From Woman 18 in 2025, at Understory

Last year, Mary Urbas left her longtime post as Director of the gallery at Lakeland Community College after the administration cut her position and closed the gallery amid deep budget cuts and financial woes. During her tenure as director, she curated long-running themed exhibitions, including the annual the Skull and Skeleton Show, and, in honor of Women’s History Month, the From WOMAN exhibition every March since 2007.

2025 marks the 18th iteration of From WOMAN, and—determined to keep From WOMAN 18 as comprehensive as the show it was in the past, Urbas divided it into three sections. This year, the exhibigion spreads the same number of works that used to fill Lakeland’s large gallery across BAYarts’ Sally Otto (Playhouse) Gallery, Lake Erie College’s BK Smith Gallery, and Understory Gallery at W. 78th Street Studios. The Understory iteration opened on February 19, and is on view for Third Friday, March 21, closing on March 29.

The work at Understory is comprised of abstract, two-dimensional pieces, as well as Annie Peters’ woven vessels, functional ceramics by Diana Bjel, and enamel works by Marty Moore. “Given the three venues, I decided the best way to showcase the work was to present it thematically, placing the abstract works together at Understory,” explains Urbas.

After the chaos and human tragedies of World War II, American cultural critic Dwight MacDonald noted that the popularity of American Abstraction Expressionism in the global modern art realm was not a coincidence. In 1945, as New York became the new center of avant-garde art, he wrote of Jackson Pollock’s action paintings: “to describe [the horrors and traumas of the post-War moment] was to accept the unacceptable.”[1] Indeed, it was the artist’s gesture, the actions of his individual body was the subject of Pollock’s human-scale paintings. Given our own historical moment, there is something apt, too, about Urbas’ grouping of the non-figurative with the functional. There is no representation whatsoever in the Understory iteration of From WOMAN, aside from the fantastical enamels of Marty Moore, which include embroidery, and these precious gems occasionally reference the natural world with floral or leaf motifs. Diana Bjel’s ceramic works are created by stacking rings of clay, a process that leaves horizontal lines on the surface, which the artist juxtaposes with three rows of deliberate vertical marks near the top of the vessels. Like so much of the work in the Understory show, Bjel’s work is about line, texture, and surface.

Viewers are drawn into the Understory space by Libby Chaney’s texturally raw fiber works, including “To Be Where I Couldn’t Be,” a large-scale composition of red, pink, blue, and white fabric pieces, some hand-dyed, some factory printed, all combined to create a composition akin to an abstract painting, especially when viewed from a distance. The colors are sumptuous, the texture of the materials echoing thick impasto paint strokes, dabs, and marks, and Chaney makes order out of fluid fabrics, emphasizing color, line, shape, and texture.

Susan Kraus’ Gravitational Pull is a beautifully rendered painting of calm, cool fields of color—blues, stark whites, and greens, “disrupted” by gashes of blood-red pigment and hurried pencil lines. These scratches do not penetrate the underlayers; rather, they appear to loom above or outside the serene color fields underneath. To be “woman” in 2025 and survive is to stay centered, resilient amid the overt sexism, misogyny, racism, and queerphobia of contemporary politics and politicians. Kraus captures the sting of the daily slights, even as we stay grounded, serene, graceful. You do not have to let it in to acknowledge its weight on your day-to-day life, how being “woman” informs everything from the amount of your paycheck to the kind of work available to you, to whether or not you are permitted full agency to make choices about your own body.

Grace Summanen’s mixed media works are whimsically clever sculptural objects that hang on the wall. Stripes is comprised of acrylic and latex paint on fabric; when the paint dries, the fabric changes from fluid to frozen, from flat to three-dimensional. Summanen’s color palate is bright, but not garish, and she brings an ethos of joy and humor to the piles of laundry that accumulate on bedroom floors by week’s end. Her collages are similarly upbeat, with common objects like ribbon and scraps of fabric or canvas painted in the same visually amusing color palate as the sculptural objects.

Marti Higgins’ mixed media on canvas works make linear order out of chaos. Amendation, her largest work in From WOMAN 18, is a collage of text fragments, found paper, and painted swaths of color. Here, Higgins is expert in color theory, and she underscores the horizontal picture plane, creating a sense of energy from left to right, right to left.

In addition to Chaney’s textile art quilts, there are other historically “feminine” media and processes represented in From WOMAN 18, including Annie Peters’ woven basket forms, Sandy Shelenberger’s textile art quilts, and Deborah Silver’s split shed woven works. Peters’ works read like dashed dreams and broken fairy tales, her wonderfully wrought Basket For Heartbreak is made of vine, wood, and paper, and is a compelling example of an artist using traditional materials and processes to communicate abstract and/or “feeling-based” subject matter, as the morose, mourning color (eggplant-purple) reminds us of grief and love lost, the gourd shape evokes Cinderella, as the princess heads to the ball to meet her prince in a carriage made from a pumpkin turned to gold by the fairy godmother.

Shelenberger’s textiles are dyed to perfection in traditional, global techniques and forms, and Urbas, an adept curator in that she creates a visually stunning assemblage of work from a variety of media, also makes in interesting connections in her placement of Silver’s textile works near Shelenberger’s, as the latter employs traditional and multicultural techniques in her creative process, the former inventing new methods, as Silver created the split shed weaving technique she employs to make her textiles, writing a manual, The Technique of Split-Shed Weaving.[1]

Understory’s iteration of From Woman 18 is a beautifully and thoughtfully curated exhibition that stands on its own as a complete project. Organizing three shows across Greater Cleveland is no small feat. Urbas’ commitment to women artists is unwavering, and beyond this project, she created a directory of women artists and events for Women’s History Month.

However, From WOMAN 18 at Understory lacks diversity. At Understory, most if not all makers are mid to late career, white cisgender women, all trained as skilled craftspeople and/or “fine” artists. Missing are young artists, queer perspectives on “woman” as identity, and critical analyses on the very idea of “woman.” These conversations about the fluidity of gender, about the “contingency” of womanhood, are now more than 35 years old.[2] To leave these concerns out of From WOMAN 18 in 2025, as all women are being stripped of rights, lives, and dignity (as second citizens, living under the pussy grabber and in an allegedly “free” nation that dictates our healthcare choices), is a missed opportunity for deeper discourse around it what means to identify as “woman” in this toxic political climate.

From Woman 18
Feb. 19-March 29, 2025
Understory Art Studios & Exhibition Space @ W. 78th Street Studios

Unique portions of the exhibition are on view in additional locations:

Mar 14 2025 – Apr 13 2025
BAYarts Sally Otto Gallery

BK Smith Gallery, Lake Erie College
February 13-April 3, 2025

[1]MacDowell is quoted in Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Free, and the Cold War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

[2]Deborah Silver’s book is available here. (accessed March 4, 2025).

[2]See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York, NY and London: Routledge, 1990). Butler posits that gender is a “contingent identity,” meaning it is fluid and dependent upon ever-changing social and historical circumstances. A major argument of the turgid text is that gender is performative.