Andrew W. Allison is a mixed media artist born in Wichita, Kansas, and raised in Pittsburgh. He began making things early on in order to engage with his experiences with nights terrors. Allison creates intuitive, sculptural installations using hand-made, mixed media objects and paintings that explore identity, memory, and the preternatural.
Susquehanna, Current
Mine Factory, Alumni
Kimberlyn Bloise is a ceramic artist living in Lawrenceville, PA. Working mainly in porcelain, Kimberlyn makes musical ceramic objects, specializing in pieces that are dually-functional as drinking vessels and musical instruments. She's working on patenting the flute handle that makes it possible for you to play a tune and have your coffee at the same time. In December of 2014, Kimberlyn graduated from Mercyhurst University with a B.A. in Studio Art and moved back home to Pittsburgh. She was a member of the ceramics cooperative at Union Project in Highland Park from 2014 to 2016 where she taught ceramics classes and worked alongside some truly wonderful artists. Kimberlyn was chosen to receive an Emerging Artist Scholarship for the Three Rivers Arts Festival in 2015, which kickstarted her business as a traveling artist. Kimberlyn now enjoys traveling to art shows all over the country to sell her work.
Susquehanna, Current
Christopher Boring is a painter living in the Bloomfield neighborhood of Pittsburgh, PA. Christopher focuses on traditional, direct observational, painting and drawing. Recently his work was exhibited in Phoenixville Center for the Arts in Phoenixville,PA and Future Tenant in Pittsburgh, PA. Christopher attended and graduated from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania with his B.F.A. in Drawing and minor in Painting from 2008 to 2012.
Susquehanna, Current
Artist Statement/ Bio: April Friges’ art practice is about looking at photographic conventions and creating alternate methods by blurring the boundaries of digital and analog media. She considers how ideologies of photography range in definition from person to person, and how that translation differs today in both physical and immaterial form. Her photographic works comprise of large-scale, unique, black and white and color darkroom prints. Her images are not from a camera; Friges works in the darkroom with only photosensitive paper and light to develop a complex and imaginary language with the mediums in exploration. The paper is physically manipulated to construct three-dimensional sculpted works that examine the intersection between image and object. The site-specific gallery lighting create shadows from these objects, relating to the origin of how the works are created. Once off the walls, the pieces are often rolled up and flattened, thus creating a body of work in flux every time the work is exhibited.
April Friges was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and in 2010 received her MFA in studio art from The University of California, Irvine. Friges lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she is the assistant professor of the BFA photography program at Point Park University.
Susquehanna, Current
Mine Factory, Alumni
Heather Heitzenrater is a figurative oil painter from Punxsutawney, PA but now lives with her fiance in Pittsburgh. Heather uses reflective mylar to create surreal, colorful environments that the figures inhabit. Heather received her BFA in Painting and Drawing from Edinboro, PA in 2015. Her work has been shown in the Erie Art Museum and has be published in the Chimera 11 journal and also on the cover of the Happy Hour Review. In addition, Heather is a new member of the Pittsburgh Society of Artists. Along with showing her work around the city, Heather also hosts painting parties at Painting with a Twist in the South Side. Heather and her fiance, Christopher Boring, share a space at the Radiant Hall Susquehanna location.
Susquehanna, Current
Todd Keyser is a painter residing in East Liberty, PA. Keyser’s paintings emphasize their own architectural potential through a geometric interplay that is direct and evocative. The work is resolutely abstract in its totality; composition, tone, touch, and color are highly calibrated in the artist’s paintings. He has exhibited at Gross McCleaf Gallery, FJORD, Vox Populi, Pittsburgh Filmmakers, and with AAP at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Todd Keyser received his MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD (2008-2011) and his BFA from University of the Arts, Philadelphia, pa (1993-1998) and a certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1994-1998). Keyser has written for Title-Magazine, Bmoreart, criticaleyes, and the Pittsburgharticulate.
Susquehanna, Current
Conor McGrann is a printmaker, mixed media, and installation artist living in the Bloomfield neighborhood of Pittsburgh, PA. His work is focused on the relationship between geography and culture, usually manifesting in the form of maps. He examines the co-evolution of space and community through time, revealing tension between the built and natural environments. Conor received a BFA in printmaking from Syracuse University in 2009. In addition to his own artwork, he currently works as the Printshop Coordinator at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and as a local teaching artist.
Susquehanna, Current
Aisling (pronounced Ash-ling) Quigley received her BA in Studio Art (focus in printmaking) from Carleton College in Minnesota. Since then, she has worked in museums and libraries (with a brief stint at a zoo and vet clinic), and is currently a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh. I make art as much as I can, and it is usually somewhat whimsical.
Susquehanna, Current
I work across diverse mediums and disciplines, incorporating broad interests into my studio practice, set design, and socially engaged projects. I am attuned to the contradictions, nuances, beauty, sadness and ridiculousness saturating the cultural atmosphere of contemporary life in America. My attunement to the visual and cultural landscape of the moment is the driving force behind much of my work. I delight in using the cast off materials and images of mass production and mass culture yet I resist the system that would create such materials, endanger the natural world and destroy people. This contradiction enables my work to hold both humor and the pathos of our contemporary plights. I understand that my acts of creation are a contrast to the awareness of the destruction and violence of our time.
Susquehanna, Current
Nikita Zook is a multidisciplinary artist and illustrator living and working in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She makes art to discover and creates work that is decidedly positive and often whimsical. Nikita’s studio practice has always been self-guided and self-motivated and much of her work is very personal. Through the process of making, she explores ideas of self, vulnerability, imagination, and meaning. She works primarily with paper and ink, but also uses watercolor, gouache, her iPhone, and cut up magazines and is always experimenting with new techniques and materials.
March through July 2016, she completed her first 100 day project focused on hand lettering and shared a quote each day for 100 days on Instagram @just_make_things, establishing creative habits and productive risk taking. In December 2016, she focused on drawing and digital design, and shared an original sketch or image every day for 30 days. She is currently in the middle of 365 days of making in 2017. The best way to follow her work is on Instagram @nikita.zook.
Susquehanna, Current
