Ohio: Love for the Heart of it All
Ten days after graduating from college, Alsup embarked on a journey of 3,416 woman-powered miles through the Ohio Region. Beginning on June 1st 2023, Alsup biked the entire length of the Ohio River, thru hiked and biked the Buckeye Trail, biked around the perimeter of Lake Erie, and then completed the Ohio to Erie Trail by bike and roller blades.
This Ohio adventure fully immersed the artist in the region’s culture, history, and nature; providing unexpected moments with wonderful strangers, and gentle encounters with wildlife. Alsup hopes that residents of the local area feel a sense of comfort and pride when seeing their home state displayed through depictions of admiration and wonder. Viewers are encouraged to admire Ohio through a new perspective; a young girl exploring by herself with only her backpack, sketchbook, and the kindness of strangers and Mother Nature to help her along the way.
Listen to the Adventure Sports Podcast interview with Alsup on Spotify! Listen now.
Read more on Waterloos website here.
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.
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.
Read more at The Canton Repository
Listen to the Massillon Museum's podcast interview with Alsup at the MassMusings podcast on Spotify! Listen now.
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.
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.
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. Discussions of social and material value, commodification, and mass production are identified through a multimedia approach.
Alsup’s works are a form of documentation. Using meticulous detail, her artwork observes mundane scenes at the cannery.
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.