Akron Soul Train

🚨🚨 Reminder: Live bronze pour demonstration with CJ Carter next Monday, June 22, from 5:00–7:00 PM, in partnership with the University of Akron’s Myers School of Art!

This special event offers a behind-the-scenes look at Carter’s process, featuring sculptural elements from their upcoming exhibition, “Legacy”.

Guests will also have the opportunity to view the studio and works in progress, and connect with Carter during a casual meet-and-mingle following the demonstration, offering deeper insight into the artist’s practice and process.

- Free RSVP required (limited capacity)
- Register using the link in our bio or at www.akronsoultrain.org
- Free parking is available in the Myers School front parking lot, nearest main building entrance

CJ’s Artist in Residence exhibition will be on view at Akron Soul Train November 11 - December 19!

Join us at the gallery tomorrow, Thursday, June 11, for ArtWalk!

The gallery will be open with extended hours for ArtWalk from 11-7pm featuring “Siting Ritual: Holding Renewal, Inscribing Resilience” by Artist in Residence Kristen Mimms Scavnicky, “Working Woods: Altered But Not Erased” by Artist in Residence Josh Maxwell, and “Through Our Nikkei Eyes by CapSOUL Emerging Artist Nick Lee”

Then, join us from 7-9pm at Outside the Box at TrueNorth (110 N. Main Street, Akron’s Northside District) for the immersive installation “Inflection”.

Join Artist in Residence CJ Carter for a live bronze pour demonstration in partnership with the University of Akron’s Myers School of Art. This special event offers a behind-the-scenes look at Carter’s process, featuring sculptural elements from their upcoming exhibition, Legacy.

Guests will also have the opportunity to view the studio and works in progress, and connect with Carter during a casual meet-and-mingle following the demonstration, offering deeper insight into the artist’s practice and process.

- Free RSVP required (limited capacity)
- Register using the link in our bio or at www.akronsoultrain.org 
- Free parking is available in the Myers School front parking lot, nearest main building entrance

CJ’s Artist in Residence exhibition will be on view at Akron Soul Train November 11 - December 19!

Beginning this week, the gallery will stay open until 7 PM on Thursdays throughout June, July, and August 🎉 🎉

Gallery hours on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays will remain 11 AM–4 PM!

Join us next Friday, June 12th, from 5:00 – 7:30 PM for the opening reception of “Siting Ritual: Holding Renewal, Inscribing Resilience” by Artist in Resident Kristen Mimms Scavnicky, “Working Woods: Altered But Not Erased” by Artist in Resident Josh Maxwell, and “Through Our Nikkei Eyes” by CapSOUL Emerging Artist Nick Lee!

For more information, visit akronsoultrain.org
(🔗 in bio)

Artist in Resident Kristen Mimms Scavnicky’s “Siting Ritual: Holding Renewal, Inscribing Resilience” will be on view from Wednesday, June 10 - July 18!

The installation explores the transformative power of everyday rituals—washing, eating, and gathering—as acts that sustain cultural identity across generations. Through sculptural soaps, etched tablescapes, and material experimentation, Scavnicky creates what she describes as “soft architectures,” objects that exist both in intimate and within communal space.

Her work draws on a range of historical and cultural frameworks, including bell hooks’ concept of the Black homeplace as a site of resistance and care, as well as the legacy of spatial injustice during the Jim Crow era. These references inform a practice that bridges the intimate and collective, asking how ordinary gestures can carry both trauma and resilience.

Through this work, Scavnicky invites viewers to reconsider how daily acts of care and connection become powerful expressions of memory, cultural presence, and belonging.
 
About Kristen Mimms Scavnicky:
Kristen Mimms Scavnicky is an artist, designer, and educator who explores how the spaces around us hold memory, identity, and emotion. Through drawing, installations, and design projects, she creates work that reflects on culture, community, and how environments shape our well-being. Her projects have been supported by grants from organizations including Kent State University and Akron Soul Train, and have been shared through exhibitions, publications, and talks in the United States and abroad. Kristen earned a Master of Architecture from the University of Cincinnati and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of Kentucky. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Kent State University, where she teaches students to think about design as a way to care for people, tell stories, and make communities more visible.

Artist in Resident Josh Maxwell’s “Working Woods: Altered But Not Erased” will be on view from Wednesday, June 10 - July 18!

Josh Maxwell’s exhibition presents a body of sculptural works and paintings rooted in the forests and landscapes of Northeast Ohio. Drawing from long-term observation and engagement with sites across Cleveland, Akron, and the surrounding region, Maxwell treats forests as living archives—records of ecological change, human impact, and ongoing renewal.

His paintings function as site-based studies, focusing on moments of encounter within the landscape—tree wounds, hollows, and surface textures that reveal layered histories of contact across species and time. The sculptural works extend this inquiry into physical form, transforming carved timber into expressions that exist between documentation and interpretation.

Through this lens, “Working Woods: Altered But Not Erased” offers a contemplative exploration of resilience, stewardship, and interconnected systems, encouraging viewers to see themselves as participants within shared ecological narratives.
 
About Josh Maxwell:
Josh Maxwell is a Cleveland-based multidisciplinary artist, designer, educator, and tree steward whose practice translates careful observation into public understanding. Trained in Biomedical Art & Design at the Cleveland Institute of Art, with minors in sculpture and graphic design, Maxwell developed a precise method for studying bodies, life stages, and complex systems. His work as a scientific illustrator with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and interpretive experience designer with Cleveland Metroparks extended that training into public-facing experience: helping people feel connected to place while learning how systems work. Across art, design, civic practice, and stewardship, Maxwell works through immersion. He enters a landscape, community, or visual system; studies its visible and hidden patterns; and translates that experience into accessible forms of meaning and action.

CapSOUL Emerging Artist Nick Lee’s exhibition, “Through Our Nikkei Eyes”, will be on view from Wednesday, June 10 - July 18!

“Through Our Nikkei Eyes”, is a group exhibition featuring artists of Japanese descent working across the United States. Through painting, sculpture, animation, printmaking, and documentary, the exhibition explores the layered identities and lived experiences of Nikkei communities—Japanese and Japanese-descended individuals living outside Japan. This exhibition showcases Lee’s work in conversation with artists Gwen Waight, Joey Leppo, Akira Maynard, Matthew Hashiguchi, and Ritsuko Lee.

Lee’s work centers portraiture as a means of visibility and representation, challenging reductive perceptions and affirming the complexity of identity. “As Western perceptions of Japanese people are often that they are “foreign” or “unknown,” I use portraiture to assert my sitter’s full personhood. My paintings invite the viewer into a world of vibrant color palettes and playful compositions, asking them to get to know the community I am depicting,” explains Lee.

The exhibition also reflects Lee’s engagement with public art as a platform for cultural storytelling, connecting personal narrative with broader community awareness in Northeast Ohio.
 
About Nick Lee:
Nick Lee (b. 1996) is a painter from Akron, Ohio. Lee received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art from Kent State University in 2021 and he is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Iowa. Lee’s work is inspired by the diversity of human experience. As a Japanese-American, he strives to better represent minorities like himself in American portraiture and Western art. Another motivation for his work is self-discovery. Lee uses symbolic Japanese objects in his paintings to connect with a culture that was never taught to him growing up. Lee is the 2023 recipient of the Distinguished Citizen for Art Education for the Northeast Ohio region by the OAEA. Lee is also the recipient of the 2024 Arts Alive Emerging Artist award by Summit Artspace.

The gallery will reopen on Wednesday, June 10th featuring Artist in Residence Kristen Mimms Scavnicky, Artist in Residence Josh Maxwell, and CapSOUL emerging artist Nick Lee.

See you next Wednesday!

Thank you so much to everyone who came out to Kim’s Community Pierogi Dinner this past Saturday at Jilly’s!

A huge thank you to Jilly’s Music Room for hosting us and serving up those delicious gluten-free pierogis! 🥟

We’d also like to give a special shoutout to our wonderful musical guests, Bellows & Backbeat (Robert Buzecan on accordion and Bob Young on drums), for filling the evening with fabulous music!

The night was full of laughter, delicious food, shared stories, and so many beautiful new connections. It was wonderful to see our community come together and enjoy such a warm and welcoming evening!