2016 Artists
Meet the artists who participated in the 2016 Community Supported Art program.
Mireli Books
Mireli Books is an illustrator, a children’s book author, and a scientist. She began drawing and painting early on, pursuing design after high school. She then started a family, eventually returning to university, earned a PhD in science and worked in research turning to art in her spare time. In 2015, she began a startup dedicated to art, learning, and creativity. Mireli is the author of
Creative Montage, Birds, Linescapes, Flowerlines, and
The Jungle Dream, her first children’s book. She lived in NY/NJ, and Ecuador, and for the last 14 years has resided in Massachusetts. Her studio is in Kendall Square. For the CSArt project Mireli created an original composition interpretive of the area’s intellectual and cultural roots. A diagram of the Greek’s first analogue computer is used as a backdrop for five iconic Cambridge images. The diagram of the antikythera mechanism evokes Cambridge’s innovation spirit, and it is also reminiscent of the region’s nickname as ‘The Athens of America’. The composition will be printed on high-quality double weight matte paper suitable for coloring.
Mireli's Work
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Marcia Cohen
Marcia Cohen uses a variety of media and techniques to create her unique silk screen prints. Silk screen “paintings” are created by printing multiple images (photographs, sketched, paintings) on a single page with different layers of color. Photographs from local locations such as George’s Island or Rockport are digitally layeredand then collaged to create an new image for silk screen.These images are printed on different backgrounds, in different colors and/or on top of one another, so each finished print is unique. Marcia also employs collage, watercolor and fiber arts techniques to create vibrant, multi-layered paintings, prints and fiber works. Exploring her process, Marcia created an original image to layer over different iterations of her prints for the CSArt Program. Marcia lives and works in Cambridge and regularly participates in Cambridge Arts Open Studios.
Marcia's Work
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Estelle Disch
Estelle Disch’s phototransformations stretch or obscure reality, sometimes rendering the original image unrecognizable. She uses bold colors and unusual forms, and the work sometimes emerges looking more like painting than photography, but with uniquely digital elements. Her goal is to engage the viewer with something satisfying and raise questions related to what exactly something is or was and how it might have gotten there. Estelle’s passion for creating inventions in Photoshop has led her into a post-retirement career in fine art photography. For her Community Supported Art project, Estelle created an original, limited edition work in her Photo transformations series.
Estelle's Work
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Melissa Glick
Melissa Glick finds beauty in unexpected places. As a “hacker” she takes things apart and re-purposes them in cool new ways. She transforms “e-waste”- discarded electronics and outdated computer components into dynamic compositions within assemblage, jewelry, mosaics and clocks. She creates a “conversation” between 2D text and images and 3D forms by incorporating the glut of obsolete technology with artifacts from her personal life. Her work grapples with the environmental impact of our technological lifestyle and our emotional attachments to “things” that represent and validate who we are. In a new series titled, Steampunk Tiles (SPUNKS), Melissa produced 5×7 assemblages on a variation of her deconstructed conversation theme. Melissa has a Masters in Art Education from Mass College of Art and a BA from SUNY Purchase and has run educational programs at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, Boston Ballet, Museum of Fine Arts, Watertown Arsenal Center for the Arts, Parts & Crafts and at various community events.
Melissa's Work
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Linda Haas
Linda Haas is a freelance photographer and educator, with a background in Art History and Anthropology. In addition to her local work, she has traveled and photographed internationally. Using a photojournalist’s sensibility, Linda creates photographs with the hope of motivating the observer to consider the subject and the moment in a new way. She believes that photos can have the power to move the viewer toward a new understanding of the world, its people and their cultures. Linda explored this by capturing an image during her travels in the summer of 2016 and producing a limited edition print for the CSArt shares. An art educator, Linda has taught at various institutions including the New England School of Photography (NESOP), the University of Massachusetts, Lesley University, and the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. Linda’s work has appeared in such diverse publications as Newsweek, The Boston Globe, The Guardian (UK), Ms. Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Boston Magazine, and many others.
Linda's Work
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Janet Malenfant
Janet Malenfant is an artist who lives and works in Cambridge, MA. She has a background in both advertising and graphic design but her passion is painting. Janet’s artistic journey is a continually evolving one that has roots in graphic imagery but she also enjoys an interest in mixed media portraiture. This parallel pathway is part of an instinctual desire to try new things and explore creatively. Janet is inspired by vintage photography, nature, urban graffiti, museum trips, gallery openings, the energy of artist friends and art supplies inherited by an elderly neighbor. For the CSArt program, Janet created a series of abstract paintings inspired by nature, comprised of 6×6 individual wooden gesso boards.
Janet's Work
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Margarette Mattos
Margarette Mattos is a expressionist abstract painter. Pieces contain mixing iron ore fines with pigments, waxes, varnishes and acrylic paint. Her paintings are characterized by bold colors and texture contrasts. Margarette’s facination withe the colors and textures of iron ore began a couple years ago while involved in visual and architectural research in her hometown Vitória, Espírito Santo. During her research process she watched the coming and going of ships loaded with iron ore extracted from the Brazilian regions of Itabira in Minas Gerais and Serra dos Carajás in Pará. Margarette used this original mixed media technique in the Windows series she is producing for the CSArt share, creating fifty, iron ore images inspired by the cities of Brazil.
Margarette's Work
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Anne Plaisance
Anne Plaisance, a French visual artist, mixes various techniques (collages, sketches, watercolors, oil painting, drawing, sculptures, installations, travel diaries, video). The subject-matter of her works is focused mainly on women in society, memories, and criticism of the consumerist society. For the CSArt project, Anne is calling attention to the issue homeless women through and will interview and draw portraits of members in this community. The undeniable aesthetic qualities of her artworks are contrasted with the brutality of the message they convey, thus confusing and questioning the viewer (e.g. In Memoriam, The Tears Collection). She has taken part in more than sixty exhibitions in Poland, France, Germany, Lithuania, Egypt, and in the USA. Her works can be found in the Brooklyn Art Library in New York (USA), but also in private collections in France, Great Britain, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, and Poland, among others. She received several prizes (Carleton Goff Award at the Providence Art Club National Juried Exhibition: color, Juror Award, Art League Rhode Island Associate member Annual Exhibition at Warwick Art Museum, etc..).
Anne's Work
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Deidre Tao
Deidre Tao is a landscape painter based in Cambridge. Deidre derives most of her inspiration from the nature of New England, her native home. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from University of Massachusetts Dartmouth where she received traditional academic training in fine art. Having shown in solo, group and juried shows as an independent artist, Deidre sells her work to private collectors in the Boston area and throughout the US.
Deidre’s painting style lies between realism and expressionism. Full of color, movement, and brushwork, her paintings evoke emotion while grounded in realistic settings. She loves exploring the relationship between sky, water, and land in her ongoing series, “Water’s Edge.” Shorelines of rivers, marshes, and oceans have been a springboard for this discovery, which has afforded amazing painting retreats to beautiful coastal locations and has yielded more than thirty paintings on this subject to date.
Deidre feels honored to be invited to work on the CSArt Project with such a diverse cohort of fellow artists. She will present a work-in-progress slideshow of the painting that she produces this summer especially for the project, and looks forward to presenting limited edition prints of her painting as her shares to collectors.
Deidre lives in Cambridge with her husband and two children and works from her studio in Central Square.
Deidre's Work
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