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Carolyn Wenning

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Carolyn Wenning's artwork explores and challenges the boundaries between drawing, painting, collage and assemblage. Themes of identity, relationships, personal history and transformation factor largely into her multimedia pieces. She uses traditional materials such as ink and flashe as well as nontraditional resources including enamel housepaint, shellac, tar and bits of repurposed, fabric, needlework and paper detritus. Wenning works intuitively, allowing the acts of layering and removing, connecting and recontextualizing to drive her process. The resulting artwork is a created situation - a place where the raw, the enigmatic and the true come together to speak. The language is new, but familiar. Viewers are able to make references and draw parallels. In that way, the artwork becomes believable and understood.

For The Myth of Persephone, Wenning moves beyond her primarily abstract artwork and uses recognizable imagery and symbols. Incorporating painting, collage, assemblage, and photography, her artwork traces Persephone’s capture, Demeter’s grief, and Persephone’s emergence from darkness as a queen. Her artwork examines the tensions between vulnerability and power, absence and return, and transformation as both traumatic and empowering.

Wenning is a nationally and internationally exhibiting artist living and working in Pittsburgh, PA. Her paintings, drawings and mixed media assemblages have been featured in numerous solo and group shows, most recently at ArtCake and M David & Co in Brooklyn, New York. She has exhibited at Obras Gallery in Estremoz, Portugal, Pagus Gallery in Philadelphia, and at The Andy Warhol Museum and The Matress Factory in Pittsburgh. She has recently been included in the Art File Gallery at the Painting Center in New York. Her artwork is in numerous private and corporate collections, including Children’s Hospital and PNC Bank.

As well as producing her own artwork, Wenning is a dedicated arts educator. She has taught in the public school system and at various universities including Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Chatham University and the School of Education at Carlow University. She holds an MFA in painting and print media from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University.

portfolio.jpg View Carolyn Wenning's artwork in the 2026 exhibition, The Myth of Persephone.

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