LIGHT Art + Design
15 Years of LIGHT
May 7 - July 11, 2026
Featuring works by
Anita Wolfenden, Harriet Hoover, Ippy Patterson,
Jon Rollins, Katherine Armacost, Leigh Suggs,
Lynda Stuart Curry, Matt Shlian, Neil Patterson,
Tom Spleth, and Yun Dong Nam
Images
Information
About the Artists
This year marks the 15th year of LIGHT Art + Design at our current location in the Greenbridge building in Chapel Hill. Over the years we have worked with so many wonderful artists. This group exhibition features works by Anita Wolfenden, Harriet Hoover, Ippy Patterson, Jon Rollins, Katherine Armacost, Leigh Suggs, Lynda Stuart Curry, Matt Shlian, Neil Patterson, Tom Spleth, and Yun Dong Nam.
Selected images from the exhibition are above. For the full list of available works, contact the gallery at info@lightartdesign.com
15 Years of LIGHT
About the Artists
Anita Wolfenden was born and grew up in Sweden. In 1965, she earned a degree from the University of Lund majoring in Classical Archaeology and Art History. That same year, she married American biochemist Richard Wolfenden, in Chapel Hill, NC, where they raised their two sons. She went on to earn a Masters degree in the School of Public Health at UNC, Chapel Hill in 1976. She later met and studied with Swiss tapestry weaver Silvia Heyden for several years in Durham, NC. Wolfenden has participated in exhibitions across North Carolina and in invitational shows in the US, UK, and Sweden. In the 1990s she learned to make paper and collage and joined the Carolina Designer Craftsmen Guild where she exhibited both tapestries and collage for many years. Her father was an entomologist from a family of naturalists and his work on flowerflies with their clarity of line is still a strong influence in her work. Architectural forms in nature with their hollows and shadows are also a recurring theme for her.
Harriet Hoover is a visual artist and educator whose work explores abstract, process-driven approaches to drawing and textiles. A recipient of the North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship Award, she has exhibited nationally and participated in artist residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Château du Pin in Champtocé-sur-Loire, France. She holds a B.A. in Textile Technology and Art + Design from North Carolina State University and an M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In addition to her studio practice, Hoover has worked as an arts educator and administrator in community, academic, and museum settings. Her work often engages themes of play and the artistic process through social and participatory projects.
Ippy Patterson is a visual artist who was born in New England and grew up in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile where her father was a metallurgist for the Andes Copper Mining Company. She attended Rhode Island School of Design as an illustration major before transferring to Brown University to major in creative writing. She had her first short story published by New Directions at 21 and went on to receive several awards for book illustration and to illustrate the New York Times garden column. More recently she illustrated the garden column for Walter Magazine. Her line work ranges from the smallest pen nib to wide sticks of charcoal, from figurative to imaginary to abstract and is included in the permanent collections of The NCMA and the Gregg Museum. At present, she is working on portraits of South American writers.
Jon Rollins (b. 1991) received his BFA at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2013. His work has been exhibited in New York, Madrid, Basel, Miami Beach, and throughout North Carolina. His first solo show opened in New York City in 2019. Since 2020, ten solo exhibitions of his work have been presented in North Carolina. His work was featured in New American Paintings 154 in 2021. Jon’s work is represented by Blue Spiral 1 (Asheville, NC), COHAB (High Point, NC), and Oneoneone (Chapel Hill, NC).
Jon’s work is constructed from materials preserved from his studio practice and daily life. Melding identifiable objects of personal memory and cryptic scraps from old sketchbooks and abandoned paintings, his layered surfaces are built up and torn down through cycles of painting, drawing, collage, cutting, sanding, and scraping.
Jon lives and works in High Point, NC.
Katherine Armacost has been showing her work since 1987 in solo and group shows in North Carolina, New York, and California. She has received an emerging artist grant from the Durham Arts Council, first place awards from jurors Joan Snyder and Willie Cole, and merit awards from Dore Ashton, Sarah Faunce, Charles Hinman and Josh Wu. Her works are in public and private collections in the United States, Canada, and Europe.
Leigh Suggs (b. 1981, Boone, NC) is a Richmond-based artist whose practice exists at the intersection of craft, painting, and sculpture, engaging with the themes of perception, ambiguity, and transformation. Her intricate works, created through a process of drawing, painting, and hand-cutting, transform the modernist grid into a site of tension and exploration, oscillating between positive and negative space, structure and fragility. Suggs’ process is deeply tactile and methodical, combining layers of painted paper with painstaking cuts that evoke woven textiles or radial webs. These patterns mutate and evolve, engaging with light, shadow, and reflection to create works that shift and transform with the viewer’s perspective. Rooted in the tradition of process-driven, labor-intensive craft, Suggs reimagines the grid as a flexible and ambiguous framework, asking viewers to remain active participants in their experience of the work.
Suggs’ work is held in prominent public and corporate collections, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and Deutsche Bank. She has exhibited widely across the United States, with solo and group exhibitions at venues such as the Mint Museum (Charlotte, NC), Massey Klein (New York, NY), Abigail Ogilvy (Los Angeles, CA), and Main Projects (Richmond, VA). Through her explorations of material and process, Suggs creates works that act as meditations on endurance, fragility, and the risks of desensitization in an overstimulated world. Her practice invites viewers to engage deeply with the interplay of structure, pattern, and perception, offering a reflective space to consider their own relationship to form and the act of looking.
Lynda Stuart Curry is a visual artist creating paintings, wall sculptures and mixed media including wood, papier-mâché, collage and photography. She explores psychology, memory, healing and nature by combining intuitive and meditative elements in her art process. Experience teaching at-risk youth, working as a downsizing specialist, travel to Japan and learning a Qi-gong practice adds to these themes in her art. Lynda attended Chautauqua School of Art (Chautauqua, NY), earned a BFA (painting) at East Carolina University (Greenville, NC), participated in residencies at Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), joined an artist retreat on Monhegan Island in Maine, co-founded Arthouse, a local artist pop-up gallery (2010 Beacon, NY) and assisted Mike +Doug Starn in their studio (Beacon, NY). Lynda currently lives + works in Carrboro, NC. Her artwork is collected nationally in private and corporate collections.
Matthew Shlian works in the realm between art and science, guided by wonder and rooted in craft. His sculptural forms are inspired by organic material and iterative patterns, each piece mapped out digitally, and then folded and assembled by hand. Matt received his BFA from Alfred University and his MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. He has lectured and taught workshops at Haystack Mountain School of Craft, Penland School of Craft, and at universities across the U. S. Matt has held numerous artist residencies at Tamarind Institute (Albuquerque NM) and given lectures at the Museum of Mathematics (NYC) and the National Academy of Science (Washington DC). His clients include Ghostly International, Apple, P&G, Facebook, Levi's, Herman Miller, Sesame Street and the Queen of Jordan. In 2020, Matt's monograph was published through Thames & Hudson. Matt's studio is currently located in Ann Arbor, MI.
Neil Patterson (1933-2023) was born in Toronto on October 15, 1933, the youngest of four boys, to English parents who had emigrated in the 1920’s. His father was a banker; his mother had been a hat designer in London who sold her hats to the Queen.
At 25, Neil took a job in the Canadian office of McGraw Hill selling textbooks across Canada. He took a keen interest in the scientific subject matter and his early mastery led to extraordinary sales and rapid promotion to editor, and, soon after, editor-in-chief. From Toronto he made his way to New York City where he began a notable and long career developing leading science textbooks for college students, including collaborations with 19 Nobel Laureates.
At 82, Neil traded publishing for art. Two chance encounters drawing with children in a single week led to a surprisingly rigorous and intense personal drawing practice — sometimes 5 to 6 hours a day. His constantly evolving exploration of color and form has produced a mature body of work that has been exhibited regionally and nationally.
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1946, Tom Spleth attended the Kansas City Art Institute and then the State University of New York, College of Ceramics at Alfred University for his master’s degree. Upon graduation in 1971, he set up a studio practice which he continues to this day. He returned to teach at Alfred in 1978, left the academic life in 1984, and continued working with students through workshops at such places as Penland School, Haystack, Anderson Ranch, Arrowmont, and various universities. Tom has used residencies throughout his career to advance his work—most notably the Arts/Industry Program at the JM Kohler Arts Center in Kohler, WI, and the Golden Foundation in New Berlin, NY.
Important exhibitions include a one-person show of paintings at Art, Light + Design Gallery in Chapel Hill in 2016 and a retrospective exhibition at the Gregg Museum in 2007. A collaboration in ceramics with Israeli painter Moshe Gershuni resulted in a 2018 traveling exhibition in the Southeast. In 2022 Tom had a one person exhibition at the Cary Arts Center in Cary, NC and in 2023 a two-person exhibition at the USC Sea Island Center Gallery in Beaufort, SC. Tom lives and works in Little Switzerland, NC.
Yun Dong Nam was born in Seoul, Korea, and received his M.F.A. from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Before joining the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995, he taught at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, California State University at Long Beach, and Bennington College in Vermont. He also completed an artist residency at the Bemis Foundation in Omaha, Nebraska. Currently Professor of Art at UNC, Yun-Dong received the University of North Carolina’s Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. In addition to his acclaimed teaching career, he is an active and widely recognized ceramic artist, with his work featured in over sixty group exhibitions and nineteen solo exhibitions.