time through collaged, painted, sculpted, corporeal, and somatic interruptions.
Lisa Olson received an MFA in Mixed Media and a BS in Microbiology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her work is in many public and private collections including Brown University; the Universities of California, Los Angeles and San Diego; the Cleveland Institute of Art; and the Boston Public Library. She lives in Lexington, MA and is a past member of Bromfield Gallery.
Lisa is living with Parkinson’s disease, which has robbed her of her manual dexterity and strength, but her art is still flowing. She is making do with a shaped metal punch, glue, and a 30-year archive of her prints, drawings, and photographs to create an ongoing body of collage work and mail art. She thinks of this as a last dance and hopes it will take her years to complete.
Mary Beth Muscara is from Baltimore and has had residencies at Yaddo, Hambidge Center for the Arts in Georgia, and Vermont Studio Center. She has received grants from the Maryland State Arts Council and she was nominated for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and non-profit spaces throughout the Baltimore-Washington and mid-Atlantic region including Maryland Art Place, Easton Academy of the Arts, Anton Gallery, New Jersey Center for Visual Arts, and Gwinnett Fine Arts Center in Duluth, Georgia. Her mixed-media paintings and sculpture engage with the nature of reality.
Mary Beth says, “Habitual tendencies lead us to view our lives through narrow filters.” Her goal is to break through those filters “and see what is simply there to reveal the transitory nature of everything”– including herself.
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