December 2019 Exhibits + Events: The Northern Spirit Shop and Morgan Mercer 

About

MacRostie Art Center is pleased to announce the grand opening of its 2019 Holiday Marketplace. Starting the weekend after Thanksgiving and continuing through December 24th, the MacRostie Gallery is transformed into unique local shopping experience. Our Northern Spirit Shop is annual exhibition that celebrates the diverse and talented artists that live and work in northern Minnesota.

In the Minnesota Gallery, artist Morgan Mercer will be exhibiting her abstract paintings. Having grown up hunting for unusual rocks and exploring deep ravines in the woods behind her childhood home, Morgan Mercer is a Twin Cities-based oil painter and storyteller who still has a fascination for finding wonder in unexpected places. She starts each of her paintings by creating a hand cut collage of black and white images. Then, she projects that the collage onto the canvas and draws it. With each layer of paint, she interprets the imagery from the collage onto her canvas by focusing on different shapes, lines, feelings or areas of negative space until the painting explodes in a mass of color, overlapping brushstrokes and energetic marks. Her work is a catalog of moments and scenes —a midnight dinner party, an underground circus in an abandoned warehouse or a cabinet of curiosities that opens to a sea of stars and forest — that encapsulate feelings of wonder, curiosity, adventure and discovery.