Still Emerging after 19 years: From Woman, at Understory.

This year, Mary Urbas, long-time curator of From Woman, returned to Understory to mount part of her large-scale, annual exhibition, now in its 19^th iteration. As in 2025, art is spread across multiple spaces. In chronological order of their openings, they were at the McDonough Museum at Youngstown State University (January 20–February 28) : Lake Erie College’s BK Smith Gallery (February 6 – March 26); Lorain County Community College’s Beth K. Stocker Art Gallery (February 19 – March 15); and Understory (March 18 – April 17). In reality, it was four exhibitions, each focused on its own theme: Visual storytelling at McDonough; inspired by nature at BK Smith; figurative art at Stocker; and emerging women artists at Understory. This review considers the exhibition at Understory, where Urbas joined curatorial forces with proprietor Susan Snipes.

Mounting a broad-themed show is challenging; more than half the population is female, even more identify as “woman,” and Urbas and Snipes give us a slice of a variety of media, from prints and drawings to traditional ceramics and whimsical figurative sculptures. Urbas has always had an eye for ceramicists, and this is again evident in the work of Emily Strogin, whose vessels are classic, historical forms. The artist uses coiling techniques to connect her practice with ancestral knowledge, manifest in clay. “Mammon,” an impressively large vessel for being hand-built, and a stunning form dripping in shiny black glaze.

Indeed, the vessel is an exhibition theme, with Strogin’s traditional forms juxtaposed with Izabela Zoga’s “Exit,” an installation comprised of a single channel looped projection, audio, and nine large-scale photographs, all in black and white with the exception of a two vivid-blood-red water jugs. The video depicts a swaying, dancing, woman figure beneath a swath of white fabric, the red jugs are in proximity to the dance, both in the film and in the photographs nearby.

The female body is historically represented in art across cultures as a vessel, a container for life, and, in terms of representations of fecundity, which includes breasts, which continue to give life, even after an infant is born. Zoga’s dancing figure bares breasts under flowing white fabric,and  rests her head on blood red vessels; perhaps the “Exit” is from childhood to puberty—womanhood, with the monthly “blood-red” reminder of the power and responsibility connected to creation or destruction.

Joan Pogalies’ photo dye sublimation prints on metal, all titled “Gateway to Happiness,” read like enormous ink blots of the Rorschach test, developed in 1921 by Hermann Rorschach to analyze personality, emotional functioning, and “latent thought disorders.” Upon closer inspection, however, Pogalies photographed tree trunks, with their unique openings, textures, and shapes, subsequently creating images that are clearly vaginal and labial.

Bianca Seely’s intaglio and ink wash prints are wonderfully rendered images of animals. “Mouse,” reads like a fancifully sweet taxonomy drawing, while “Bucks Brawling,” depicts a frozen moment in male power struggle, the two bucks are caught in one another’s antlers, head-to-head, both pulling away with equal force, and, subsequently stuck. It’s a wonderfully clever piece, for the political charge it holds at this very moment in history.

Laura Tuokkola’s intricate found-object figural sculptures have a Dada and Surrealist quality, as she combines found objects with intricately wrought clay figures. A ginger-complected, blue-eyed child’s face fills in for a clock face in “It’s Never Too Late,” a wooden clock body with time-keeping device gone, and the kid’s eager, buck-toothed visage  taunting, reminding us of society’s compulsory parenthood expectations.

Tuokkola’s Georgie–a small sculpture of clay, paper mache, and found objects, including a toy vintage wagon that the artist refurbished, and wood–has Georgie, a gender-ambiguous, armless, clown-like figure pulling the wagon, which has a giraffe with human features solemnly standing in the small contraption. There is a nod to colonial exoticism, here, as the face is not European, the animal itself an oddity-object-commodity, with human face, giraffe body (both “out of Africa”), the creature ensnared for the roadshow by a creepy white figure who pulls the wagon aimlessly along.

Now two years after Lakeland Community College closed the gallery where Urbas gave birth to From Woman, this is her second year organizing the show on a freelance basis. The accomplishment in this iteration at Understory is that Urbas and Snipes together have created a space for emerging artists to show their work and be a part of the series and its history. It’s a succinct show, unified by elements of form. Watch for another chapter in the From Woman saga—its 20^th year—in 2027.

From Woman 19
March 18 – April 17, 2026

Understory Gallery
78th Street Studios
1305 W. 80th Street, Suite 019
Cleveland, OH
Understory.art