Looking Back on 2025 at The Art Center
- Jan 8
- 7 min read
Happy 2026! It’s hard to believe another year has already come and gone at The Art Center, but what a year it was! With 56 outreach programs, 52 workshops, more than 70 camps, 166 classes, and art enrichment in 8 local elementary schools, we have been very busy! With the additional gallery exhibitions, receptions, and special events, we’ve had a ton of fun throughout the year.
Exhibitions
The Art Center hosts gallery exhibitions in six locations, including four off-site gallery spaces at Newtown Park, Ocee Library, Emory Johns Creek, and Johns Creek City Hall. The off-site exhibition spaces showcase art from The Art Center Guild, our senior outreach students, and the students at our after school elementary art classes.
New this year is the improved Annex gallery space. We added a new hanging system to the walls of the Annex, which expanded our ability to showcase local artists who have developed a body of work. Our first exhibiting artist in the Annex space this year was Jai Ho Kyung with his solo exhibition A Pencil in His Hand. Jai’s collection of colored pencil pieces drew in more than 200 people to view the exhibition, and the generous donation he made to The Art Center partially funded the new hanging system. We installed the system after summer camps concluded and were able to hold two more solo exhibitions in the Annex space. Sandy Teepen’s Quilted Collage was the first show to utilize the new system, featuring her incredible collage work that has been on exhibit around the country. We ended the year with the ViewFinder Arts Exhibition, featuring the photography and digital art of our guild member Michael VanPatten.
Our main gallery was as busy as ever this year. We opened the year’s gallery calendar with We’ve Got the Power!, a celebration of Black History Month and the 30th anniversary of Atlanta’s Sistagraphy photography group with which The Art Center has enjoyed a long relationship. Then A Woman’s Place is in the Arts opened in March to celebrate Women’s History Month with a collection of works created by female artists, with many works celebrating influential women from history. Artistic Alchemy, our Spring Student and Member Showcase, displayed the incredible work of the talented students and contributing members of The Art Center, and The Art Gathering brought in diverse works from local artists who are members of our instructor Debra Yaun’s art group.
Summer brought in the annual High Honors exhibition, where we celebrate the work of local Middle and High School students as our camp season gets into gear. We also had the unique opportunity to host the Atlanta Korean Art Association’s GwangBok 80, an exhibition of historic and contemporary Korean artwork that celebrated 80 years of Korean independence. Our annual Summer Serendipity juried art competition closed out our summer season with record-breaking numbers of submissions and a truly impressive showcase of regional artists.
The fall season opened with By a Thread: Contemporary Voices in Fiber, our celebration of the modern manifestations of one of the oldest art mediums in human history. Fall Into Art brought back a celebration of the student and member work from the latter half of the year. It was another remarkable show; each showcase gets better than the last as our students continue proving that their hard work in classes is paying off.
Our final exhibition of the year was short and sweet. Seniors in the Spotlight celebrated the artistic creations of the students in the senior program at Newtown Park. It was a lovely afternoon event that put a beautiful endcap on the year.
Clay Studio Improvements
Our clay studio saw some great changes in 2025! In addition to new classes and plenty of new faces, we also got a new kiln. Miranda, named for Fulton County Arts and Culture Arts Education Coordinator Miranda Smith, joined us this year as our sixth and largest kiln. Miranda has greatly expanded our ability to handle firing, which is much needed as our classes continue to grow.
With the addition of Miranda, we are also looking at expanding our kiln room. The Bowls 2025 fundraiser raised over $7,000 toward that goal through silent auction sales, donations, and bowls purchases. We’re in the process of receiving bids on the expansion, complicated somewhat by its intense electrical needs and the location of one of our breaker boxes. It might take some time, but the kiln expansion will be a huge help to our instructors who load and unload the kilns and it should help to expand the life of our kilns with better ventilation.
Thanks to the hard work of a local Eagle Scout, we were able to add a more permanent and safe pathway from the Clay Studio to the excess clay disposal outside. While it might not sound glamorous, it is a major quality of life improvement for our clay studio.
Finally, we introduced a new glaze program this year. This was a huge investment into the clay program, with months spent testing glaze mixes and preparing the sample tiles and refreshed containers. The glaze options have been simplified and improved (and now all our glazes are food safe!), with a better range of colors and more stability.
Wednesday Wanderings
Expanding on our Creator Circle program, we introduced Wednesday Wanderings in late 2025. For this new program, we are arranging field trips to do plein air painting and social sketching at an interesting location in the area. It’s been a fun way for our artists to get to know each other and experience new local spots while putting in useful practice on their art.
Our first wandering took us to McDaniel Farm Park, a park featuring historic buildings and equipment from a 1930’s cotton farm. It was a beautiful day in October, and McDaniel Farm has so many interesting vistas for painting. Oil painters, watercolorists, illustrators, and acrylic painters found comfortable spots with views of the farm buildings and sprawling fields and spent a quiet morning doing studies in each other’s company. We ended the afternoon at a nearby restaurant, Tiger K CupBob, enjoying good food and conversation.
Our second Wednesday Wandering ended up happening on a Thursday to accommodate the hours of the nearby Southeastern Railway Museum. We booked a group tour for this field trip that included a guide through some of the most impressive trains in their collection and a ride on one of the trains. After the ride, we settled in to do studies of several of the engines in the train yard.
Our last Wednesday Wandering took us to Antique & Caffe, a beautiful coffee shop down the road from The Art Center. It features a collection of fascinating antiques that were fun to sketch while enjoying the delicious breakfast and coffee.
Our next Wednesday Wandering will take us to Autrey Mill Nature Preserve on March 4 from 10:30-1:30 pm. It’s free to attend, but we request you bring a donation to the Nature Preserve to help support their good work. There are animals, buildings, and nature trails that will all provide great opportunities for interesting studies.
Performing Arts Play a Bigger Role at The Art Center
The Art Center has made performing arts available during our summer camps for many years, with the occasional offering throughout the regular sessions. In 2025, we expanded our performing arts offerings with the addition of Amanda Rountree to our instructor lineup. Amanda Rountree has an impressive background as a former instructor at the renowned Second City Training Center, and she has toured eight countries performing as an improvisor. Her improv and storytelling classes are designed to help students build confidence, think on their feet, and simply loosen up and have much-needed fun. Classes are available for both adults and youth.
Forefront Arts, the theatre company that runs our musical theatre summer camps, has also expanded their offerings at The Art Center to include after school theatre programs at The Art Center. There is one coming up soon themed after the popular K-Pop Demon Hunters film!
Fiber Fair
In conjunction with our contemporary fiber arts show and solo quilt exhibition, The Art Center hosted a one-time Fiber Fair celebrating the history of fiber arts. With the help of local fiber arts guilds, businesses, and individual artists, we were able to introduce people to the various crafts that take raw wool or cotton all the way to finished clothing. Visitors got to pet angora rabbits, try out a loom, see a 200 year old spinning wheel at work, and dye cloth with indigo (among many other activities). It is our goal to continue creating educational tie-ins to our gallery exhibitions to help further our mission to connect the community to arts education opportunities, so keep an eye on our events page for other fun opportunities for the whole family!
New Deputy Director
Another big change The Art Center saw this year was the addition of our Deputy Director, Samson Tarpeh. As you might imagine from the above list of activities from this year alone, running The Art Center has become a very big job for a staff of five. Samson has joined our ranks to provide much needed help with fundraising and operations. With his help, The Art Center will be able to implement new programs and expand what we currently offer. We will also have a lot more live piano music here!
Second Annual Holiday Pop-Up Market
Our last big event of the year was our second annual Holiday Pop-Up Market. We were able to expand our list of vendors from last year and lengthened the market by an hour. It was a fun day of good company with the vending artists, steady crowds, and festive vibes. We also went through more than two crockpots full of hot chocolate (with marshmallows, of course). We’ll keep growing the market in 2026, so we encourage any artists who are interested in the opportunity to sell their work to join our mailing list to keep up with application openings and other calls for art!
Now we enter 2026 with big goals for The Art Center. This year marks The Art Center’s 30th anniversary, and we will be celebrating all year long! Keep an eye out for updates on our upcoming 30th Birthday Bash and Gala, as well as other smaller celebrations over the next several months!
