AKRON, OHIO.- Summit Artspace presents New Master Drawings: An Akron Art Museum Exhibition. While the Akron Art Museum’s galleries are closed for expansion, the museum is collaborating with area arts organizations to present New Master Drawings, an innovative three-part exhibition. It is the tenth installment in the museum’s Ohio Perspectives series, which focuses on contemporary art in the state.

The second exhibition in the New Master Drawings series will take place at the Summit Artspace, 140 East Market Street in downtown Akron, through July 14. This venue, located just a block up from the museum’s existing building and construction site, will showcase the work of three artists from around the state: Lisa Jameson from Cincinnati, Matthew Kolodziej from Akron and Kirk Mangus from Kent. New Master Drawings is on view during the first two dates of the museum’s Downtown@Dusk summer concert series, also hosted by Summit Artspace.

Drawing is one of the most dynamic and talked-about areas of art today, as artists in Ohio and around the world reconnect with craft and handwork. Cincinnati-based artist Lisa Jameson seeks to capture the mystical quality of the creative process by drawing stylized figures in dreamlike settings. Her smoky charcoal drawings present artist figures seeking inspiration and grappling with creative decisions. Jameson combines strong value contrasts and exaggerated perspective to give each of these scenes a surreal sensibility.

Matthew Kolodziej draws the ghosts of things—a web of beams that once supported a vast train station ceiling or the interior framework of a new house. Kolodziej, who teaches at the University of Akron, is trained in art, archeology and anthropology. He deliberately splinters forms and shades shapes with heavy ink so that his images also resemble fossils or broken rock formations. One of Kolodziej’s remarkable nature sketchbooks, in which abstracted plant forms spray across the pages, will also be on view.

Combining a loose technique inspired by underground comic art with subjects from history, B-movies and his own travels, Kent-based artist Kirk Mangus creates drawings that are humorous, ironic and sometimes bawdy. In addition to color, Mangus (who is also a ceramist) uses dramatic shifts of scale to build a sense of drama. In his largest drawings, including a series about the Trojan War and the 12-footwide mural he will draw directly on a wall at Summit Artspace, Mangus flattens space by creating a tangle of figures that extends over the entire composition. When drawing onsite, he uses a more delicate touch, as in his poignant series Lithuania.

New Master Drawings is organized by the Akron Art Museum and made possible by a lead gift from Malone Advertising. Additional support provided by generous gifts from The Mirapaul Foundation, Bridgestone/Firestone Trust Fund and the R.C. Musson and Katharine M. Musson Charitable Foundation.

The exhibition series is presented in cooperation with the Butler Institute of American Art/Salem, Summit Artspace and the Canton Museum of Art.