Meet the Ohio artists featured in two of our current exhibitions: Jerry Birchfield: Asleep in the Dust and Frameworks: Paintings by Dragana Crnjak, Andrea Joki and Matthew Kolodziej.

Free and open to all • Come as you are

Artists Jerry Birchfield, Dragana Crnjak, Andrea Joki and Matthew Kolodziej will talk briefly about their work in the galleries at 6:30 pm and be available for questions and conversation afterward.

Jerry Birchfield was born in Cleveland, earning his BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2009 and his MFA from Cornell University in 2014. Asleep in the Dust at the Akron Art Museum is his first solo museum show, and presents his non-traditional approach to photography and sculpture.

Dragana Crnjak, whose paintings are on view in Frameworks, is an associate professor of painting at Youngstown State University. A native of Serbia, Crnjak creates the patterns in her paintings by distorting images of Serbian embroidery patterns, tracing the resulting images in paint on her canvases.

Based in Cleveland and Los Angeles, Kent State University alumnus Andrea Joki creates paintings that meld sensory experiences of landscapes, people and places, drawing on impressions she observes during her travels.

Matthew Kolodziej, a professor of painting and drawing at the University of Akron Myers School of Art, assembles photomontages from photographs of construction and demolition sites. Using a computer program, he translates the collaged images into line drawings that form the basis of his multifaceted, architectural paintings. The artist is especially interested in how the relentless volume of images that we process on a daily basis affects our way of seeing and our sense of place.