First Friday with Leslie Locketz

Service Description

Join us for the 1st Friday Art Show, Friday, May 2nd, 5-8pm. Featuring Artist, Leslie Locketz and her mixed media portraits. Leslie will be hosting a mixed media workshop on Wednesday, May 28th, 6-8pm, which you will find on our "Events" page. About Leslie: I grew up in Denver, Colorado, and loved making art for as long as I can remember. When I was 9, my family moved to Alabama for 2 years, and my mother, who was only 29, discovered art. Eventually, she got a Masters in Painting and became an art professor at the University of Denver. At Barnard College, I majored in anthropology with a heavy dose of art history and studio art classes. I dabbled in many media: drawing, painting, clay modeling, stone carving. My junior year, I went to Paris and studied printmaking at the American Center for Students and Artists. But my mother’s expertise as a painter and sculptor inhibited me, so, eventually, I turned to photography. After graduating from Barnard in 1970, I took photography courses from Nathan and Joan Lyons at the Center of the Eye in Aspen, Colorado. In 1971, I moved to Rochester to study with them at the Visual Studies Workshop. I received my MFA in photography through SUNY Buffalo and the Workshop in 1976. Most of my working career was as an adult educator. After retiring at the end of 2018, I took my first workshop in painting/fabric collage from Lynne Feldman in March 2019. I enjoy using the painting/collage medium to make portraits. While I start with an initial idea and composition, often from one of my photographs, the fabrics sing to me and tell me how to proceed. I love this opportunity to return to the hands-on art making of my early life. In my early years as a photographer, I did many black and white film portraits, both of strangers and of my friends, that I printed in my darkroom. Today I am a phone photographer and am thrilled when a dear friend uses my portrait of them as their “profile” picture. Someday, I would love to have a large retrospective of portraits in a variety of media produced over my lifetime. This show is the trial run. Thank you for giving me the space and the encouragement.