Jun 042026
 

Ohio artist and muralist Lizzi Aronhalt created this mural in 2023. It is located on the Arts in Stark building in downtown Canton.

Elsewhere, an exhibition of her landscape and cityscape paintings, is currently on view at Cyrus Custom Framing and Art Gallery in Canton until 6/30/26.

You can also find her work on Instagram.

Jun 022026
 

Overlooking the Sartain Street Community Garden, David Guinn‘s mural Garden of Delight was created in 2010 for Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program.

About the mural from Mural Arts Philadelphia’s website:

On the left side of the mural, rendered in line drawings, are three vignettes from the immediate neighborhood. Two trees in the center lean into each other, symbolic of an embrace. The garden spills out from the space between them. This is to symbolize the spirit of community gardens and the people who work together to nurture these gardens. Guinn created the mural with transparent colors, to simulate the feel of a watercolor painting. The bottom extends the actual garden’s space up onto the wall and vice versa.

You can also find Guinn’s work on his Instagram.

Jun 012026
 

Johanna Samuels- Two People, The Moon

Every month I listen to the majority of bands and musicians who are playing in Los Angeles and select some for a monthly playlist. It includes a variety of genres and usually newer work by the artists.

This month’s playlist includes songs by Dry Cleaning, Miss Grit, Anjimile, mary in the junkyard, Nothing, and ZHU.

The song above, Two People, The Moon will be on Johanna Samuels‘ upcoming album, Sorry, Kid, releasing on 8/14/26.

May 302026
 

The paintings pictured above are from Philly-based artist Macy West‘s exhibition 4:5, currently on view at Pink Noise Projects in Philadelphia until 5/31/26.

Her statement about the work from the gallery:

4:5 is a new collection of paintings considering the shorthand, diagramming, and notation that accompanies notetaking and sorting of information. I’m fascinated with perception, how we move through the world with physical bodies, how our bodies mediate our experience, and how we develop additional mediators, symbols, and signals to communicate with each other. Developed within the aesthetic parameters of the notebook, each painting relies on the repetition of form and mark. The grid, the crop, and the mask are recurring compositional strategies which reference ideation, speculation, and learning. The paintings are only 10 x 12.5 inches each, maintaining my preferred 4:5 ratio at the scale of the page.

These works respond to my own need to work through information in my studio, to prepare again and again, to edit, revise, measure, scale up, scale down, transpose, translate, cut, paste, and rotate as I try to make sense of experience: perpetual motion, the passage of time, the constant stream of images, the torrent of news, and the influx of sensory information more generally. For 4:5, many of the paintings begin with a screenprint which, like a notebook, contains and sequences the content, the image on the canvas. The structure is a primary assumption accepted to receive the meaning, which excludes as much as it organizes. My perpetual impulse toward change prevents me from flattening ideas into a single image.

The paintings reference the need for a key or an interpreter when engaging with the generated abstractions.Their meaning exists in their impenetrability, their sense of organization without understanding. They are fragmented in a way that reminds us of breakdown in communication, and the limits of human knowledge. What does it mean to know part of something? How much knowledge is required for understanding? When does position fail to provide context, but instead dilute meaning?

May 272026
 

Works by Zoe Elwood

MFA candidates Tim Carr, Ryan Dittmar, Zoe Elwood, Rebecca Giles, Arizol Mendoza, Alyssa Rose Pirolli, and Nasir Young are currently showing their work at The Delaware Contemporary for the 2026 University of  Delaware Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition. The show will be on view until 5/31/26.

The sculptures pictured above are part of  Zoe Elwood‘s installation.

Information from the museum about the artist:

Zoe Elwood (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist from central Utah, currently based in Newark, DE, as they pursue an MFA in sculpture at the University of Delaware (UD). A self-proclaimed “sculpture convert,” the thesis exhibition for their BFA in painting & drawing (Utah Valley University, 2023) featured numerous assemblages of found objects, and one painting. The language of their practice continues to involve all things patinated, favoring the strange familiarity of those that remind of the home. Through such materials Elwood interrogates heteronormative notions of domesticity and discusses queer identity formation within intimate, intolerant spaces. Elwood is a current DELPHI Fellow at UD’s Center for Material Culture Studies and has been the recipient of several other honors, including the Dianne Komminsk Scholarship.

Below are more works from the exhibition and some information provided by the artists and the museum.

Paintings by Nasir Young

Nasir Young (B.1995, Philadelphia,Pa) received his BFA from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art in 2021; and is currently a MFA candidate at the University of Delaware(2026). Young is currently represented by Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia and had his first two solo shows at the gallery. He has had a multitude of group shows along the east coast. Awards he has received range from was The Raymond D. & Estelle Rubens Travel Scholarship; two illuminate arts grants; an Elizabeth Greenshields grant; and was the second-place winner of the Philadelphia Sketch Club 158th exhibition of small oils. Young was an artist in residence at Davinci Art Alliance Resident; Delaware Contemporary and upland Vermont. Nasir’s primary source of imagery is the everyday scenes of urban inner city life influenced by the shared visual language between places.

Photo Collage work by Ryan Dittmar

Ryan Dittmar is a photographer currently collaging images onto metal forms. His work focuses on memory and what happens to it when it is lost. Dittmar first started with photography in his undergraduate studies at SUNY Oneonta. He examines the ties that photographs have to memory, examining what happens over time when memory fades but the image remains.

Through the process of photography and collage, I collect memories with the camera and re-work the memories with my exacto knife. Steel sheets become the settings for these new scenes to exist. They represent a place in my mind, an open area in which memories are allowed to be reconstructed on. At its most simplest ingredients it is steel, and photopaper. Together these forms create the liminal space that is what I call the void. The place in between presence and memory.

Paintings by Rebecca Giles

Rebecca Giles is a painter who earned her BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her paintings focus on photosynthesis and plant cellular structures. She is especially interested in artificial photosynthetic systems. Giles is inspired by microscopic plant life. She has a light microscope in her art studio, and she paints pictures of what she sees through her microscope. She uses her microscope as an art tool to investigate light and color. Giles wants viewers to experience a feeling of overwhelming awe at the incredible vastness of the miniature worlds found within nature. She calls this feeling of awe the microscopic sublime.

Sculptures by Tim Carr

Tim Carr earned his BFA with a concentration in ceramics from Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in 2024. He is currently pursuing his MFA at the University of Delaware. Much of his practice centers on utilitarian ware, which he expands to engage with personal and conceptual themes, using clay as a metaphor for culture, folklore, and narrative storytelling. Throughout a decade of working with ceramics, his artistic journey began in the communal studios of the Chester County Art Association, where he first developed foundational skills in the medium. His early years at Alfred University deepened his fascination with functional tableware and refined his approach to utilitarian ceramics, with a particular focus on mastering wheel throwing.

Paintings by Alyssa Pirolli

Alyssa Pirolli is a visual artist from New Jersey and is currently an MFA Candidate at the University of Delaware. She attended private art lessons with artist Rebecca Tait at the Studio of Glenn Gables in Laurel Springs, NJ before continuing her training in Philadelphia. Pirolli received her BA from Chestnut Hill College and a Certificate from the Advanced Fine Art Program at Studio Incamminati. Her work is focused on exploring ‘the self’ and the human condition, primarily through portraiture. Community, especially the one she has come to know while pursuing her studies in Delaware, has become a driving force in her current body of work.

Sculpture by Arizol Mendoza

Arizol Mendoza (she/her/hers) is a Mexican-American sculptural ceramic artist born in New Jersey, USA. She obtained her B.A. in Art in 2018 from Rutgers University with a Minor in Psychology and is a current MFA candidate at the University of Delaware (2026). Mendoza began her ceramics career in 2015 while studying at Raritan Valley Community College (Branchburg, NJ). Originally concentrating in Graphic Design, she discovered that the plasticity and physicality of clay— combined with her existing interest in abstract forms opened a door to exploring ceramics as a medium for translating her visions into tactile, three-dimensional forms. Her earlier works explored personal narratives and storytelling through organic forms.

May 222026
 

Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt was born today, May 22nd, in 1844. The oil painting above, Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge, 1879, can be seen at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as part of their permanent collection.

From the museum about the work:

Cassatt created a series of theater scenes in the late 1870s, displaying an interest in city nightlife shared by many of the Impressionists. This work, showing a woman (often said to be her sister Lydia) seated in front of a mirror with the balconies of the Paris Opéra House reflected behind her, demonstrates the influence of Cassatt’s friend Edgar Degas, particularly in the attention paid to the effects of artificial lighting on flesh tones. This painting was shown in Paris at the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879, where it was singled out for much praise.

May 212026
 

Roy Lichtenstein‘s painting Desk Calendar, 1962, part of MOCA‘s permanent collection, was on view at the museum in 2024 as part of the exhibition Reverberations.

May 202026
 

“The Shape of What Remains”, 2026, Casein, Painted Paper, and Shopping Bag Paper

“Cocooned Reflection”, 2025, Casein, Collage, Blackout Poem,and Acrylic Mediums

“We Learn to Be Guarded”, 2026, Casein, Collaged Drawings, Found Objects and Acrylic Medium

“We Learn to Be Guarded” (detail)

For An American Son, Oscar Eduardo de Paz‘s solo exhibition at Chris White Gallery in Wilmington, he has created a series of works that capture moments from his life growing up as an American born to immigrant parents. The addition of collaged poems and objects adds textures to the paintings that draw the viewer in, while his focus on hands emphasizes the commonalities in his experiences.

From the gallery-

An American Son presents a powerful new body of work by Oscar Eduardo de Paz, tracing his journey from childhood poverty to fatherhood, community, and artistic emergence.

Through his Poetic Symbolic Representation (PSR) approach, de Paz layers figures, objects, archival fragments, and lived memory to reveal how American systems, poverty, policing, immigration, education, and care, shape a life. These paintings move between personal testimony and collective history, offering an intimate and compelling account of American experience through one son’s eyes.

The gallery is hosting a closing reception this Friday evening, 5/22/26, from 5-8pm.