Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 28, for an art talk and demonstration with artist Elise Rugolo and a reading by author Marlene Lee
ELISE RUGOLO
Columbia native Elise Rugolo is a mixed-media painter who celebrates the physicality of her artwork through an exploration of various media and layering of imagery. Her paintings are abstract, with references to natural and man-made structures. Her use of pattern and rhythm, as well as a calligraphic style of mark making and brushstrokes, is suggestive of dance or motion borne out of a sense of urgency. She often combines both geometric and organic forms in a painting. She does not shy away from color, and generally favors a vivid and expressive palette.
Her father, Lawrence Rugolo, was a talented fine artist, designer, and art professor. He was her earliest influence in her creative development. A printmaker, he sometimes cut up his extra silkscreen prints and refigured them into collaged pieces--a process that has been engrained in her own work.
Rugolo holds an MFA in painting and drawing from Arizona State University and a BFA in painting from the University of Iowa. As a young artist, Rugolo moved to Chicago, where she lived at the Artist in Residence building. She worked as a freelance editorial illustrator while continuing her fine art studio practice, and taught at the University of Wisconsin. She is a member of Fair Share Art and Fluid Media, artists’ collectives that mainly exhibit work on Instagram and Artsy.
Rugolo has shown her paintings in galleries and museums at the local and national levels, as well as in many juried exhibitions. In 2020, she put on a large-scale show of her encaustic paintings and the work of her workshop students at the Montminy Gallery. Her November 2023 show at Orr St. Studios is her first solo exhibition of her new monotype work.
MARLENE LEE
Marlene Lee is the author of the newly release collection of short stories Inner Passage.
When she’s not reading, playing the piano, or talking to other writers, Marlene Lee holds down a table at the Lakota Coffee House in Columbia, Missouri, confronting blank pages during business hours and postponing the inevitable with another cup of coffee.
Before writing full-time, Lee worked as a court reporter, carting her shorthand machine from place to place (eventual settings for her fiction) in a moveable feast: Brookings, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; Chico, California; San Francisco; and New York City.
Before court reporting, she taught high school, children’s special education, freshman and sophomore college English, and vocational school classes in stenotype. Always and in-between, she was writing short stories and novels, accumulating publishable manuscripts before being actually published in 2013. Lee’s previous fiction titles: The Absent Woman, Rebecca’s Road, Scoville, Limestone Wall, No Certain Home, published by Holland House Books. Her author page can be found at marlenelee.wordpress.com.