Storytellers Spotlight Series: Benash & Luck

This is the second segment in series about the artists of Women of Visions exhibition Storytellers: Truth Be Told! which will run from November 21, 2014 through February 1, 2015 at the the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. Here we highlight Shelita Birchette Benash and Monique Luck. 

Benash is a self-taught multi-media artist from the state of New York, with a professional background of 20 years in theater. Ms. Benash's primary mediums are clay, fiber and mosaic. She collects and salvages broken and discarded components to create trans formative visual metaphors. The act of gathering then bending, cutting, layering, and piecing parts that can then be viewed as a whole, gives her great satisfaction as an artist. She and her sculptor, husband own the "Organic Art Farm," where she is currently working on a mosaic bovine. 

Luck, a California native, left Pittsburgh several years ago to pursue her dreams, but never left her love for art. According to the Agora gallery in New York, one of many galleries in which she has shown her work nationally: "Monique Luck creates soulful and wonderfully lyrical images in mixed media..using fragments of found paper...the effect is exceedingly painterly in appearance." In 2012, Luck was the winner of the Bearden Inspired Collage Contest sponsored by the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

Stone and porcelain tile mosaic by Shelita Benash

Mixed Media collage by Monique Luck