Debra Varvi, resolving a mono print, 2024 At 69, Debra Varvi is working through her dead angels cathedral window series. She's more focused now, more disciplined. And she's still paying bills. There's an insistent energy in creativity. A restless energy that pushes and prods. It collects light, color, shadow, form, lines, ideas, songs, bits of poetry, imagery, random nonsense. It hoards these things in the back of the mind and plays with them constantly. This energy is only s

By Kristine Schomaker I'm watching a Zoom screen where a medical school auditorium at USC is showing a painting of a service dog wearing a medical alert vest, his human hooked up to an IV pole surrounded by pharmaceutical labels and pain scales. The dog's eyes are clear and calm. The human's body is deconstructed into medical diagrams - intestines visible, organs exposed, reduced to systems and symptoms. Ashley Bravin just got out of the hospital with sepsis a week ago. She g

Mural, acrylic, 30'x11', 2025 Donna Budzynski showed up at her first art fair at 60 years old without a tent. She had no clue what she was doing. When she arrived and saw all these younger artists, she immediately thought she didn't belong there because of her age. But she had a fabulous welcome. She was juried into some big fairs in the Twin Cities. People told her how awesome her work was. Customers contacted her wanting pieces. And at 64, she just completed her first 30 ft

So I’m standing—back against some kind of white box column—in a gallery that’s humming and realizing: all these faces and textures and loops of color across the walls are having a long, heated conversation, and I’m the accidental eavesdropper. This isn’t just some reverential “women’s art exhibition”. It’s loud, messy, full of risk—Oak trees, riotous masks, feathery stitched creatures, piles of upcycled joybombs. Three women from one lineage. And the art is straight-up talkin

Photo Courtesy Jennifer Scott Jennifer Scott has been drawing since she could hold a crayon. At 50, she's put in 10,000 hours of practice times 30. She knows what she's doing. She's not studying something anymore—her work is not a performance for others, it's just part of how she communicates. Drawing with pen, being out and part of the world recording spaces—that's what keeps her excited. Her work moves between the immediacy of small black-and-white drawings and the expansiv

Rise of Raven Woman, 2021 self portrait , color photographs mounted on metal with hidden back frame, both performed and shot with tripod by the artist Monet Clark At 57, Monet Clark is making the best work of her life. She's deep in the process of creating performance-based photographic series and performance video works as animal-women hybrid characters. Think elaborately costumed figures posing in sweeping natural landscapes, tripod and interval timer capturing moments that

2020 Pastel Chalk Pencil on Strathmore Paper, 9x12 2020 Photo credit Wes Kroninger. Liza Macawili creates portraits that literally glow...

By Betty Ann Brown “Historically, the portrayal of minorities in movies and television is less than ideal. Whether it’s appearing in...

By Betty Ann Brown An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.                    ~Ruth Asawa  ...