A PLACE TO EXPERIENCE, CREATE, AND APPRECIATE ART.

The Mansfield Art Center is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.

  Elizabeth T. Black Gallery

John Mellencamp | Paintings & Assemblages

June 26 – August 7 | $5 Admission | Members Free

VIP Preview Party | Saturday, June 25 | 5:30-8pm | $50 RSVP, 419.756.1700

Opening Reception | Sunday, June 26 | 1-5pm

John Mellencamp brings his mixed-media exhibition Paintings and Assemblages to The Mansfield Art Center June 26. He is a member of the Rock and Roll and Songwriters Halls of Fame, a recipient of the John Steinbeck Award, ASCAP Foundation’s Champion Award, The Woody Guthrie Award, the Americana Music Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and most recently, the Founders Award, the top honor assigned by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. Mellencamp is also an accomplished painter, collector, and activist. Paintings and Assemblages documents America’s heart and soul, exposing unsettling but beautiful truths with an attitude of defiance and narrative sensibility.

As his musical career flourished, Mellencamp began to paint earnestly in the 1980’s. His affinity for portraiture shares a kinship with the German Expressionism of the early twentieth century. Artists such as Otto Dix and Max Beckmann are often sighted as influences. Like his music, Mellencamp’s paintings are carefully composed through the structural requirements of harmony, rhythm, and order. His large-scale oil portraits and mixed-media pieces examine subjects that speak to the viewer with a voice as powerful as his songs.

John Mellencamp isn’t trying to make us feel comfortable. His paintings are at times unsettling, and confrontational. John is a consummate storyteller. In his paintings, he sets the stage and puts the story in motion, often allowing the painting itself to steer its own course, only to become complete when connecting to the individual viewer. The characters are gritty and raw, much like Mellencamp’s voice, some pulled from personal experiences, while others are imagined and brought to life in the paintings. It becomes instantly apparent through the sheer volume and scale of the work, the expressionist strokes, and somber tones, that this is a person whose mind is constantly at work. His paintings are not only about the creative act, but also about a catharsis of thoughts. John Mellencamp is in a constant state of purging his heart into his music and art and is equally adept at expressing himself in both places. Paintings and Assemblages brings together approximately fifty original works, many never displayed before, representing a varied selection from hundreds of his paintings.

He has exhibited his work in galleries and museums across the United States including: The Butler Institute of American Art- Youngstown, OH; The Tennessee State Museum- Nashville, TN; The Museum of Art-Deland, FL; ACA Galleries- NY; and The Morris Museum of Art- Augusta, GA. The Mansfield Art Center will be showcasing a full collection of Mellencamp’s work, including recent paintings, in the Elizabeth T. Black Gallery from June 26- Aug 7, 2022. An Opening Reception is scheduled for Sunday, June 26 from 1-5pm; featuring food trucks and craft beer from The Phoenix Brewery.

Sponsored by:

 Foundation Gallery

Mindy Tousley & George Roby | Manifestations in Paper & Clay

June 26 – August 7

Manifestations in Paper & Clay, explores the friendship between Mindy Tousley & the late George Roby, the synchronicity of their work, and their shared use of abstraction to present their observations and experiences of the world through their art, exemplifying the larger conversation between artists which crosses time.

Mindy Tousley, is the Executive Director of The Artists Archives of the Western Reserve (AAWR) and a committed studio artist. Her practice as an artist using paper is influenced by her own background as a ceramicist, and is built around her appreciation for the beauty of the accidental mark or the random act. In this, her approach is very much like Roby’s approach to the clay. Her work is based on her observations of her everyday life, the natural world, and the urban environment, banality, absurdity and ugliness or beauty. She finds joy in creating order out of chaos, unbalancing and rebalancing and then finding the center.

The late Archived Artist George Roby, a graduate of Cranbrook, was a highly respected Ohio potter, sculptor, and teacher who mainly produced both functional and sculptural works in the medium of clay. Many of his pieces in Manifestations are deeply personal sculptures chronicling his own unique emotional experience as a caregiver for his wife Sue, as they faced the daily realities of her Alzheimer’s diagnosis before her death in 2014. These pieces have mainly been shown as part of the Art Interprets Alzheimers Exhibition, which has travelled to over 20 different venues since 2012, and is now part of the collection of the AAWR. Roby’s other works are predominantly altered vessels. They embrace the concept of imperfection; a simple stretching of volume from the inside which throws the symmetrical pot off balance, or a line drawn down through the clay on the outside while it is wet and malleable, fresh from the potters’ wheel. His actions accentuate and draw our attention to the nature of the clay, and the imperfections of the individual.

Spotlight Gallery

 Wilhelmina Marks | Through my Eyes

June 5 – July 10

My photographs focus primarily on a sole individual, whether it is part of them or their whole being. In these unique portraits, I aim to capture emotion and movement in an abstract manner. As a dancer my intention is to bring life to the image through the body language and surrounding atmosphere.

I am inspired by the traveling of natural light through time and how it affects the space within the image. Overall, my desire in photography as it is in dance is to choreograph a moment in time that each viewer can either relate to or question.

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