EXHIBITIONS
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Abby Cipar Highlights Unique Collective in My Hand Was Yours to Hold
On view November 12 - December 13, 2025
Burton D. Morgan Foundation Gallery
Opening Celebration: Friday, November 14, 2025 from 5:00 - 7:30PM
My Hand Was Yours to Hold is a group exhibition curated by local artist Abby Cipar as part of their residency with Akron Soul Train. Featuring a selection of works by Cipar, Avery Mags Duff, Nick Lee, Moo, and Maria Uhase, this exhibition creates a unique collective that investigates the connective tissue between artist communities. Expanding upon their ongoing series Trans-Plants, a collection of highly embellished soft sculptures, Abby Cipar explores new techniques in paper-making and mixed media while integrating their background in painting and deep interest in tapping into the Queer frequencies of the natural world.
As a curator, Cipar brings together an exhibition containing the work of artists who have been pivotal in Cipar's personal growth and ability to currently work in the arts. Their respective bodies of work similarly explore concepts of community, identity, and our individual connections with nature. My Hand Was Yours to Hold highlights the notion that we can not arrive where we are without the support of our communities. This exhibition invites viewers to seek out the through-lines and inherent interconnectedness of artistic praxis, as well as consider their own unique roles within creative ecosystems.
“In many ways, organizing this exhibition has served as a sort of homecoming. After two years away for graduate studies, I found myself chasing after a deep desire for [re]connection. We do not have to look far to see who reciprocally aids us in sustaining our lives and artistic practices. Through this exhibition, I am inviting visitors to seek out the through-lines and interconnectedness of our practices and to consider their own, unique roles within creative ecosystems.”
– Abby Cipar
About the artist Abby Cipar:
Abby Cipar is a multidisciplinary artist, arts advocate, educator, curator, and wage laborer with roots in Northeast Ohio. Cipar received a BFA from The University of Akron (2021) and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2024). In addition to numerous honors, Cipar was a 2023 recipient of the Stewart Thomson Fellowship to attend Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and the 2019 Folk Charitable Foundation Venice Biennale Travel Award. Their work was included in Cleveland’s 2022 CAN Triennial, and they have exhibited widely in both institutional settings and local, artist-run spaces. In addition to numerous private collections, their work is in the care of Emily Davis Gallery (Akron, Ohio) and Akron Children’s Hospital (Akron). Projects for 2025 include co-curating FRESH: Soft Offerings at Summit Artspace and solo shows with The McDonough Museum of Art (Youngstown), 934 Gallery (Columbus), and Restorartive (Cleveland).
Alex Younger’s Private Rights Unraveled
On view November 12 - December 13, 2025
Burton D. Morgan Foundation Gallery, CapSOUL Gallery
Opening Celebration: Friday, November 14, 2025 from 5:00 - 7:30PM
Alex Younger’s art exhibition, Private Rights, is a series of twelve works that explore the last 60 years of Supreme Court text and opinions that proactively assert a bodily right to privacy. In 2022, the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision implied that the previous texts and opinions surrounding bodily privacy did not exist in the Constitution. In Private Rights, Alex Younger explores how this reasoning puts numerous precedents in jeopardy, including previous
rulings about abortion, birth control, interracial marriage, workplace discrimination, gay marriage, and the decriminalization of gay sex.
Using hand-weaving, natural dye, and experimental printmaking, Younger brings loud, fearless visual compositions that invite reflection and discussion. The exhibition focuses on legal archives with the intent of making these formerly important bodily privacy cases visible, legible,
and emotionally resonant. The works also draw attention to the unsettling ease of the omission of previous case judgments. Younger will also present correlating pieces from her other art series alongside Private Rights.
“These pieces bear witness to traumatic histories, mediating the relation between the literal representation of the object and the pain they signify, but can only indirectly portray. Hiding, erasing, or fracturing text through the intervention of image, material, or audience, the pieces highlight the construction and fragility of the narratives we build. ”
– Alex Younger
About the artist Alex Younger:
Alex Younger is a multidisciplinary artist who focuses on the systems and structures that maintain and support continued inequality, often focusing on gender violence and protest. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Swarthmore College in 2012 with an Honors Major in English Literature and a Course Major/Honors Minor in Studio Art, and she received her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018. She is a Gold
Złoty Medal Laureate from the 16th International Tapestry Triennial and a Silver Medal winner from the 13th International Scythia Biennial. She has shown internationally and across the United States, and her work is in the permanent collection of the Centralne Muzeum Włókiennictwa w Łodzi. She currently teaches at Kent State University.
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