artandcakela

By Kristine Schomaker I'm watching a Zoom screen where a medical school auditorium at USC is showing a painting of a service dog wearing a medical alert vest, his human hooked up to an IV pole surrounded by pharmaceutical labels and pain scales. The dog's eyes are clear and calm. The human's body is deconstructed into medical diagrams - intestines visible, organs exposed, reduced to systems and symptoms. Ashley Bravin just got out of the hospital with sepsis a week ago. She got on a plane...

Mural, acrylic, 30'x11', 2025 Donna Budzynski showed up at her first art fair at 60 years old without a tent. She had no clue what she was doing. When she arrived and saw all these younger artists, she immediately thought she didn't belong there because of her age. But she had a fabulous welcome. She was juried into some big fairs in the Twin Cities. People told her how awesome her work was. Customers contacted her wanting pieces. And at 64, she just completed her first 30 ft. x 11 ft. mural...

So I’m standing—back against some kind of white box column—in a gallery that’s humming and realizing: all these faces and textures and loops of color across the walls are having a long, heated conversation, and I’m the accidental eavesdropper. This isn’t just some reverential “women’s art exhibition”. It’s loud, messy, full of risk—Oak trees, riotous masks, feathery stitched creatures, piles of upcycled joybombs. Three women from one lineage. And the art is straight-up talking to itself. Or,...