wordshapes: Center for Creative Works
About the Exhibition
The artwork on view features the diverse drawing, painting, and mark-making practices of artists at Center for Creative Works (CCW), celebrating the slippage between pictorial and written expression. The Center for Creative Works, located in Wynnewood, PA, is an art studio that provides a unique work environment and day service program for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities. CCW gives individualized support to its participants, fostering their personal and professional growth in the arts.
CCW was formerly known as the Lower Merion Vocational Training Center (LMVC), founded in 1972 by Resources for Human Development. LMVC, a place where participants did standard contract work, transformed into CCW in 2010. Through CCW art programs, participants develop and build skills, discover their creative potential, and contribute to their communities.
wordshapes has been curated by Mariel Capanna. Capanna has received several fellowships for her artwork and studies in painting at Yale School of Art.
About the Curator, Mariel Capanna
Mariel Capanna is a MFA candidate in Painting at Yale School of Art, and the Fresco Shop Associate at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is the 2019 Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Travelling Fellowship Recipient, the 2018 Haverford College VCAM Philadelphia Artist in Residence, a 2016 Tacony LAB Arist in Residence, a 2014 Independence Foundation Visual Arts Fellow, and a 2012 Cresson Travel Scholar. Mariel has presented work in solo and two-person exhibitions in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Her project Little Stone, Open Home with Good Weather gallery is a permanent fresco in a perpetual state of interruption, alteration, degradation, and repair in a single car garage facing a public lake in North Little Rock, Arkansas.
In 2017, Capanna was awarded an Allies in Art project grant through Center for Creative Works, and invited three CCW artists into her Philadelphia studio to work on an eight-week fresco project. Alongside and in collaboration with Capanna, Vinetta Miller, Tamisha Williams, and Paige Donvoan developed a series of portable paintings on plaster, which were exhibited at the University City Arts League later that year.
