This exhibition celebrates the inimitable Oberlin artist Audra Skuodas (1940–2019) with works from the AMAM collection.

Skuodas was a beloved member of the Oberlin community. Born in Lithuania, she spent her early years in a displaced persons camp in Germany, a time formative both for her sense of self and her relations with others. For almost 50 years, she created her inimitable art—in a wide variety of media—in her studio in town.

She received the Cleveland Arts Prize Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010, among other accolades. This exhibition presents three of her five works in the collections of the Allen Memorial Art Museum.

Skuodas once wrote that she sought to “reveal moments when invisible phenomena make themselves visible.” Her art speaks to universal themes, often through very personal imagery. In her early work, the female figure is often emphasized, while abstraction and intricate patterning are given more prominence in later works—often with a continuing emphasis on the importance of the individual, and her relation to a larger whole.

In all of Skuodas’s works, a profound sense both of vulnerability and of interconnectedness are present; in many, including those in this exhibition, she conveys the intensity of the interdependence she perceived between humans and the forces and energies that surround us.