Exhibitions | Mysite

Alsup working on an ink drawing titled Break Time. The piece was featured in the exhibition at the Massillon Museum in March of 2023.

Prairies to Peaks: Biking to Colorado's Tallest Mountain

Prairies to Peaks: Biking to Colorado's Tallest Mountain is an exhibition by Alison Alsup, featuring paintings and drawings about her 1,000 mile solo bike trip across the American Midwest to her summer job working and living on Mt Elbert- Colorado’s tallest peak. These works display America’s expansive beauty with excitement through young and curious eyes and portray difficult physical feats with a sense of romanticized innocence accurate to the artist's experience.

Detailed watercolor, pen, ink, and graphite artworks depict observations that follow the artist's adventure west from Cleveland, Ohio. Using photo references from the journey, Alsup has created a body of highly rendered drawings and paintings of the landscapes she encountered. She has also constructed narratives that illustrate meaningful moments of the venture that were not photographed.

While looking at the accounts of a young girl admiring the Midwest on her bike, and pushing hundreds of pounds of rock around a mountainside to build hiking trails, viewers are invited with the artist to contemplate about the charm of interactions with strangers, the country’s magnificent nature, the horrible destruction it has faced due to colonization, and other complexities that are associated with outdoor recreation.

The Holy Land: A Semester in Jerusalem

The Holy Land: A Semester in Jerusalem is a solo exhibition by Alison Alsup which features paintings and drawings depicting her observations and experiences from studying abroad in Jerusalem for four months.

Western media’s perceptions of the Holy Land are predominantly focused on colonialism as it relates to Israel and Palestine, which is often influenced by bias. Upon returning to Ohio, Alsup understood that there is much more to the Holy Land than the media's coverage of violence.

Detail-oriented, naturalistic watercolor paintings, pen, and graphite drawings admire the country’s beauty. From the lush green gorges tucked away in red desert rock along the Dead Sea near Jericho, to the rolling green mountains outside of Jerusalem. The work additionally draws attention to the significance of the population's cultural and religious diversity to communicate the necessity of seeing people as individuals.

Through the artist's young and curious eyes, viewers who are only aware of the Holy Land through the media may see the country from a new perspective, and those personally familiar with the area are invited to feel a sense of joy and nostalgia for this unique land which they call home.

Alsup in her studio working on a watercolor painting titled It's About You Sized for the exhibition in Current, a community space at the 78th Street Studios in April of 2022.

Alaska: Working in Bristol bay

Alaska: Working In Bristol Bay is a two person exhibition featuring works by Alison Alsup and Ronald Jackson III. This multidisciplinary retrospective depicts their experiences working and living in salmon canneries on the remote shores of Bristol Bay during the summer of 2021. Their drawings, paintings, and sculptural works give viewers a peek into the fishing industry on the Alaskan Peninsula.

Jackson’s work focuses on the people he lived with, and the conditions they endured by portraying the lifestyles and daily struggles of working in such a beautiful and strange

environment. At the whims of corporations, workers rely on industrialization, which construes nature into a product for our livelihoods. Discussions of social and material value, commodification, and mass production are identified through a multimedia approach. By incorporating manufactured elements and systems of reproducibility, Jackson establishes an aesthetic that draws from these ideas. Representation is not limited to medium use, but shown

through various illustrations depicting the working class as anonymous equals to their product.

Alsup’s works are a form of documentation. Using meticulous detail, her artwork observes mundane scenes at the cannery, from the rugged dock, to trays of food at the mess hall.

Intense technical detail and rendering in her paintings and drawings record Alsup’s honest perspective of the cannery’s lifestyles and day to day experiences. Alsup particularly focuses on the beauty of the area’s bareness, and the human influence on this remote scenery and the natural

species which inhabit these areas.

This exhibition is supported through the Cleveland Institute of Art Creativity Works program, and made possible by the generous support of the Fenn Educational Fund and the G.R.

Lincoln Family Foundation.