2013 was a tremendous year for the studio! Here are just a few highlights from the past twelve months:

• Five exhibitions were showcased at Open Door's gallery and the openings broke records both in sales and attendance!
• Two Open Door group exhibitions expanded the visibility of our artists. Vision Unveiled graced the Urban Arts Space and Unlocked was on display at the Martin DePorres Center!
• One exceptional, premier exhibit by Wallace Pecks at the Lindsay Gallery in the Short North was held over due to his success!
• Another exhibit, entitled Recollections and Resurrections, featured Doug Gannt's imaginative paintings at the Fresh A.I.R. Gallery in downtown Columbus.
• Wallace Peck was hand-picked by the first lady of Ohio as the first artist to be featured for the Featured Artists at the Ohio Governor's Residence program! His work lived at the Governor's Residence for three months!
• Thirteen Open Door artists were juried into Accessible Expressions Ohio 2014 traveling exhibition through VSA Ohio - 4 Artists won awards, including Jessica Wallace's first place prize in the Emerging Artist category!
• Countless pieces of art were created, exhibited, appreciated and purchased! Thank you all for your support of our artists! 2013 would not have been the same without you!  

We can also count 2013 as a year of change. We bid farewell to both Courtney Yoakum and Cat Lynch and welcomed Sean Moore and Tim Cook to the Open Door team. We also sadly lost a big personality from the Open Door family. Studio artist, John "Joe" Wilson passed away in December. Please read on for his memorial.   

 

Joe Wilson's bright eyes always gleamed with mischief, and his good humor was paralleled only by his kindness. Joe was every bit the life of the party and lived for the chuckles his antics would invoke. Joe joined the Open Door Art Studio in early 2012 and immediately found a creative home and a new community of friends.

 

Read his full memorial here.

 

Open Door's very own Sharon Dorsey was selected by the Columbus Museum of Art to create two dioramas for the reinvented Wonder Room, an interactive gallery space. These 15 inch cubes are each miniature living quarters, replete with all the accessories of some very interesting inhabitants.  

 

Columbus Underground had an incredible article about the January reopening of the Wonder Room and quoted Sharon.

 

"The dioramas are intended to make viewers imagine what sorts of beings lived in there, kind of like rooms of a doll house," says Dorsey. "I typically make figurative work, so designing the "where" as opposed to the "who" was a challenge. I had to at least address the "who" portion in my brain. I wanted one to be a cave where a barbaric, warlock gnome-like being lived, and I wanted the other to be a Victorian-inspired, slightly steam-punky room where a fancy toad lived. For each I had a LARGE amount of odds and ends scattered around my dining room table to scour through and to then figure out "what the heck could this thing be made into?" It was very much like a big, messy puzzle. All of the furnishings had to be designed then fabricated with materials that fit the theme. Suddenly having a big collection of animal bones didn't seem like the craziest idea."

 

Read the full article here!