Peggy Pownall

Peggy Pownall is a mixed media painter who often incorporates layers of collage, stitching and loose threads into her works. Using the creative process to explore life’s mysteries and memories, her work often tells stories that are very personal, and yet universal.

Her current body of work is born out of a mystifying combination of heartbreak and hope, a processing of her grief following the sudden loss of her husband Tim. The work emerged organically, as she began creating pieces using his garments, a tender, meditative, painstaking process of remembrance, sorrow and healing.

Sandra Klein

Sandra Klein is a fine art photographer whose practice consists of conceptual imagery exploring personal narratives. Since her son died tragically three years ago, she has been working on a series entitled Grieving in Japan.

She has found the winter landscape of Japan, which she visits yearly, in its eerie beauty and spirituality, the perfect place to grieve, but also to find images to use and composite in an attempt to portray that grief.

Frances Elson

Frances Elson, a glass artist working and living in Southern California, identifies herself with the following labels: Glass Artist, Holocaust Survivor, Jew and American Citizen. These are not the labels she would have used prior to 2015 when it became clear that the events that led inevitably to the Holocaust were being repeated in the United States.

Frances knew that telling her story, and that of her family, was something she could do through her art, and embarked on a project called “Broken…A Holocaust Memorial in Fused Glass” in order to express the fragility of our freedoms through the fragility, and strength, of fused glass.

Daggi Wallace

Daggi Wallace is known for her ability to capture not only a likeness, but the spirit of her subjects in her pastel portraits. Having painted several posthumous portraits previously she realized that art has the ability to offer comfort in times of sorrow.

This series of portraits of the victims of the Borderline mass shooting of November 7, 2018 in Thousand Oaks was her way of dealing with a tragedy that hit too close to home, a small way in which she could offer comfort to the grieving families and feel a connection to her community and those who were lost.

Katherine Chang Liu

When Katherine Chang Liu took care of her elderly parents, often in the hospital room or in their bedroom, she took small panels and simple art supplies and tried to imagine the color of the air during each hour, and painted them while they slept.

Her and her sister took care of their elderly parents for 10 years, and they each lived to 100 and 101.