Atticus Adams, Pittsburgh, PA
This installation was donated to Family House by the artist.
Atticus grew up steeped in traditional folk art. Several members of his family were self-taught artists, deeply involved in such crafts as wood carving and quilting.
According to the artist, “Making tangible objects is definitely part of my family heritage. I come from a tradition of using simple, easily available materials for creative expression.
“I like to think of my work as Neo-Appalachian Folk Art.”
His formal art training includes stints at Yale School of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, and Harvard School of Architecture.
Atticus’s art has been exhibited in national institutions like The Carnegie Museum of Art, The Mattress Factory, and The Westmoreland Museum of American Art.
He received Artist of the Year from the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in 201 and his sculptures are now found in public and private collections in the United States, Great Britain, Spain, Australia, Saudi Arabia, China, and The Philippines.
To discover more of Atticus’ work, visit www.atticusadams.com.
S. Rick Armstrong, Murrysville, PA
This photograph comes to Family House from S. Rick Armstrong.
Rick is an international assignment photographer and media producer based in Murrysville, PA, who brings a documentary approach to visual storytelling. He has documented culture and community in Central America, Europe, and America, with emphasis on social justice, humanity, and environment.
To discover more of Rick’s work, check out www.raphoto.net.
Larry Brandstetter, Pittsburgh, PA
This print comes to Family House from Larry Brandstetter.
Larry is a native of Pittsburgh and a 1972 graduate of Ivy School of Professional Art, which was located in Market Square, Downtown Pittsburgh. A very active and prolific artist from 1971 to 1982, Larry specializes in whimsical storybook style drawings and illustrations using pen and ink, colored pencil and graphite. He also created fun, colorful mixed media assemblage sculptures built with found objects and his waggish style.
Working with archival ink pens and/or colored pencils, his fun illustrations are characterized by whimsical characters, lines, patterns, and simple things. All of this creates a composition of a magical world. The drawings take your eyes on a fun, complex journey of hidden treasures and some pretty cool creatures.
Charlee Brodsky, Pittsburgh, PA
This pair of photographs were donated to Family House by the artist.
Charlee is a photographer, educator, grandmother, mother, wife, and dog-owner, among other things. Her professional home is at Carnegie Mellon University where she is a professor of photography and has taught for over 40 years. The streets she walks are in Pittsburgh and that has been the inspiration of her many photographs.
Charlee has photographed steel communities in the Ohio River Valley and has told stories of individuals, who have dealt with challenges, such as of her dear friend, Stephanie, who lived stoically with breast cancer.
The work pictured here is different from her more world-oriented projects that take cues from the documentary tradition. Also, it departs from her artist’s books that have been inspired by muses ranging from her dogs to great thinkers such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Mary Shelley.
Charlee often works with writers and finds great satisfaction in word/image pairings. She exhibits and publishes her work, and it has been recognized by Pennsylvania state grants, an Emmy, and other awards.
To discover more of Charlee’s work, check out www.charleebrodskyphotography.com.
Cynthia Cooley, Verona, PA
This collection of paintings was donated to Family House by the artist.
Cynthia is known for her vivid paintings of steel mill interiors and of Pittsburgh’s hillside neighborhoods and industrial valleys. She is a graduate of Lawrence University, which honored her with the 1997 Distinguished Career Achievement Award.
Her paintings explore the urban landscape, emphasizing the geometric forms, rich colors, and textures found in hillside neighborhoods, city skylines, industrial river valleys, and steel mills. Her other works recreate the visual delight she finds in her world travels and coastal New England.
To discover more of Cynthia’s work, visit www.cynthiacooley.com.
Pamela Cooper, Greensburg, PA
This painting comes to Family House from artist Pamela Cooper.
An award-winning multidisciplinary artist, entrepreneur, educator, and community leader, Pamela has a B.A. in Graphic Arts/Minor in Fine Arts along with a Teaching Certification in Art from Seton Hill University in Greensburg, PA.
Pamela received a technical degree in Fashion Illustration from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. Her skills in design transferred into her fine arts practice. She sees shapes in their simplest forms, and she creates captivating works that stimulate the viewers to engage and allow for a dialog of spiritual reflections.
To discover more of Pamela’s work, check out www.pamelacooperart.com.
Ron Donoughe, Pittsburgh, PA
This collection of 26 paintings comes to Family House from Ron Donoughe.
A native of Loretto, PA now living in Pittsburgh, Ron is best known for his spirited realistic landscape paintings of Western Pennsylvania. He has a B.A. in Art Education from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and has studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA.
Ron works full time now as a professional artist/painter. His work can be found in many corporate and private collections as well as in the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, The Westmoreland Museum of American Art, and The University Museum at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and Heinz History Center.
To discover more of Ron’s work, visit www.donoughe.com.
Scott Hunter, Pittsburgh, PA
This painting comes to Family House from Scott Hunter.
Scott studied painting and art history at Boston University. He graduated in 1993 after a classically structured education based on intensive studio training and drawing from life. His related experience includes theatrical set design, illustration, commissioned portraits, and wall murals.
Scott’s work is rooted in tradition, drawn from life, and constructed with imagination. It is about the arrangement of images, textures, colors, and shapes. Working in both a representational and non-representational manner while struggling with the need to merge figuration with a love of abstract expressionism, Scott produces two distinct bodies of work. Both tend to evoke a specific place or memory. The construction of each resonates with emotional presence.
To discover more of Scott’s work, check out www.scotthunterfineart.com.
Maura Keeney, Latrobe, PA
This painting was donated to Family House by the artist.
Based in southwestern Pennsylvania, Maura’s paintings reflect dramatic moments in the life of plants and natural subjects of the earth. She believes that in order to understand the whole, we can study a minute part. Details of nature are often overlooked but through magnifying the forms, their intricacies are revealed. Examining nature on these dual micro and macro levels parallels the introspective way in which we contemplate our own lives. Many of Maura’s images ponder a will to survive in harmony with or in spite of forces of nature; the same sorts of struggles we face daily in life. Maura is instinctively drawn to these subjects because they echo themes of maternity, motherhood, aging, and sibling rivalry that occur in her own life.
From conception through process, her work is a personal search for truth, understanding, and peace regarding her existence within nature. Today, as climate change becomes a reality, nature’s survival in all of its forms and cycles is threatened. Maura hopes to affect viewers with her celebration of nature’s awe-inspiring influence upon her life.
To discover more of Maura’s work, visit www.maurakoehlerkeeney.com.
David A. Ludwig (1946-2011), Greensburg, PA
This collection of four paintings by artist David A. Ludwig (1946-2011) was donated to Family House in his memory by Barbara L. Jones.
David began his career as a painter and slowly evolved from two-dimensional color field paintings on canvas to three-dimensional wall reliefs or structures constructed of plywood. His work as a model builder for an architecture firm in Philadelphia had a major impact on his working method as well as on the direction his work would take. David’s love of industry led him very early to define his three-dimensional paintings as Structures, generically titled so as not to reveal specific sources or define literal references.
David’s colorful abstract structures are minimal in means. Closer observation reveals, however, the complexity of each structure. Controlled completely, the artist set up a dialogue between form, light, color, and texture from the very beginning. The subtlety of each curve, combined with the all-over tactile quality of surface, creates the sense of movement. The artist’s hand is not revealed in these pieces; however his control is obvious. While his pictorial language remained the same throughout his career, it evolved in subtle but distinctive shifts in form, to continually create new approaches to image-making.
Born in Terre Haute, IN, Ludwig resided in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Greensburg, PA.
Duncan MacDiarmid, Pittsburgh, PA
Entitled “Common Roots,” this sculpture comes to Family House from Duncan MacDiarmid.
Duncan feels a connection to the land–the grit, moisture, light, and emotion that binds our human experience. This interest took him first to the sculptural figure and portrait. Eventually, these representational forms wove themselves into works that evoke a particular sense of place within our environment. These pieces later evolved into artworks that comment on our global, human-to-planet relationship.
To discover more of Duncan’s work, visit thefiretreeproject.org.
Richard McWherter, Derry, PA
These photographgs come to Family House from Richard McWherter.
Richard is a visual artist working in photography and digital art. He thinks of photographs as dreams made tangible. They represent a physical extension of a memory for him, but he wants to go beyond just recording a time and place; he wants to capture what he feels in that moment. McWherter’s goal is to lead the eye through an image with the same effect that a storyteller weaves a tale
To discover more of Richard’s work, check out www.richardmcwherter.com.
Jim Murphy, Ligonier, PA
This collection of photographs comes to Family House from Jim Murphy.
Jim is a native of Limerick, Ireland, who now lives in Ligonier, PA. In the early 1970s, Jim regularly traveled the Irish countryside taking photographs of his favorite places in County Clare, Galway, and Carry. He loves the wide-open spaces and big skies in the western U.S. with so many beautiful places to hike and take photographs.
To discover more of Jim’s work, visit www.jimmurphyphotography.com.
Kevin O'Toole, Greensburg, PA
This pair of sculptures was donated to Family House by the artist.
Kevin’s work has always been about simple, subtle curves, shifting planes and how light reveals them. Free-standing pieces are most often about transitions from one shape to another. The use of contrasting material, most often silver leaf or paint, not only plays off the sensuous quality of the wood and adds a secondary design element but also emphasizes the play of light across the surface.
Born in St. Louis, MO, Kevin graduated with an MFA from The Pennsylvania State University, and a BFA from Cornell University after studying at the Tyler School of Art in Rome. His works have been exhibited widely and can be found in public and private collections around the country.
To discover more of Kevin’s work, visit www.conceptgallery.com/artist/kevin-otoole.
Mark Perrott, Pittsburgh, PA
This collection of photographs was donated to Family House by the artist.
A native of the Pittsburgh area, Mark has worked as a professional photographer since 1971. His work includes portraiture and corporate photography for annual reports and commissions for black and white portraits of families and children. In the early 1980s, he gave special attention to the life and death struggle of “steel” in the Mon Valley, with a special focus on Pittsburgh’s Jones and Laughlin steel mill and its Blast Furnace Department, informally known as Eliza. Photographs from this project were used to create the book Eliza: Remembering a Pittsburgh Steel Mill, published in 1989 by Howell Press.
Mark’s photographs are included in the permanent collections of a number of museums, including Carnegie Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
To discover more of Mark’s work, visit www.markperrott.com.
John Burt Sanders, Pittsburgh, PA
This painting comes to Family House from John Burt Sanders.
John is an artist from Arcade, NY. In 2019, his work appeared in the Northeast edition of New American Paintings, issue # 140. He completed his MFA in painting and drawing at Ohio University in 2011 and earned a BFA in painting and art history at State University of New York at Fredonia in 2007.
John was awarded an Artist Opportunity Grant from the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council in 2014. In 2014, he participated in an artist residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. He currently lives and works in Pittsburgh.
To discover more of John’s work, check out https://indivisbler.com.
Richard Stoner, Latrobe, PA
These photographs come to Family House from Richard Stoner.
Since age 23, Richard’s life has revolved around photographic image making: as an artist, as a businessman, and as an educator. His personal work is primarily landscape driven where black and white film continues to be his medium, though variations persist. A formal underpinning of all his work is architectural, be it natural or human design. Made as a gelatin silver print, he does no manipulation in printing beyond the application of contrast, dodging and burning, and selenium toning in a traditional wet darkroom.
Aside from a two-year project as a survey photographer, Richard’s subject matter is eclectic, which he sees as lyrical and poetic in the manner of musical composition.
To discover more of Richard’s work, visit www.richardstonerphotography.com.
Gary Zak, West Mifflin, PA
This print comes to Family House from artist Gary Zak.
Gary is a videographer, photographer, and exhibit designer and consultant who resides in West Mifflin, PA. Throughout his artistic journey, Gary has continually pursued originality through a variety of methods. He is a member of the Society of Sculptors, Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, and several other art organizations. Two of his works are included in the Greater Latrobe School District’s collection.
This print titled “Nocturnal Kaleidoscope Vortex” symbolizes artist Gary’s ongoing quest to create unique and captivating imagery. Inspired by several photographs taken at the Asian Lantern Festival in 2021, Gary blended in hand-drawn custom effects using Photoshop. Through careful harmonization of luminosity and color tones, he achieved a distinctive patina-like style—one that defies traditional photography or common illustration techniques.
To discover more of Gary’s work, check out www.art-gzak.com.
