2025 NAEA Member Exhibit

Painting

Photography

My photography has evolved from detailed compositions to minimalist explorations of texture, color, and light. Recently, I returned to self-portraits as a reflective practice, capturing personal and collective uncertainty. Through calming, meditative imagery, I invite emotional connection. I truly believe art can foster community and hope within a society.

Drawing

Wansapanataym (Once Upon a Time) revisits my nostalgic Philippine childhood, catching dragonflies in the rice fields. Central to my creative process is my erasure technique, which I call “excavating light”—a metaphor for unearthing hope within darkness. Art matters because it gives us this hope.

Mixed Media

The layering of inside and outside imagery creates a visual dissonance and asks the viewer to engage with different perspectives while viewing the maze of lines. Are you pulled through the portals to barren trees of winter, or do you remain climbing stairs—footsteps and voices echoing throughout the image?

Mixed Media

A testament to the daily trauma teachers and students carry due to gun violence and school shootings across the nation. The ghostly outline of the student body is dedicated to the invisible trauma caused by unannounced active shooter and lockdown drills performed on campuses nationwide. The backpack, complete with bullet holes, is surrounded by headlines from the past 15 years, documenting the numerous lives that have been lost to senseless violence. Thoughts & Prayers seal the holes.

Painting

I wanted the viewer to feel like they had too many drinks and were feeling tipsy.

Drawing

In Chains, We Plant Seeds portrays the weight of teaching in 2025. The pen pours out endless policies and laws, while the chains drag us down underwater, threatening our well-being. Yet, even as we drown, we lift delicate forget-me-nots—symbols of hope, remembrance, and the lasting influence of teachers. Through struggle, we continue planting seeds of growth, holding to the dream of breaking free from burdens that confine, leaving behind a legacy that endures.

Drawing

My work delves into the transformative journey of an immigrant or refugee, reshaping the term from a divisive word in America today and revealing the real faces behind them. My goal is to instill hope, empathy, and understanding. By using industrial materials as a canvas, I aim to further highlight the resilience and strength of the most vulnerable in society.

Printmaking

Relief printmaking has always been my favorite art medium; it is a sensory experience like no other—the smells, the sounds, the feel of tools, and the unique visual textures it produces. The medium itself can be so forgiving, yet the printing process is so technical. I love the balance of both processes—carving and printing—to create images based in nature. Among the Flora was created while I was in my graduate program at Eastern Illinois University during a weeks-long intensive studio course.

Painting

This painting explores a childhood memory of finding a bird skeleton under a tree in my yard. In that moment I felt fascination, sadness, and as if I possessed a great and mysterious treasure. I felt a sense of shifting—as in a dream where the known becomes the unknown.

Mixed Media

I began the painting by creating an underpainting to capture emotion, then had my subject sit for the portrait in her opera recital gown. The subject is a descendent of the Daughters of the Revolution and a single mother who had immigrated to Canada and was studying opera. I was inspired by the simplicity and honesty of her character and yet the incredible depth of her expression while singing.

Painting

I began the painting by creating an underpainting to capture emotion, then had my subject sit for the portrait in her opera recital gown. The subject is a descendent of the Daughters of the Revolution and a single mother who had immigrated to Canada and was studying opera. I was inspired by the simplicity and honesty of her character and yet the incredible depth of her expression while singing.

Painting

In my recent painting trip to Normandy, France, I came upon this family of cows grazing in a field. Like humans, the parent watches out for their young, carefree but mindful.

Sculpture

The sculptures I create from found objects provide insight to the question “What is Art?” The objects have histories, memories, or associations to time and place. Their stories take viewers beyond the sculpture’s physical form. Creativity and design aesthetics are not limited to traditional art supplies or materials.

Painting

South Beach, Neskowin, Oregon, is constantly changing and yet remaining the same. There are “ghost” trees (petrified tree stumps) from the last Cascadia earthquake in 1700. It was magnitude 8.7–9.2, and its tsunami was noted in Japan, which provided the evidence of the earthquake’s timing and size. These trees were sunk into the sand as the earthquake collapsed the shoreline into itself. We who live here do so in constant awareness that we are overdue for another catastrophic earthquake. This work was completed in gouache on Aqua Stonehenge paper.

Painting

Spring at Two Mile Creek, Arkansas, began on a peaceful walk as colors emerged after winter. I capture flowing water and light from my family’s creek using acrylics, painting both plein air and in the studio. Color, movement, and brushstrokes express my personal vision of this landscape.

Mixed Media

I have been inspired to create a series of artworks using materials I have collected over the years as I visited original homestead sites in western South Dakota. I am intrigued by the vastness of the prairie and the abandoned sites that were original homesteads of my family. The barbed wire brings a life of its own to the artworks, and the bits and pieces incorporated into the buildings represent the labor and dedication those ancestors used to create a life on the Western prairie.

Mixed Media

False Sunflower utilizes cyanotype imaging and natural dye derived from local fauna to represent the artist’s native Nebraska Sandhills home. Hand-sewn elements were inspired by Bloomfield’s research on European crazy quilts and Japanese sashiko embroidery. Themes of sustainability, women’s handiwork, and generational inheritance connect concepts of home and our material belongings.

Painting

Art is significant due to its capacity to shift how we view the world, igniting our creativity and introducing us to novel ideas. This acrylic artwork consists of 16 canvases created as homage to Cybele, the Anatolian mother goddess who serves as a bridge between the realms of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Those joined canvases represent the palm of a hand with a semireflective round glass at the center, which allows the spectator to become part of the artwork.

Mixed Media

Nostalgia Is a Seductive Liar is a mixed-media piece about memory, identity, and longing. I created it after moving away from the place where I was born. The layers and textures represent my roots and cultural connections. Some areas are bold and clear, while others feel distant, like fading memories. This work shows how nostalgia can be both beautiful and bittersweet.

Painting

Georgia’s Red Oak Creek Covered Bridge features a bridge built by Horace King, a man once enslaved turned master builder. The piece embodies resilience and passage. In my Bridge series, it symbolizes both public history and private longing, the labor of building, the act of crossing, and my search for family connection.

Drawing

Painting

This painting reflects my time in studio course experiences. My peers assumed lower expectations of me upon learning I was an art education major. Art educators face the perception that we are not “real” artists. This work proves that the role of an educator doesn’t hinder that of an artist.

Painting

This watercolor portrait of an eccentric Indiana musician accentuates his quirky personality, as squirrel silhouettes dance across the background in vibrant warm hues.

Drawing

I want to share the subtle, familiar, and wistful occasions in which scenery may become the main characters in the story. The subplot could come to the fore. Every scene has something that can inspire wonder. Through my small-scale, delicately treated drawings and paintings, I champion the hidden, the time-worn, the abandoned, the seemingly insignificant, and the decayed. I notice things. A crumb is fascinating. Nothing should be overlooked.

Photography

Mixed Media

Through the use of mediums, pastes, gels, and needle-felted wool, I’ve created highly textured landscapes with three-dimensional elements providing a new twist on landscapes. My hope is that the viewer will pause and relax, and be transported to a happy place of both calm and wonder.

Photography

This past summer I was blessed with clear skies on a new moon in the Outer Banks. I ventured out and spent long evenings photographing the Milky Way at different locations. Serendipity through all of this was a shot with a falling star. I have been teaching high school photography for 25 years and previously managed the photography department at the Maryland Institute College of Art. I am a member of the Harford County Photographers, Maryland Nightscapers, and 365 photo group.

Photography

Under the twin spans of a Great South Bay bridge, black-and-white photography captures raw geometry and reflective stillness. Steel trusses slice the sky while rippling water mirrors their rhythm. Shadows and light create dramatic depth, revealing strength, symmetry, and the timeless dialogue between human engineering and the natural waters below.

Sculpture

Two Sisters explores the fluidity of identity and the resilience of human experience. Two interconnected portraits unfurl across winding ceramic forms, their features echoing the tangled lines and knots of the clay beneath them. As viewers move around the works, faces shift and recombine, evolving with each new perspective. This work is acrylic on earthenware.

Folk Arts & Crafts

My work seeks to take the traditions of the past as well as the layers of symbolic representations from early Christian and Jewish art. Some of the early religious symbols I draw inspiration from come from sacred geometry. My new work seeks to bring together the beauty, nostalgia, and charm of mosaic work with the deeply spiritual symbols used by those same ancient cultures. I look for inspiration in biblical and other scriptural allegories.

Photography

This image captures a fleeting moment—my friend photographing Banksy’s elusive work in Park City, Utah. I was inspired by the layers of observation: artist, art, and observer. Art matters because it invites reflection, challenges perception, and connects us across time and space through shared stories and spontaneous encounters.

Folk Arts & Crafts

This glass mosaic captures my grief and memory of the death of my own mother when I was young by showing a boy lying within the chalk outline of his mother, remembering her love and loss. His shirt states “left behind” in Chinese because that was how I felt—broken inside—during my adolescence. He lies there wondering if she is thinking of him, wherever she is, missing him. The use of classroom garbage glass fragments reflect both the permanence of death and the fragile shimmer of remembrance.

Mixed Media

I layered my child’s playful cat sketch with a digital drawing of a portrait, split, of one of my students on a monotype with an embossed bread knife and then gel transferred this to a large wood panel. I was reflecting on my students’ fragile adolescence and the tension between self-discovery and loss. This piece holds my hope that art and storytelling can nurture empathy and resilience, even when outcomes defy our expectations.

Mixed Media

Media Arts

Layared with spray paint, acrylic paint, screen printing, and drawing, this work builds textured history into its surface. The life jacket, worn and radiant, embodies courage chosen in peril, affirming endurance and persistence of hope.

Sculpture

With this piece, I aimed to “material shift” an object that feels connected to both my present life and my past. As an art student, paintbrushes are part of my daily routine. But they also carry a more personal meaning for me; my Nana was the one who first taught me to paint, shaping a huge part of my identity. In some ways, she’s my universe, my Bristle Full of Stars. By sculpting a paintbrush entirely out of wood, it’s transformed from a tool used to create art into a piece of art itself.

Mixed Media

I am interested in exploring and finding the moments. Moments of chaos. Moments of calm. Moments. Mixed media best captures what I sometimes struggle to find. The layers capture and reveal. The juncture of materials provide contrasts worth investigating. Some might result in triviality, but more often it exposes the needed moment. Thus the power of it is now delivered. The moment recorded. Now on to find more.

Sculpture

This is a narrative found-object assemblage wall-relief sculpture from my Relationship with Time series. In this series, I am reflecting on past experiences I enjoyed and new adventures that I am looking forward to. I think both activities are very important for our mental and emotional health. This work was inspired by Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game.” As I am aging I find the carousel of life is speeding ahead, and I would like to slow it down to enjoy new adventures.

Painting

I work from photos, so half the challenge is being in the right place at the right time. The day I saw this heron, it was raining. I followed it to several locations around Conestee Nature Preserve, and each time it landed, it paused long enough for me to take many photos. By the time I left Conestee, I was soaking wet, and I had damaged my camera, but I’d had so much fun! Painting often takes me right back to those precious encounters with birds and nature.

Painting

This work was inspired by my father’s tractor. Like animals and humans, there comes a time when work slows down or stops. Winter is a fitting time to illustrate this concept. This watercolor piece is a tribute to the hardworking farmer my dad was.

Sculpture

Artistic supplies and resources can have a significant ecological impact. While we are moving toward more sustainable practices, the overall environmental footprint of traditional artmaking is still heavy. I aim to reduce my inherent hypocrisy of addressing environmental concerns with unsustainable materials. Black is my third welded sculpture using recycled and/or discarded rusted metal pieces from barns, dumpsters, and roadsides. He is the start of my new, conscientious journey into “clean art.”

Folk Arts & Crafts

Quilting became my language, transforming curiosity into self-discovery. Traditional materials felt limiting, but fabric carries stories, each piece weaving my identity. Blending quilting, collage, and color, I create layered, two-sided works—knots and threads visible—reflecting tangled, unfinished, yet whole emotions. My quilts are portraits of life, stitched into being.

Sculpture

Jeremy is a handbuilt lidded vessel and my second alien sculpture. While creating him, I was reminded why art is so important. When my thoughts feel jumbled, art helps me find clarity. Working with the materials brings peace, hope, and understanding. In short, I believe art saves lives.

Painting

My son and many of his friends are part of the transgender community in Richmond, VA. I recently started creating oil and acrylic paintings of his friends to show their beauty and strength. This painting celebrates David, aka Bacchus, who is not only one of my son’s best friends, but a student I taught several years ago in high school art. Art has always been an important part of his identity and a way we have all shared a similar bond throughout the years.

Painting

I created a piece that reflects the time we live in.

Photography

My photography normally is centered around people, a type of sentimental street photography, looking into the quiet parts of what makes us human. But most recently, I have found a new interest in photographing in and around water. I love how water abstracts. How it distorts shapes, reflects light, moves lines. It can be so unpredictable, but yet I have an exact sense of what I imagine an image to become. When I take photos of people, the eyes are always so important. Here it is the focal point.

Printmaking

Assemblage is a collage of failed prints reimagined into renewal. Inspired by my slow fashion background and work with Pakistani women artisans, it honors imperfection, traditional assemblages, and environmentally friendly materials and techniques, celebrating resilience, interconnectedness, and the quiet beauty of transforming discarded fragments into narratives of growth, sustainability, and meaning.

Mixed Media

Binyah defines a community that has a deep connection to heritage. The Gullah Geechee people have roots that run deep and wide in coastal Carolina. A young Oscar Frazier with his daughter Bridgette are the subject of this cyanotype, a process selected for its vibrant indigo hues. “Haint” blue was painted on doorways, shutters, and window sills, and blue bottles on trees as a form of protection. This piece honors the Frazier family, their cultural contributions, and advocacy.

Painting

I am drawn to geometric forms and angles. For my current series of large watercolor paintings, I have searched for those elements in the world of trains, concentrating on the moving parts that most people do not notice. Being so close to something enormous and powerful feels simultaneously dangerous and intimate to me. These new paintings are an homage to the inner workings of the machines that move just about everything we use on a daily basis.

Painting

This work depicts the joy of being uplifted through the gift of dance. The complexity in the dance experience is beyond physical, as it is also metaphysical. It is in the realm of the spiritual and psychological. The subject’s exaltation comes from learning how to maneuver her space in the world. She knows when to reach, when to stretch, when to leap, when to twirl, when to embrace, when to push away, and when to soar. She is now joyfully exalted in life with no limitations to her destiny and achievements.

Mixed Media

The “base” began with works that were produced to evoke the stress and anxiety involved in being a teacher. The marks represent the day-to-day things to do, a never-ending to-do list, a lack of work–life balance, and repetition and loss of self. However, I have taken a new outlook of embracing the challenge with a positive outlook of love and compassion. I chose students to work with me on collaborative work, which shows their thoughts on their feelings in the art room, my teaching, and our relationships.

Painting

This family portrait explores the balance between motherhood and identity. Referencing Las Meninas by Velázquez, the artist stands at the threshold of her studio, backlit by the golden hour. Shadows bounce around a playfully chaotic scene, underscoring opportunities and obstacles that lie on the horizon.

Painting

I have been meeting every couple of weeks with two longtime college friends to create art. We establish ideas and completion dates and then meet on FaceTime to share our works. This assignment was to be a pet portrait inspired by a famous artist. My painting of my cats was loosely inspired by Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. Mine is called The Snuggle.

Photograph

I appreciate the ability to transform space and reality through the manipulation of photographs. I consider my family, my high school art teaching, and my aesthetics when creating a digital art piece. Transpositions aligns with my themes of multiplicity of subject, reflection and rotation of an image, and speaks to my students with learning disabilities. Transposing elements in the photograph invites the viewer to consider how visual perception is not equal for all individuals.

Sculpture

Sculpture

This work examines the combination of organic fragility and industrial tension. The suspended leather is stretched within a framework, transforming hide into a stretched membrane that reveals texture and vulnerability. The word “HIDE” becomes both literal descriptor and conceptual invitation, questioning what we conceal and systems that pull upon us.

Painting

This painting on found object was created in response to the aftermath of Hurricane Milton. The sculptural textures on the boxed water container represent the chaotic energy of the storm. This water was given out after several days without power. It is a reminder of daily comforts taken for granted.

Mixed Media

Mixed Media

My work explores motherhood, memory, and childhood through materiality. Water recurs as a metaphor: calm and chaos, body and sea. I build images from photographs using polymer clay. Through color mixing, tactility, and transformation of craft materials, I elevate daily rituals of care into visible, resonant acts of art.

Sculpture

This is a stone carving made with a white and orange alabaster rock on a black granite base. I worked on this sculpture for approximately 2 years. I work on several different projects and art media at the same time. When displaying this piece, I use backlighting to enhance the colors of the rock because of the varying thicknesses. Thin areas in the sculpture are as thin as 1/8 inch. When displayed in galleries, Spirit is also on a turntable so the viewer can enjoy all sides with the backlighting.

Photography

My work explores mental health through the lens of depression, seeking to give shape to an experience that often exists in silence and invisibility. The imagery I create reflects both the weight and the distortion that depression brings: moments that feel suspended, and the way time itself can blur or fracture. Colors often slip into one another, edges dissolving and blending, mirroring the way emotions and thoughts can lose definition under the weight of depression.

Folk Arts & Crafts

This summer I started a challenge to define my life in plates: one for every year of my life, aged 0–49. Each plate celebrates visual memories that formed my artistic identity. It is a visual retrospective of my very ordinary life told through the patterns, fabrics, artists, musicians, and moments that felt extraordinary. It’s 1978. My 2-year-old self is wearing a family heirloom: the overalls. Worn by all children in the family, love worn into the threads from use, and fixed in my memory forever.

Painting

I use nature as a point of departure into a psychological exploration of figurative realms. My process is guided by intuition, beginning with use of a raw lyrical line. This painting emerged from a series of drawings inspired by the blooming of a Queen of the Night plant in my garden and Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. Through the interplay of form and feeling, I aim to elevate the viewer into an ephemeral space.

Photograph

Each rose becomes a note, its petals unfolding like measures of music. Together, they compose a visual symphony where color, texture, and form merge into balance. Just as a symphony unites diverse instruments into one harmonious sound, the roses gather in shared rhythm, creating harmony through their variations of pink. Symphony in Blush invites viewers to see nature’s ability to orchestrate beauty—soft, strong, and perfectly attuned.

Mixed Media

This work is inspired by the vision of feminine leadership: bold yet compassionate. The pink bullseye on the Capitol symbolizes hope for a future where women uplift women, and power is guided by empathy. Art matters because it imagines possibilities, challenges systems, and points us toward a kinder world.

Painting

The focus of many of my paintings is to show the personality of the figure via the patterns and/or colors they chose to wear. Faces of the figures are not the central to the painting. Cardboard may be added to the canvas to give added dimension and texture.

Painting

This large painting had been swimming around in my head for some time, initially making its presence known as a composite photograph. I began painting it 2 years ago and found the abstract areas overwhelming. With renewed determination this summer, I finally finished the work I intended to create.

Painting

In my paintings, I strive to depict individuality and uniqueness through my use of expressive color. I also attempt to convey a shift in power and a reclaiming of focus on our lands. In this piece specifically (the second in a series of three), I paint rainbow eucalyptus trees native to Maui, where women are constantly sexualized by tourists and the media, labeled “Maui Babes.” I want the viewer to shift their focus to protecting our beautiful land instead of sexualizing the women who inhabit it.

Folk Arts & Crafts

Experimenting with fibers and considering landscape patterns in terms of cyclical growth, maturation, and dormancy drove my thinking during this weaving. I collected a variety of fiber material and, as I wove, considered change in the land over the course of a calendar year. The weaving is vertical as if time runs from top to bottom, however my interest was in the transitions from one horizontal section to the next, and experimenting with interactions of colors and textures.