By Dan Spalding
News Now Warsaw
WARSAW — Sea Grandon’s Atelier art gallery is proof that you don’t have to be in a major metropolitan area to attract and exhibit top notch artwork.
The latest exhibit at Atelier, which opens Thursday night, features different types of architectural-themed art from New York City resident Michael Wolf.
One year after opening the East Center Street gallery, Grandon has realized she could bring in upscale artwork to a small city in northern Indiana via social media and her connections in New York, Miami and elsewhere.
Wolf discovered Atelier through Instagram where he began commenting on some of the artwork featured on Grandon’s Instagram page.
“This is how the world of social media works and I started looking into his work,” she said.
That led Grandon to explore his online artwork and eventually led to an offer from her to exhibit his work in Warsaw.
The exhibit, “domicilium: a place to dwell,” includes four freestanding sculptures, nine wall-hung relief pieces, and one painting with geometric forms and gilded arches rendered in wood, stone, metal, and gold leaf.
I’ve always loved architecture and his work is very architectural. I love the simple geometry of it,” she said. “Even though the forms are quite simple, it really can evoke a lot of different memories or connections.”
She said she receives on average 50 to 100 emails every day from artists. That, along with her networking and her own research means she’s never lacking in possible artwork for the gallery.
“It’s rare that I’m actually looking for someone specifically to fill a spot in the gallery’s programing. It’s more like every day, I see this abundance and things just naturally seem to fall into place,” she said.
“Yeah, its been really great,” she said “I haven’t had a single artist decline showing here, so that’s a good thing,” she said with a laugh.
An open house for Wolf’s collection is from 6-8 pm. Thursday and the exhibit continue until March 22.
Admission at Atelier is free.
The next show in 2024 will arrive in April and feature Mike Kelly — a Warsaw native who Grandon describes as a colorist and a landscape painter.
She said his style of landscape work does not use the traditional representational color combinations, but still evokes emotions tied to places, weather and time of day.
In late May, Detroit-area artist Kat Quay will feature back-lit light boxes hung on walls with 3-D printed botanicals using layers of glass and metals.
Grandon said the entire 2024 season has already been locked into place and she’s already developing a plan for 2025.
* * *
On a related note, Grandon is one of a dozen downtown merchants who will participate in an ice sculpture show Thursday night that’s organized by Go Rogue Warsaw. The show will feature ice sculptures outside of downtown stores in Warsaw from 4 to 7 p.m.
