Monday, September 30th at 7 p.m. in the Blue Room

The Blue Room is located in Pioneer Park, 2300 Airport Way, 99701, on the 3rd floor of the Alaska Centennial for the Arts Center

Fairbanks Arts Association is proud to host Liz Maugans (Bay Village, Ohio), the guest juror for this years 38th Annual 64th Parallel Exhibition! Liz will provide an overview of her life as an artist, curator, teacher, activist and community organizer and the bridge between her own studio practice and the greater community. She will go over a series of projects she has worked on and is currently working on. 

Liz Maugans lives in Bay Village, Ohio and is the Director of YARDS Projects and Curator of the Dalad Collection at Worthington Yards in Cleveland’s Warehouse District. She co-founded Art EverySpace, a women-owned business that supports local artists in Northeast Ohio communities. Liz is also a co-founder and former Executive Director of Zygote Press, a Cleveland-based non-profit printmaking studio. She established the Collective Arts Network, which promotes Northeast Ohio artists and organizations through a journal and arts consortium. Additionally, Liz founded the Artist Trust (now The Cleveland Artist Registry), a platform connecting Cuyahoga County artists with the community. An advocate for artists, she has consulted on various community and business initiatives while continuing her own artistic practice. Liz is represented by Hedge Gallery.

Artist Statement

“I’m a starter, and like sourdough yeast, I’m drawn to moments of challenge where I can invest in ideas and create a new “culture” of problem-solving that tackles tough issues. When people identify with similar challenges, and someone takes the lead, people naturally get on board and take a stake in the process. I co-founded Zygote Press, a community-supported print shop, and other collective art spaces that have become the ultimate incubators of this democratic engagement. My passion lies in the public space, where my community-engaged work has found a system of connecting through material culture and neighborhood development through print-public interventions, community organizing, creative youth programming, publishing, mobilizing print facilities, creative advocacy campaigns, and protest printing. 

I firmly believe that everyone is a creative being and this informs how I engage with the community by fostering ingenuity and resourcefulness to identifying individual skills and acumen and bridging these concepts to community networks. It’s a democratically beautiful process. The community-share concept of learning and ideation produces results that are often inaccessible to those working alone. Still, through collaboration, design, mapping, prototyping, and critical thinking, anything can be tackled to solve real-world problems. A large aspect of my work leads to a participatory, connective citizen action and heightened awareness and empathy with the engaged community. My studio practice has been an equal and inspired companion to this community work. 

My work has been informed by my domestic family relationships and those individuals around me from my community. I am interested in particular phrases originating in my familial vernacular, a kind of story-telling rumination on the power and brevity of language. My work appropriates words and phrases from jokes, stories, cultural references, and overheard conversations. My work aims to research compassion, distrust, and variable levels of desperation and resiliency. I am not interested in making light of those damaged from hard, difficult times. Still, instead, I find an empathetic access portal for fortunate others to see through the communication itself a widely hopeful, trying, and courageous person on the other end.

Currently, I am working on a series of transfer drawings and watercolor collages introducing organic shapes inspired by readings on mushrooms, microscopic cellular forms, and other organic structures. Cellular structures have been consuming our news cycle, as well as viruses, variants, and microscopic forms that protect and harm us. The series is called Life is Brutiful and reflects on taking a hiatus, a pause in time. Lately, my work has been intuitive, and my images have evolved from pleasure and freedom to exploring pure form, color, and texture. Each drawing begins with scraps of materials from my studio. Since I have been working actively in the civic space, these works originated in retreat, formed from meditation. This yogi-like expressionistic approach leads me to unexpected dreamscapes and conceptual spaces of the body’s cellular structure, exploring deep states of my being.”

-Liz Maugans

This event is free and open to the public.

Fairbanks Arts would like to extend special gratitude to 64th Parallel sponsor Sophie Station Suites for sponsoring this year’s exhibition– learn more about Sophie Station Suites at their website!