The Ohio Artist Registry (OAR) is an exciting opportunity for artists to share their work, connect with the creative community, and establish an online presence—all on a free, virtual platform! The OAR encourages artists working in all art forms, throughout Ohio and beyond, to create a profile, which allows them to better promote themselves and their work. Being listed in the OAR provides artists with new opportunities to share their work with clients, galleries, patrons, and audiences. A listing in the OAR does not confer an endorsement, approval, or verification by the Ohio Arts Council.
For more information, contact Kathy Signorino, artist programs director, at kathy.signorino@oac.ohio.gov or 614-728-6140.
2024 Ohio Artist Registry Juried Exhibition
Bio
Stephanie Rond (Columbus, Ohio) is an internationally recognized painter whose work subverts and reimagines traditional expectations of space, gender, and power. Guided by having and sparking conversations, her practice activates female narratives in uncommon spaces and builds communities through creative collaboration. Rond develops street art and canvas paintings through a deeply tactile, materials-driven, hands-on process of designing, cutting, and spray- and hand-painting impressions on layers of paper and photographs.
Rond’s street art brings a bright, otherworldly aesthetic to the outside’s most gritty spaces, offering an initial moment of visual reprieve followed by a revelation of each piece’s haunting subtext: Why does it surprise you that this is here? Her work in both indoor and outdoor spaces, both as an individual artist and as a curator, elevate a compassionate positivity that offers a safe space to ask hard questions—of the viewer, of the wider visual culture, of the environment in which a piece is hung, and of the artist herself.
Most recently, Rond has been honored as a Young Guns Art Award finalist (London), an exhibiting artist at Bienal de la Habana (Matanzas, Cuba), a TedX speaker, and as the only representative of the U.S.’ Midwest portion of the global Google Art Institute: Street Art Project. She is the curator of Carnegie Gallery at the Columbus Metropolitan Library, and her work has been honored and exhibited extensively in Columbus, including at the Columbus Museum of Art. She’s created street art and murals in numerous national and international locales, including Vienna’s Wien Museum (“City Dwellers,” 2019). As a prolific community arts leader, activist, and collaborator, Rond has worked with multidisciplinary artists, elementary school students, plant nurseries, arts councils and collectives (she’s active in discussions of climate crisis with the international collective Micro Galleries), and an online community of female street artists from around the world, among others.
Rond is the founder of Women Street Artists (womenstreetartists.com) and S.Dot Gallery, a dollhouse that exhibits miniature art pieces and challenges notions of traditional domesticity as well as art accessibility. A short documentary about Rond’s artwork, “Tiny Out Loud,” won Best Ohio Short Film (Columbus Film Council) and Best Short Documentary (WV FILMmakers Festival), and was an official selection in 20 international and national film festivals, including Boston, Cleveland, Las Vegas, New York, Portland, St. Louis, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC.
Artist Statement
Art is an experience—something we’re all in together.
Making art that serves as a springboard for meaningful conversation for all is the foundational throughline of my art practice, and my interests in gender, equality, accessibility, and compassion influence both the art I make and the collaborations I pursue. I believe everyone has the right to see and create space for reflections of themselves in the world.
My work examines urgent topics such as sexism and racism through contradictorily celebratory imagery of all women and discussions of topics like kindness, unity, forgiveness, and respect. I also challenge the traditions associated with indoor and outdoor spaces by showing women and girls as positive role models and active citizens, combating the objectification and degradation of the feminine and reclaiming ownership of our own stories.
My character Ghost Girl takes these ideas further. She is blue to signal a reversal of gender stereotypes, to be self-identifiable for every viewer, and to draw your attention amid the noisy industrial or muddy outdoor environments in which she dwells. On one hand, she represents the collaboration between me and my model and the outside world; on the other, she represents the ghost of goodness in all of us and the potential spirit of the human experience—because we’re all in that together, too.
