Born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Susan has cultivated her creative spirit across multiple mediums, from oil and soft pastel to gouache/mixed media, paper mâché, and tile mosaic sculpture and wall pieces.

Susan’s artistic journey has been as diverse as the images she portrays. Born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she later studied at the University of Wisconsin Platteville, earning a degree in Business. Despite her academic background, Becker’s true passion lies in the arts. Throughout her adult life, she has cultivated an imaginative and creative lifestyle, exploring various mediums to express her artistic vision. Finally settling in Bellevue, Iowa, she and her husband, Tom, transformed a nineteenth-century one-room schoolhouse into their home and studio.

Roy Haught, known for his evocative pastoral paintings, draws inspiration from the rich textures and landscapes of Eastern Iowa. Haught’s compositions transport the viewer to the essence of the natural environment. According to Haught, a painting is successful when it exists as a letter of gratitude to nature. Haught received his MA from the University of Notre Dame and Chaired the Art Department at Loras for many years before his retirement.

Timothy Rees began his pursuit of art by moving to Chicago in 2009 to paint in the open studios of the Palette and Chisel Academy. After one year, he joined the staff of instructors, and soon began teaching workshops locally and abroad. In 2012, he moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, where he later created and taught a classical art program for the Scottsdale Artist School. In 2017, he opened an atelier, where between 10 and 15 apprentices studied under Rees at any given time. Three years later, he moved to Iowa, where he paints in his downtown studio.

Throughout his decade of painting, he has appeared in numerous publications. among them Fine Art Connoisseur, International Artist, Southwest Art, and American Art Collector. Rees has won various awards, including first place in Portrait Society of America’s Members-Only Competition, the Art Renewal Center’s Gallery Award, FASO’s Bold Brush Award, and the People’s Choice Award in the SAS Beaux Arts Show and P&C Gold Medal Show.

Evan Ventris was born and raised on a farm just outside of Garnavillo, Iowa. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Clarke University in 2012, and works primarily in oil paint on panel, digital art, and sculpture. He focuses on landscapes and surrealism and is deeply influenced by his rural surroundings in eastern Iowa. Ventris has a fascination with photorealism and enjoys the challenges this technique offers. The artist has exhibited in both solo and group shows throughout Eastern Iowa, and like Rees, his work has been featured in several publications. 

“In my paintings, the edges of shapes yield easily to the spaces around them. They create a variety of changing allegiances, sometimes simultaneously becoming one thing, sometimes another. Like sleight of hand, shapes live hiding, nestling, drifting, absorbed, material and immaterial. In these paintings, the images often have no clean cut boundaries and I came to realize that by avoiding them and by simulating light, intuitively, this is how I have tried to replicate mystery”.

Thomas Jewell-Vitale is an artist who lives and works in Iowa where he is a Professor of Art at Loras College.

Dominique creates collage and mixed media embellished acrylic paintings re-interpreting history with images suggesting scraps of memory and surreal dreamscapes. Using lenticular and 3-D materials, mirrors and bright shiny things, her work is loaded with detail, symbolism and depth.

Introduced to high gothic architecture as a child, “The Cathedral Project”, combines the artist’s French heritage with her Midwestern roots. By using mixed media and rare, tin, barn roof shingles as her canvas, she bridges the spiritual world invoked by gothic masterpieces with rustic architecture. The work integrates historic facades, caryatids, icons and metal embellishments to create a dreamy homage inspired by man-made wonders.

Melissa has had a lifelong fascination with old family photos. She invites you to join her on a search through her colorful paintings: eavesdrop on a phone call, go grocery shopping in Mill Basin, come see the new baby, eat a bagel on the lower east side of Manhattan. She has studied at the New York Academy of Art, The Art Students League, and under the tutelage of painter Lisa Zwerling. She has shown her work at 440 Gallery in Brooklyn, O’Flaherty’s in Manhattan, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

https://melissamiddleberg.com/

Nanavati’s art practice is an amalgamation of printmaking, painting, and textiles. She is heavily influenced by meditation, prayer, and repetition along with the aftermath of loss and its manifestation in one’s own life. She completed her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Postgraduate Certification in Indian Aesthetics from Jnanapravaha, Mumbai. She is co-founder of Young Art Support, an online platform that promotes, exhibits, and sells work of young artists commission free.

https://alqawinanavati.com/

Georgie is a multidisciplinary artist and muralist based out of Charlotte, NC. After honing in on her artistry at Northwest School of the Arts, Georgie attended Winston-Salem State University with intention of further exploring the natural world. Her studies in Life Sciences have fueled her insight in environment preservation and philosophy, which transcends through her work’s subject matter. Her work pays homage to the African and Indigenous diaspora while highlighting nature and biodiversity. Georgie is an AT&T Black Future Makers honoree.

https://www.gardenofjourney.com/

With more than 100 miles of artist studios and galleries, the Scenic Art Loop is definitely one of a kind—and not to be missed! The self-guided Monthly Art Drive provides an inspiring adventure for art lovers of all kinds. Five regional artists from the Scenic Art Loop were recently featured in the Joan Mulgrew Gallery:

• Ben Brummerhop, Mineral Point, WI
• Jenna Lueck, Balltown, IA
• Rabecca Jayne Hennessey, Guttenberg, IA
• Kathryn Baxa, Galena, IL
• Laura Larabee, Monticello, IA

https://scenicartloop.com/

Sometimes known as Amy SquarePaints, Amy Carani is a visual artist that draws inspiration from pop culture. Knowing visual art does not have the mass appeal of pop culture, she creates colorful acrylic paintings with precise geometric shapes that guide popular themes on square canvases. By connecting pop culture and her geometric painting style, Amy creates an easy accessibility for those that may not be familiar with visual art.

amysquarepaints.com

Becky Sisco has been passionate about photography for more than 50 years. She can lose herself in the colors, textures, and lines–as well as the meaning–in whatever she shoots. The downtown murals caught her attention for their artistic value and for what they said about cultural change in Dubuque and the idea that art belongs to everyone.

Sisco reflects “As a photographer, I wanted to create my own compositions from art that already existed, to collaborate with the muralists in a way, even though I wasn’t involved in their process and hadn’t even met them.”.

Wendy S. Rolfe creates with a unique visual vocabulary and creative juxtapositions. Her oil paintings are influenced by her early studies in Philosophy, Psychology and Religion, particularly the Desert Fathers of the third century wisdom tradition with a small emphasis on Platonism and Freud. Rolfe was effected by her travels throughout Europe, Mexico and Central America . She writes, “Latin culture, specifically the Christian elements in combination with psychology play a significant role in my work.’’

Rolfe studied at The Academy of Art University in San Francisco, Parsons School of Design in New York and Le Atelier D’ Etampe in Paris. She executed many commissioned pieces for corporations in the 90’s, particularly in New York City, Southern California and the Southwest.

https://www.wendysrolfe.com/

Thérèse Mulgrew (b. 1991) grew up just outside of Dubuque, Iowa. Influenced by her mother’s surreal oil paintings and her grandmother’s impressionist still life, she began to cultivate her own style which focuses mainly on depicting large-scale portraits and nostalgic still life in oil paint. Her paintings represent an attempt to explore vulnerability and intimacy.

She took a variety of studio art classes at the University of Iowa, where she graduated as an English literature major in 2013. Immediately after, she moved to NYC where she worked in the fashion photo industry and studied at The Art Students League and New York Studio School of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture. Her first solo exhibition took place in NYC in 2020.

She currently resides in Chicago, IL.

https://www.theresemulgrew.com/