Plein Air Painting with Mary Proenza – Hinge Arts Artist!

Acrylic painting materials will be provided for participants who sign up in advance. (Wear old clothes in case of any spills!) We’ll paint from observation, using the park and the historic Kirkbride building as our motifs. If all 12 spots are filled, please stop by, observe, and ask questions!

Mary Proenza was raised up and down the coast of California and now lives in New York City.  She earned her MFA in painting at New York Studio School, her MFA in creative writing at The New School, and her BA in the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  She has received residency grants in visual art from the Jentel Foundation, New York Mills Cultural Center, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. One focus of her work at Hinge Arts will be plein air painting at the Kirkbride and in the Fergus Falls area.  She also combines writing with visual art, and another of her projects is a graphic memoir in progress, a portion of which has been published in Rosebud magazine.  Her art reviews have been published in Art in America and The Brooklyn Rail, and her visual art appears on the covers of books from John Daniel & Co. and CDs from CMH and Arhoolie.  She has just been appointed Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Marymount University in Arlington, VA (to begin Fall 2017).  She has taught both studio art and English at Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York, in the Art Department at Marymount Manhattan College, and at New York Academy of Art.  See samples of her work at http://www.maryproenza.com.

This is a Hinge Arts Project supported by Springboard for the Arts. Hinge Arts at the Kirkbride is a residency program that was launched in 2015 to engage artists and community members in the past and future of the Kirkbride Building in Fergus Falls, MN.