members

Group A’s illustrious history continues with over 60 current members.

Below is a small example of both historic and contemporary members who have and continue to exemplify the qualities of Group A.

Robert Lepper is a renowned figure in the design world.  He established the country’s first industrial design degree program at Carnegie Mellon University.  He also produced fascinating sculptures and murals, as well as an occasional printing.  As a writer, he authored a number of important theoretical works concerning both design and fine art.  In 2002 the Andy Warhol Museum held the exhibit “Robert Lepper, Artist and Teacher.”

Robert Lepper continued to be a very active participant in The Abstract Group and then Group A until at least the 1970’s. His work is in various museum collections, including The Museum of Modern Art.

Russell G. twiggs (1898-1991)

Russell Gould Twiggs was an artist faculty at Carnegie Tech. Mr. Twiggs was the massier for the art department and a well-respected painter. In his role as massier, Twiggs arranged student critiques and hung exhibits.  Barbara Jones, Chief Curator at the Westmoreland Museum of Art, notes that Twiggs held a top floor studio and advised students.  Jones described Twiggs as the “true abstract expressionist of the group.”

Along with Samuel Rosenberg, Russell Twiggs is credited for keeping Andy Warhol from being discharged from CMU’s School of Fine Arts. Twiggs exhibited at MOMA in 1956 in the exhibit “New American Drawings”.  Russell Twiggs has work in a number of museum collections including MOMA, The Whitney, The National Gallery of Art, and The Brooklyn Museum.

Samuel Rosenberg (1896-1972)

The principal founder of The Abstract Group, Samuel Rosenberg, was an extraordinarily gifted and tireless creator, teacher and innovator.  He first made his mark as a painter of strong, vibrant, social realist works.  While he never abandoned realism, he began experimenting with abstraction around 1940.  His stunning, abstract paintings have received increasing recognition in recent years.

Rosenberg was as active as a teacher as he was a painter.  During his long career he taught classes at Carnegie Tech (1924-1965), Chatham University (1937-1945), Pennsylvania Women’s College, and the YMYW Hebrew Association (1926-1964).  Additionally, he was committed to teaching artists in the community, including a course for World War II veterans. His work is in numerous museum collections.

balcomb greene (1904-1991)

Balcomb Greene was a well-known figure in the New York art world. In 1942 he accepted a position as a faculty member at Carnegie Tech, teaching art history and mentoring painting students. Greene was a founder and the first chairman of The American Abstract Artists (N.Y.C. 1938-present), a group that promoted not only abstraction but the importance of American art and its equivalence to art being produced in Europe.

He was an activist and writer who promoted modernism throughout his career. His work is in numerous museum collections. (Click Here to see more at Smithsonian Museum of American Archives)

Kyle anger

patricia scharbo barefoot

Marlene boas

Connie Cantor

Connie Cantor is currently exploring the intuitive, spontaneous movement of organic shapes, color and line. Her work is not planned or pre-conceived; images flow from their own current, informed by a somatic energy which she calls “another form of intelligence.” Cantor is drawn to mark-making as a timeless activity deeply embedded in human consciousness. This intuitive language belongs to all of us. Playful, enigmatic and often weird, the forms find a way to move on the canvas towards wholeness. There is no need to decipher or explain. Ms. Cantor has taught Experimental Drawing and classes on creative recovery at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and Touchstone Center for Crafts in Farmington, PA. She is an award-winning member of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh. Her work has been shown and sold in numerous galleries in the Pittsburgh area including FE gallery, Gallerie Chiz, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Eastside Gallery, Artist Image Resource, Fein Gallery, and The Brew House Space 101.

Laura domencic

Tim fabian

Gary jurysta

Paula Garrick Klein

kristen kovak

Kristen Letts Kovak is an artist, professor, and curator. Since 2012, Kovak has taught drawing, painting, and applied aesthetics at Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to her current appointment as Associate Teaching Professor and Senior Associate Dean of the College of Fine Arts, she taught at Seton Hill University, Indiana University’s Creative Learning Center, and the School for Visual and Performing Arts. She earned her MFA in Studio Art from MICA

Her artworks investigate connections between visual, perceptual and cognitive patterning. Kovak uses surface articulations to explore the interplay of representation and abstraction-- estranging the familiar and naturalizing the non-objective. “The complexity push[es] against the boundary where comprehensible becomes confusion. It remind[s] me of swimming in the ocean, where the destructive power of the water is always present in your mind, even when you feel capable of making it back to shore.”- Eric Lidji

Her works have been exhibited widely in museums and galleries. Most recently, she has had solo exhibitions at 707 Penn Gallery, 709 Penn Gallery, the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, St. Michael's College, Ohio University, Penn State, Baum School of Art, and the Arts Club of Washington. Her paintings and drawings have been featured in more than fifty group exhibitions including the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Wildling Art Museum, Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, IUPUI, Muskegon Museum of Art, Erie Art Museum, Museum of the Red River, and the Woodson Art Museum.

As a curator, Kovak examines common psychological, aesthetic, and theoretical questions underlying seemingly diverse artistic practices. Her recent projects at SPACE gallery (“Cataloguing Pattern,” “Degrees of Separation,” and “Identity Play”) share a characteristic interest in balancing opposing forces to arrive at harmonious states of disequilibrium. She highlights the work of artists who challenge social, political, and material norms.

maria kretschmann

Maria Mosette Kretschmann received her B.F.A from The School for American Crafts at Rochester Institute of Technology in 2004. Formally educated in the field of ceramics, Maria has expanded her studio practice to include any and all material explorations. She has shown her work nationally, and is a part of permanent collections, both private and public. 

Maria spent ten years living and working in Philadelphia. For three years, she was a part of an initiative at the Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archeology, working on a series of “Touch Tours” for the blind and visually impaired. She has done numerous projects involving touch-specific works geared toward various special needs communities. Maria is dedicated to inclusive education through the arts.

Having recently re-located, Maria maintains a healthy studio practice. She is heavily involved with the Rivers of Steel Arts program at the historic Carrie Furnaces in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This is a group of artists who host metal casting events and participate in the greater regional iron casting community. She is elated with the unexpected direction her life and work have taken. Maria is an avid maker, and liver of life. Her life is her work, and she invites you to participate.

jean mcclung

david mcgeehan

Dr. McGeehan has been a practicing artist for his entire life. Favored mediums are oil painting, printmaking, collage and computer generated imagery. David’s award-winning artwork has been showcased in many venues such as the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, the Three Rivers and Shadyside Art Festivals, and the Pittsburgh Center for Arts and Media, to name but a few.

Typically David’s artwork is a rich tapestry of human interaction with overt social assertions yet also sublime religious symbolism. A perpetual student of his craft, David’s artwork may examine a specific technical dimension of visual expression. This is the case with the painting presented here, which is one of a series of thirty-six variations on the subject.

The paintings explore hue, value, under-paining, primary, secondary, and tertiary color pairings as well as brush stroke application of the pigment itself. The fun and playful subject matter comes from one of the artists many collections. The stuffed monkey dolls began with a single gift from David’s beloved grandmother Mary when he was an infant and grew into a vast collection. More than an artist, David is a loving husband, a father of five, and ever a child at heart.

kevin o’toole

phriar phil

Dafna rehavia

Drawing influence from the fields of art and psychotherapy, my art and practice employs feminist socio-cultural analysis, personal experience, and a psychological understandings to question existential issues regarding the past and the present, identity and experience.

Dafna Rehavia Is an artist and art psychotherapist originally from Tel-Aviv, Israel. PhD in Therapeutic Arts, Psychology and Cultural Studies. Derby University, UKMA CAT in Creative Art Therapy. Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA. BFA, BED, Hamidrasha of the Arts, Beit Berl College. Israel.

Rehavia’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in group shows at Agora Gallery (NY), Suffolk University (MA), Lesley College (MA), Amsterdam (NL), Chicago (IL), Youngstown (OH), Pittsburgh (PA), Tel-Aviv (IS). Rehavia has had solo shows at Modern Formations Gallery and Pittsburgh Center for the Arts (PA), at Alternative Space (Israel), and at CA Gallery (MD). Rehavia’s work has been published in Sentiments: Expressions of Cultural Passage by Press Press and other books, journals, and catalog

harish saluja

Artist Harish Saluja is a filmmaker, artist and entrepreneur. His film The Journey (won several awards, screened at more than 30 film festivals and was distributed by the Independent Film Channel, He has shown his paintings in Europe and USA for over 40 years.

His smaller, miniature paintings are featured in ladies’ fashion handbags: www.indigoartbags.com

More info at: Harish TEDX talk

Garick Tai-Lee

Garick Tai-Lee is a Pittsburgh based artist who received his Master of Fine Arts from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 2015. Garick maintains his own studio practice where he makes both functional ceramics and multi-media sculptures.

Drawing upon his career as a potter and carpenter, the work he creates emphasizes process and technical skill.  His influence stems from his Japanese heritage, his exposure to architecture and his desire to recreate experiences from his travels.  The sculptures he creates utilizes traditional ceramic construction techniques decorated with an automotive painting process to create Post-Minimalist sculptures that questions our sense of space and place.

Garick Tai-Lee is also one of the owners and operators of Three Rivers Clay Works, a local ceramic studio based in Pittsburgh that was founded in 2014. TRCW creates functional ceramics with both traditional studio potter techniques and slip casting technique to create whimsical, stoic and organic pottery.

https://www.threeriversclayworks.com/

michel tsouris

paula weiner

Barbara westman