The Shadow
Carnegie Hall’s August/September/October Exhibits are underway with three new galleries featuring the works of regional artists. The Auditorium Lobby Gallery feature works by artist Susanna Robinson.
Susanna Robinson is a writer, artist, and vocalist who has been a fixture and creative force in the Lewisburg, West Virginia area arts scene for more 30 years.
She has her hand in many aspects of the arts community. Her creative touch is all around Lewisburg, including the rendering of dragon-wing begonias (and a small dragon watching from the side) on the town piano next to City Hall and the fire hydrant embellished with an accordion surrounded by crows.
Susanna’s costumes, jewelry, and artwork have been featured far and wide, including a hand-beaded Christmas ornament commissioned to hang on the White House tree and several ornaments for the West Virginia Governor’s Christmas Tree. She is known for her design of costumes for dancers and choreographers, as well as custom one-of-a-kind wearable art. Her ornate embellished hand-made witch hats can be found parading on beguiling noggins all around town during events and episodes of revelry and debauchery.
The collages she fashions (literally cutting and pasting the old-fashioned way) reflect a true Art Nouveau influence, and within them you can enter magical realms of the timeless 1920’s-era of gypsies, fairies, and charmed enchantment.
Susanna’s last exhibit at Carnegie Hall was cut short by the pandemic, just a few days after opening. Several of her past exhibits around town have featured costumes, witch hats, and collages.
The upcoming show is titled “Witch-ful Dreaming,” inspired by a book of dreams she is currently creating. The show is almost completely comprised of collaged Art Nouveau-inspired portraits and other-worldly realms, motivated by her propensity to dream in wild, vividly imaginative scenarios. The ladies she portrays are wide-eyed, sad-eyed, wistful, smug, no-nonsense, fragile, strong, with animals enchanted… And included are decorative (actual) musical instruments, salvaged from the trash and junk rooms of friends and musical cohorts. She’s breathing new life into old pieces. They’re lovely on the wall of a music room or studio.
Many of the pieces were created during the last two and a half years while she, like so many artists, was at home, looking within, and visualizing a different world, at least for a while. They are creatively framed in lovely, vintage frames, reminiscent of the 1920’s.
The exhibits are free and open to the public, Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. – 4 p.m., and run through October 28. For more information, please visit carnegiehallwv.org, call (304) 645-7917, or stop by the Hall at 611 Church Street, Lewisburg, WV.
Carnegie Hall programs are presented with financial assistance through a grant from the West Virginia Department of Arts, Culture and History and the National Endowment for the Arts, with approval from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts.
