King Street Gallery at Montgomery College Takoma Park/Silver Spring campus presents: Natural Blue, an exhibition of works by Jacqui Crocetta, Meredith Leich, Ruth Lozner, Sarah Kain Gutowski, and Meredith Starr. The exhibition will run from January 22, 2024, to March 1, 2024, with an opening reception to be held on Thursday, February 15, from 12 – 1 pm. Attendance is free and open to the public. An in-person poetry reading by Sarah Kain Gutowksi will be held on Saturday, February 17^th at 2pm in Cafritz.  A virtual artist talk will be held on Wednesday, February 28, 2024 from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. Free registration for the zoom link can be accessed at https://www.montgomerycollege.edu/special-programs/arts-institute/index.html

Employing a broad range of media, each artist presents works that address the gallery’s 2023-2024 season theme, “Blue,” and its connection to the natural world. Crocetta’s highly detailed paintings and sculpture highlight the prevalence of plastic marine debris and the need for ocean conservation. Leich has produced two hybrid animation and experimental video collages that highlight climate change throughout Iceland and Alaska. Lozner has created two sculptures that focus on the rising sea levels, as well as a series of vintage photos combined with paint chips intending to provoke questioning from the viewer of the various meanings of labeling and identity. Poet Kain Gutowski and the artist Starr have collaborated to create a series of cyanotypes and poems. When juxtaposed, these poems and images document how it is possible to endure the volatile and unpredictable world, particularly when it’s in crisis.

Gallery hours are Monday -Thursday 8-5 pm and Friday 8-4 pm.

About the Artists

Jacqui Crocetta works in painting, printmaking and sculpture. Her socially engaged practice has aimed to bring attention to both the human condition as well as the environmental crisis, while celebrating resilience and the potential for healing. She has exhibited her work regionally in venues such as Adah Rose Gallery, Arts in Foggy Bottom, McLean Project for the Arts, and Otis Street Arts Project, and received frequent recognition in the Washington Post and East City Art. Crocetta was a fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts (‘21, ‘22, ‘23). She has been awarded several Artists and Scholars Project Grants from the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, Md and a Maryland Artists Grant from Maryland State Arts Council. In 2019, she was recognized as Cornerstone Montgomery’s Volunteer Champion for her work with artists living with mental health disorders. Her work is included in private, corporate, and public collections.

Meredith Leich is a Boston-based artist, who works across multiple forms of drawing, animation, video, and installation to approach climate change through scientific research and intuitive visual exploration. Her films have screened at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Athens International Film + Video Festival, and Chicagoland Shorts, among others, and she has shown her work at venues nationally and abroad. Her collaboration with glaciologist Dr. Andrew Malone was awarded an Arts, Science & Culture Initiative Grant from the University of Chicago and received an Individual Artist Grant from Chicago’s DCASE. She has completed residencies at the University of Virginia’s Mountain Lake Biological Station, Tide Institute and Museum of Art, Nes Artist Residency, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Wrangell Mountain Center in McCarthy, Alaska, among others. Meredith received her BA from Swarthmore College and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Film, Video, New Media, and Animation.

Ruth Lozner received a BFA from Carnegie-Mellon University, and an MFA from American University. She has held faculty positions at the University of Maryland, College Park, Parsons School of Design, New York, and the University of the Arts, Philadelphia. She previously served on the National Education Committee at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, NYC. She currently holds the titles of Professor Emerita from the University of Maryland and Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, UK. While her professional as well as academic career has encompassed painting, editorial illustration, film and print art direction, for the last several years she has focused her passion, imagination and energies on assemblage sculpture and collage. Recently, she has embarked on exciting new conceptual directions while collaborating with artist, Kenzie Raulin. Her work has been shown in numerous regional and national museums and galleries. ruthloznerart.com and LRcollaborate.com

Sarah Kain Gutowski is the author of two books, The Familiar (forthcoming 2024) and Fabulous Beast: Poems, winner of the 14th annual National Indies Excellence Award for Poetry. With interdisciplinary artist Meredith Starr, she is co-creator of Every Second Feels Like Theft, a conversation in cyanotypes and poetry, and It’s All Too Much, a limited edition audio project. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Threepenny Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and The Southern Review, and her criticism has been published by Colorado Review, Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, and New York Journal of Books.

Meredith Starr is an interdisciplinary artist living in NY.  She earned her BS from NYU, her MFA from LIU and has two certificates in AR and VR from Harvestworks in New York City. She has three apps published to the App Store – Plastic Swim AR, You Are Here VR and Balancing Act AR. Her work has been published in Suboart Magazine and Art Seen: Curator’s Salon. She has shown nationally and internationally, notably in Oslo, Seoul, Tokyo, and New York. She recently exhibited Balancing Act AR as part of the Turning Tides exhibit at the Target Gallery in Alexandria, VA. In the summer of 2023, she completed a residency at Zero Foot Hills. Starr is a full-time professor of visual arts at SUNY Suffolk County Community College, and the VP of Membership for the FATE Organization. When she’s not in the studio you can find her on a run, pausing to photograph a sculptural arrangement of trash at the curb.

About the King Street Gallery

The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Arts Center includes galleries that mount exhibitions in support of the academic mission of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Montgomery College. The King Street Gallery is on the ground floor of The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Arts Center on the west side of the Takoma Park/Silver Spring Campus.

The King Street Gallery is on the ground floor of The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Arts Center on the west side of the Takoma Park/Silver Spring Campus. The arts center is located off Georgia Avenue at 930 King Street. Parking is available in the West Campus Garage, which is immediately behind the center. Additional parking is available in the East Campus Garage on Fenton Street with pedestrian access by a bridge and walking path. For maps and directions, visit https://bit.ly/40kEKbW