Current Exhibitions
Current Exhibitions
Open: May 12
Close: June 3
Cathy Mayhugh
Let Go
Artist Bio
Cathy Mayhugh has been the Director of Exhibitions at the Fitton Center for Creative Arts in Hamilton, Ohio since 2000. In this role she curates, designs, coordinates and installs a wide range of exhibitions of visual art. She enjoys engaging with people in the gallery during field trips, mentoring interns, and participating in collaborative community projects. She serves on Hamilton’s StreetSpark Mural Selection Committee and is a founding member of the Women’s Art Club of Hamilton. Cathy holds a BFA in Painting from Miami University and a Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Cincinnati, DAAP. After years of collaborating with other artists to present their work, she is reemerging as an art maker herself. Cathy considers the process of making art a healing and spiritual practice.
Artist Statement
Free Form
These intuitive artworks combine repurposed materials and a meditative process to build changeable structures. They hold qualities of impermanence, contemplation and interconnectedness. Embedded in the forms are experiences of loss and growth, both personal and societal.
Papers are harvested from magazines, maps and mail, then glued and stitched to construct pieces built over time. Repetitive hand stitching connects the multiple variations of a single symbol or shape (a mantra or prayer) into larger improvised structures. The forms themselves are highly transient; fragile, sometimes site specific and meant to move in air currents and transform in changing light conditions. Translucent layers and cast shadows are essentials elements of these pieces.
The works are imbued with the weight of personal loss and reflections on current corruptions within political, health care and carceral systems. In equal measure the forms themselves are evidence of the healing power of community, awareness, creativity, and faith.
Rick Jones
Washed Out Path
Artist Bio
Rick Jones began his 46-year arts career in Dayton, Ohio at age eight when in 1956, his mother enrolled him in Saturday morning art classes at the Dayton Art Institute. She made sure he rarely missed a Saturday for nearly ten years. Now with a master’s degree in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art Hoffberger School of Painting, he is an exhibited painter, author, and sometimes poet and retired arts administrator. He directed the Fitton Center for Creative Arts in Hamilton for 25 years.
He and his family owned Renaissance Fine Art Supplies & Framing in downtown Hamilton closing in 2022. With arts degrees, teaching college art for six years, and a 40-year career running successful arts centers, he, in 1991, was presented the Ohio Governor’s Award for Arts Administration. He has played the piano and banjo and was a longtime collector of telegraph insulators.
Rick published a book in June 2021. It is a memoir on his 25 years at the Fitton Center and a brief history of the arts in Hamilton. If interested, Silent Rise can be purchased on Amazon and multi-national retailers.
Rick and his family will be moving to Arizona in 2023.
Krauss Students
Artist Statement
The art on display here is a collection of paintings done by adult beginning art students at the Oxford Community Arts Center. These paintings are showing a wide variety of techniques and interpretations of the subjects depicted. These also show that the ability to create art is only limited by a tendency not to try. Interested in trying? Classes are available here at the Oxford Community Art Center.
Student Artists
Elaine Brandner
B.A. Caruso
Rachel Fryman
Jene Withrow Krall
Sandra Malicote
Michael Snyder
Susan Wise