On March 8, You Are Here in Jeannette will host an artists’ reception for its “Women in Art” exhibit, currently on display at the Clay Avenue gallery.
For two of the participating artists, it will be a doubly special occasion.
Not only will the exhibit feature artwork from sisters Maria Fagan of Murrysville and Kimberly Adams of Mt. Lebanon, but the reception will take place on what would have been the 100th birthday of their mother, a Jeannette native.
Fagan said she and Adams, who both started painting relatively recently, inherited their creativity from family.
“Our mom was really into fashion, and our dad was a mechanic, but he also did a good deal of painting, and my uncle was an artist during his time in the Navy,” Fagan said.
Adams was a certified public accountant for several years, but, while on a break from the financial world, she took an adult-education painting class in 2018 and started taking more interest in painting. She and Fagan eventually made a trip to New Mexico, where they both worked with professional artist and art coach Gwen Fox.
“I didn’t initially go there to paint; I just didn’t want Kim to have to go on the trip alone,” Fagan said. “But I ended up painting, thought it was fun and got a lot of wonderful encouragement from Gwen.”
Fagan’s focus is on abstract artwork. She uses a process called cold wax painting, where a beeswax-like substance is mixed with oil paints and applied to the canvas with a small tool similar to a spatula.
“I use a lot of sharp angles in my paintings, and I think that’s one thing I sort of share with Kim,” Fagan said. “Her paintings are very precise.”
Adams works primarily with oil paints and said she prefers to focus on nature and landscapes as her subjects.
“I work in a sort of abstract realism,” she said. “I’m not interested in replicating a photo in paint. With my art, you can tell what it is, but there’s some abstraction mixed in.”
Adams has two pieces that are part of “Women in Art.”
“One is called ‘Fall Fantasy,’ and it’s sort of looking up into an autumn tree,” she said. “The other is of one of the large aloe plants that were all over the place when I visited St. John (in the Virgin Islands).”
Fagan and Adams are among 35 female artists whose work is featured in the exhibit.
“We’ve done the ‘Women in Art’ exhibit for the past six years,” said You Are Here co-founder Mary Briggs. “They’re always a little different — we’ve done juried shows, we’ve done years where we give the artists a general prompt and there’s a bit of a theme to the exhibit. We’ve used a number of approaches over the years.”
“Women in Art” will be on display through March 22 at You Are Here, 406 Clay Ave. An artists’ reception will be from 6 to 8 p.m. March 8.
For the gallery’s regular hours and more, see YAH406clay.org.
Patrick Varine is a TribLive reporter covering Delmont, Export and Murrysville. He is a Western Pennsylvania native and joined the Trib in 2010 after working as a reporter and editor with the former Dover Post Co. in Delaware. He can be reached at pvarine@triblive.com.
