Greenville, SC – Greenville Center for Creative Arts (GCCA) is excited to announce the opening of their Main Gallery exhibition, It’s all around us. The exhibition features the artwork of acclaimed artists Heather Brand, Alan Shuptrine, & Dawn Stetzel. The exhibition opens with a First Friday reception from 6:00 – 9:00 pm on Friday, February 3rd, 2023. There will be opening remarks from GCCA Chief Executive Officer, Jess Burgess, at 6:30 PM. This exhibition continues until Wednesday, March 29th, 2023. 

It’s all around us is a group exhibition featuring artists Heather Brand, Alan Shuptrine, and Dawn Stetzel with works examining natural & synthetic elements of our surroundings. Through photography, sculptures, and paintings, the artists explore the delicate manner in how man-made materials and structures can affect our relationship with the natural world. Objects, structures, and places which are not found naturally but are created and synonymous with humanity’s connection with nature question the desire of an ideal natural world versus balancing ways to respond to and maintain our environment. 

Heather Brand

Heather Brand is a visual artist living and working in Meadville Pennsylvania. She has an MFA in Visual Studies from the University of Buffalo and is an Assistant Professor of Art at Allegheny College. Her work depicts scenes of humans’ mediated relationship with nature via deceptions of built environments concerning the collection, cultivation, and recreation of the natural world. Brand’s work has been shown internationally in London UK, Rome, Italy, Sao Luis, Portugal, and Madrid, Spain. Nationally her work has recently been exhibited at the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art in Altoona, Pennsylvania, the Midwest Center Center for Photography in Wichita, Kansas, and the Community Arts Center of Oneonta in Oneonta, New York. 

Alan Shuptrine

A painter known for his realistic watercolors, oils, gold leafing, and handmade frames, Alan Shuptrine’s works can be found in the permanent collections of several American museums and hundreds of corporate and private collections nationwide. A multi-faceted artist, Shuptrine is a leading practitioner in the centuries-old art of handcrafting and water gilding, fine art frames and mirrors, wood carving, and sgraffito etching. Born the son of recognized painter, Hubert Shuptrine (1936-2006), Alan also has continued the legacy of watercolor realism that both Andrew Wyeth and his father Hubert established and has cemented himself as a nationally renowned watercolor artist.

Dawn Stetzel

Dawn Stetzel is an artist from the United States currently living on the Long Beach Peninsula on the southern coast of Washington on the unceded land of the Chinook and Lower Chinook. Her performative sculptures interact with environments in the margins, where humans and nature rub together leaving a sometimes-messy residue. An intensely strong work ethic was formed through growing up in Iowa and this physicality and fortitude shows up in her sculptural works. She is innovative in her field of sculpture and has contributed through her work over the past twenty years. In 2000 she was awarded her first solo exhibition and a Durham Arts Council Emerging Artist Grant in North Carolina. She has a Master of Fine Arts from the College of Visual and Performing Arts at The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. She has exhibited widely in the United States through multiple solo exhibitions, public art commissions and group exhibitions including Grounds for Sculpture, Disjecta and the Portland Biennial. Her work is included in permanent public collections at The City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and the Shiwan Ceramic Museum in the Guangdong Province of China. Her work is printed in multiple publications, she has shown internationally and has lectured in the United States, China and Brazil.

About GCCA

Greenville Center for Creative Arts is a non-profit organization that aims to enrich the cultural fabric of the community through visual arts promotion, education, and inspiration. GCCA’s galleries are open Tuesdays-Fridays from 9 AM – 5 PM & Saturdays from 11 AM – 3 PM. For more information, visit www.artcentergreenville.org, call 864-735-3948, or check out GCCA on Facebook (Greenville Center for Creative Arts) & Instagram (@artcentergvl).