PAUSE

Elizabeth Crisman

Elizabeth Crisman was born in Fairfax, Virginia in 1974. She attended Virginia Commonwealth University where she received a BFA in ceramics and jewelry in 1998. Upon graduation she worked at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, WCVE/PBS television in Richmond, VA and various film projects. She attended Maryland Institute College of Art with a Graduate Fellowship and received in 2006 an MFA from the Graduate Photography and Digital Image program. Hughes has exhibited widely in VA, D.C., MD, PA, DE, IN, OR and NY. She is finishing up her Fellowship at the Center for Emerging Visual Artist's in Philadelphia, PA. She recently was awarded an individual artist grant from the Maryland State Arts Council and has attended an artist's residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2008. Currently, Elizabeth teaches photography and art history at Baltimore area colleges such as Harford Community College, Maryland Institute College of Art, and College of Notre Dame. She is also the Gallery Coordinator for the Chesapeake Gallery at Harford Community College.

Laura Hughes

Laura Hughes was born in Buffalo, New York and moved in 2005 to Baltimore, Maryland to attend school at the Maryland Institute College of Art where she received her degree in interdisciplinary sculpture in 2009. She has participated in several group exhibitions in the Mid-Atlantic region, including Artist Books at Main Gallery in Baltimore, and For the Dust, For the Snow the Maryland Institute College of Art Commencement Exhibition. Hughes had numerous achievements while at MICA, including the solo exhibition InApril at the Pinkard Gallery in 2009. Hughes currently lives and works in Baltimore, MD.

Lu Zhang

Not limited by medium, Lu Zhang creates drawings, paintings, and sculpture in bronze, wax, paper, tar, acrylic, money, rubber etc. Zhang's work is cerebral and at the same time vulnerably intimate. She uses a language found in plant life, cellular anatomy, patterns of fabric, architectural drawings and anything with a rhythmic structure. Her work is meditative and always emits the feeling one is following a very personal narrative. Her pieces typically begin as an exercise in spontaneous organization and in the end becomes an extension of her own nervous system.

Zhang traveled to China in 2006-07 where she sketched elaborate opera headdresses and studied the effects the current international art market has on contemporary Chinese art making. Zhang is an emerging artist who graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in fine art from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.