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Exhibition Details
- When: April 26 - June 25, 2025
- Hours:
- Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m. - 10 p.m.
- Friday, 9 a.m. - 1 p.m.
- Saturday, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.
- Sunday, 12 p.m. - 5 p.m.
- Artist Talk: May 17, 1 p.m.
- Opening Reception: May 17, 2 p.m. - 4 p.m.
- Location: Sertoma Arts Center, 1400 W Millbrook Road, Raleigh, NC 27612
- Cost: Free and open to the public
To purchase artwork, contact Sertoma Arts Center for details.
The Artists
Sampada Kodagali Agarwal
Lines That Connect - A Confluence of Celtic Knots, Kolam, and Mandana
The main goal driving Sampada’s creative journey is to use art as a medium to highlight similarities, celebrate differences, and keep art at the forefront. She grew up seeing her mother make floor art at the entrance of their home in India, every single day. So, this seemed a natural starting point for her.
Sampada takes this opportunity to showcase two of the (many) traditional floor art styles from India (Kolam and Mandana), in a global context. When she studied a Kolam motif, she saw similarities with Celtic knots; the intricacies of the Mandana style could add further pizzazz to the knot work. Such merging of styles seemed a logical progression for her. She has explored non-traditional mediums like found wood, dry leaves, and acrylic sheets, along with the use of red clay; thus, making art more contemporary, yet rooted in tradition.
About the Artist
Sampada is a passionate visual artist, based in Morrisville, NC, who has spent more than 2 decades exploring traditional folk and tribal arts from India, the country of her birth; while living in the United States, her adopted country. She is also a Certified Zentangle Teacher.
She finds joy in bringing art into everyday life by using different mediums like ceramic, wood, canvas, paper, fabric and even an organic medium like dry leaves! The different mediums add another dimension to the merging of the styles and pushes the envelope. After all, isn’t that the purpose of art - to provide your viewer food for thought?
Jennifer Marks
Both/And
A selection of modern quilts designed and sewn by Jennifer Marks. Jenn resists the constraints of either/or in her life and in her work. Our brains, seeking pattern and order, try to categorize and sort all we see into mutually exclusive, tidy boxes. Yet we humans are complex, multifaceted, messy.
This selection of both highly structured, symmetrical, even minimalist designs; and improvisationally designed and pieced works with varying degrees of thematic boundaries such as color, shape, and size demonstrate both the need for order and the desire for freedom from its constraints.
Viewers are invited to consider the ways they themselves are more complex than simple binary categories can capture. Have you experienced being labeled as one thing, but knowing that you are so much more?
We are both/and.
About the Artist
Jennifer (Jenn) Marks is a modern quilter living in Raleigh, NC - where she also spent her childhood, before a stint on the North Shore of Massachusetts long enough to still be able to easily slip into a convincing Boston accent. She earned her PhD in Sociology from NC State University, which is to say that her artistic education has been decidedly nontraditional and informal - two adjectives that could be used to describe Jenn overall. She is also a wife, mother of two teens, and an E-RYT 500 certified Yoga teacher. She learned to sew as many women do, from her mother, primarily garments and home goods. Once she got a taste of modern quilting, there was no turning back.
Mark Blanchard
Multifarious Imaginations
Mark Blanchard's "Multifarious Imaginations" project is a conglomeration of vivid imagination. These pieces blend patterns, images, and designs until a saturation of swirling colors comes alive into a new living artistic creation.
The origin of each “imagination” starts with abandoning preconceived conceptions. Free of judgments of possibilities that allow the artistic spirits to come alive and transform into illogical absurdities that breathe new life as a harmonious creation.
Mark’s goal as a creator is to persuade the viewer to explore the poetic romance within the pulse of rhythms and vibrations of their own imagination.
About the Artist
Mark is a NC native, born in Tarboro, and currently calls Garner his home. He started his artistic journey at an early age with drawing and painting. After a love of music came along, he ended up playing in a psychedelic-rock band in Raleigh in the late 80’s. When the Rockstar vision fizzled, photography became his main exploration and continues to be his main artistic inspiration today, but now with more of an abstract examination.
These days he is still creative in photography, but mostly he is spending his artistic energy developing digital collages that create unique works of art that are bright and fun and produce a unique and visionary experience.
With any of these artistic journeys, Mark’s playful energy is to create a mood with his art that’s more airy than grounded, foolish rather than factual, but in the end, sincere enough to generate feelings and emotions within the viewer.
Mark has exhibited at the Durham Art Guild, Carrack Gallery, ArtSpace, and Duke University Hospital along with various art markets in the Triangle area.
