Western Pennsylvania well-represented in 'Art of the State' juried exhibition

Art is a deeply personal experience, from the feelings a person gets when viewing a painting to the emotions that started the artist’s brush moving in the first place.

For Pamela Cooper of Greensburg, one of the artists whose work will be part of the State Museum of Pennsylvania’s 54th annual “Art of the State” exhibit, it is also validation.

“I started getting serious about painting maybe 10 years ago,” said Cooper, who opened her own art studio in Greensburg in February. “It’s been a struggle, and I’ve been told to just get a job and do this on the side.”

Cooper’s piece, a painting titled “Emergence,” shows the face of a small Black child quite literally emerging from a canvas streaked with brush strokes.

“It reflects what I was seeing from reading about the Middle Passage, and what it would’ve been like for a child to be part of that,” she said. “To be taken from a place they knew and loved and thrown into a place they didn’t know anything about.”

For Mary Culbertson Stark of Bridgeville, who has been painting for the past four decades, images from the past were a way to comment on the present.

Her piece, “Our Lady of the Pandemic,” depicts a saintly-looking woman who wouldn’t look out of place on the walls of an ancient Italian church. But she is wearing a very modern accessory: a medical mask.

“I thought, after watching the front-line workers and the masking discussion, I just began to get a feeling that I wanted to document the notion that all of us were persevering,” said Stark, who once served as a docent for a collection of the Renaissance-era artwork that helped inspire her piece.

“In a lot of my work, I use the techniques used to create those frescoes,” she said. “It’s not necessarily religious art, but using those symbols to represent a collective idea.”

By creating layers of paint, and then sanding them down before adding more layers, Stark gave the piece a heavily weathered look that adds weight to the woman’s serious expression. “It represents the collective spirit of what I witnessed going on in my daily life,” she said.

For Kristin Letts Kovak of Pittsburgh’s East End, the 2020 election – or rather, the lengthy wait for the final results – served as the inspiration for her abstract piece, “As the Results Pour In.”

“I designed the initial layout while waiting for the results of the presidential election,” Letts Kovak said. “However, the image continued to evolve over time as I painted it.”

Everything about the painting is open to interpretation, and focusing on any one spot tends to lead the eye to another, which may have been Letts Kovak’s intention.

“More broadly, the final image expressed moments of uncertainty, where parallel outcomes remain possible but unknown,” she said.

In addition to being available online, the juried exhibition will be open to the public on Sept. 26, running through Jan. 2, 2022. Winners will be announced via social media at noon on the exhibition’s opening day.

Cooper said it was an honor to be included among the 104 pieces chosen.

“I’m able to represent my county out of more than 2,000 entries,” she said. “As an African-American woman, you don’t hear too much about that, and it makes me feel good that I’m going in the right direction and that this is what I’m supposed to be doing.”

The exhibition is presented by the museum, the Pennsylvania Heritage Foundation and WITF Public Media. For more, see StateMuseumPA.org.