Dyed Silk

53”W x 60”L

2026

Rebecca Cross revisited these layered pieces as a way to keep developing her thoughts about onespreviously made. These color field lightscapes (of land? lake? sea? ) are color experiments that suggest horizons, and reflections of light. The translucency of silk fabric and the repeated information on both layers creates a kind of visual echo, as the forms and colors oscillate between layers. The effect of perpetual, subtle shifts challenges your eyes to land on something fixed.

Cross spends time looking at ever-changing Lake Erie, and, in general, contemplating with wonder both the intricacy and grandeur of the natural world. These observations inform these pieces, which are her modest attempt to respond to the wonder.  Close attention helps Cross keep the “crazy human world in perspective, and makes me remember why a world of such natural beauty is worth preserving.”

Perhaps, too, these lightscapes complement her paintings in this show: some are roughly the size of Cross’ height and wingspan, providing serene “bodies” or contexts for all those painted heads. And certainly, both Cross’ portraits and silk lightscapes resonate with the scale, energy and concerns of her co-exhibitor and art sister, Liz Maugans’ extraordinary pieces about self-reflection as they age.

Dyed Silk

53”W x 61”L

2026

Rebecca Cross revisited these layered pieces as a way to keep developing her thoughts about onespreviously made. These color field lightscapes (of land? lake? sea? ) are color experiments that suggest horizons, and reflections of light. The translucency of silk fabric and the repeated information on both layers creates a kind of visual echo, as the forms and colors oscillate between layers. The effect of perpetual, subtle shifts challenges your eyes to land on something fixed.

Cross spends time looking at ever-changing Lake Erie, and, in general, contemplating with wonder both the intricacy and grandeur of the natural world. These observations inform these pieces, which are her modest attempt to respond to the wonder.  Close attention helps Cross keep the “crazy human world in perspective, and makes me remember why a world of such natural beauty is worth preserving.”

Perhaps, too, these lightscapes complement her paintings in this show: some are roughly the size of Cross’ height and wingspan, providing serene “bodies” or contexts for all those painted heads. And certainly, both Cross’ portraits and silk lightscapes resonate with the scale, energy and concerns of her co-exhibitor and art sister, Liz Maugans’ extraordinary pieces about self-reflection as they age.

Dyed silk

43”W x 62”L

2026

Rebecca Cross revisited these layered pieces as a way to keep developing her thoughts about ones previously made. These color field lightscapes (of land? lake? sea? ) are color experiments that suggest horizons, and reflections of light. The translucency of silk fabric and the repeated information on both layers creates a kind of visual echo, as the forms and colors oscillate between layers. The effect of perpetual, subtle shifts challenges your eyes to land on something fixed.

Cross spends time looking at ever-changing Lake Erie, and, in general, contemplating with wonder both the intricacy and grandeur of the natural world. These observations inform these pieces, which are her modest attempt to respond to the wonder.  Close attention helps Cross keep the “crazy human world in perspective, and makes me remember why a world of such natural beauty is worth preserving.”

Perhaps, too, these lightscapes complement her paintings in this show: some are roughly the size of Cross’ height and wingspan, providing serene “bodies” or contexts for all those painted heads. And certainly, both Cross’ portraits and silk lightscapes resonate with the scale, energy and concerns of her co-exhibitor and art sister, Liz Maugans’ extraordinary pieces about self-reflection as they age.

Dyed Silk

43”W x 62”L

2026

Rebecca Cross revisited these layered pieces as a way to keep developing her thoughts about onespreviously made. These color field lightscapes (of land? lake? sea? ) are color experiments that suggest horizons, and reflections of light. The translucency of silk fabric and the repeated information on both layers creates a kind of visual echo, as the forms and colors oscillate between layers. The effect of perpetual, subtle shifts challenges your eyes to land on something fixed.

Cross spends time looking at ever-changing Lake Erie, and, in general, contemplating with wonder both the intricacy and grandeur of the natural world. These observations inform these pieces, which are her modest attempt to respond to the wonder.  Close attention helps Cross keep the “crazy human world in perspective, and makes me remember why a world of such natural beauty is worth preserving.”

Perhaps, too, these lightscapes complement her paintings in this show: some are roughly the size of Cross’ height and wingspan, providing serene “bodies” or contexts for all those painted heads. And certainly, both Cross’ portraits and silk lightscapes resonate with the scale, energy and concerns of her co-exhibitor and art sister, Liz Maugans’ extraordinary pieces about self-reflection as they age.

Dyed Silk

53”W x 61”L

2026

Rebecca Cross revisited these layered pieces as a way to keep developing her thoughts about onespreviously made. These color field lightscapes (of land? lake? sea? ) are color experiments that suggest horizons, and reflections of light. The translucency of silk fabric and the repeated information on both layers creates a kind of visual echo, as the forms and colors oscillate between layers. The effect of perpetual, subtle shifts challenges your eyes to land on something fixed.

Cross spends time looking at ever-changing Lake Erie, and, in general, contemplating with wonder both the intricacy and grandeur of the natural world. These observations inform these pieces, which are her modest attempt to respond to the wonder.  Close attention helps Cross keep the “crazy human world in perspective, and makes me remember why a world of such natural beauty is worth preserving.”

Perhaps, too, these lightscapes complement her paintings in this show: some are roughly the size of Cross’ height and wingspan, providing serene “bodies” or contexts for all those painted heads. And certainly, both Cross’ portraits and silk lightscapes resonate with the scale, energy and concerns of her co-exhibitor and art sister, Liz Maugans’ extraordinary pieces about self-reflection as they age.

Dyed Silk

53”W x 62”L

2026

Rebecca Cross revisited these layered pieces as a way to keep developing her thoughts about onespreviously made. These color field lightscapes (of land? lake? sea? ) are color experiments that suggest horizons, and reflections of light. The translucency of silk fabric and the repeated information on both layers creates a kind of visual echo, as the forms and colors oscillate between layers. The effect of perpetual, subtle shifts challenges your eyes to land on something fixed.

Cross spends time looking at ever-changing Lake Erie, and, in general, contemplating with wonder both the intricacy and grandeur of the natural world. These observations inform these pieces, which are her modest attempt to respond to the wonder.  Close attention helps Cross keep the “crazy human world in perspective, and makes me remember why a world of such natural beauty is worth preserving.”

Perhaps, too, these lightscapes complement her paintings in this show: some are roughly the size of Cross’ height and wingspan, providing serene “bodies” or contexts for all those painted heads. And certainly, both Cross’ portraits and silk lightscapes resonate with the scale, energy and concerns of her co-exhibitor and art sister, Liz Maugans’ extraordinary pieces about self-reflection as they age.

Dyed Silk

53”W x 60”L

2026

Rebecca Cross revisited these layered pieces as a way to keep developing her thoughts about onespreviously made. These color field lightscapes (of land? lake? sea? ) are color experiments that suggest horizons, and reflections of light. The translucency of silk fabric and the repeated information on both layers creates a kind of visual echo, as the forms and colors oscillate between layers. The effect of perpetual, subtle shifts challenges your eyes to land on something fixed.

Cross spends time looking at ever-changing Lake Erie, and, in general, contemplating with wonder both the intricacy and grandeur of the natural world. These observations inform these pieces, which are her modest attempt to respond to the wonder.  Close attention helps Cross keep the “crazy human world in perspective, and makes me remember why a world of such natural beauty is worth preserving.”

Perhaps, too, these lightscapes complement her paintings in this show: some are roughly the size of Cross’ height and wingspan, providing serene “bodies” or contexts for all those painted heads. And certainly, both Cross’ portraits and silk lightscapes resonate with the scale, energy and concerns of her co-exhibitor and art sister, Liz Maugans’ extraordinary pieces about self-reflection as they age.

Dyed Silk

53”W x 62”L

2026

Rebecca Cross revisited these layered pieces as a way to keep developing her thoughts about onespreviously made. These color field lightscapes (of land? lake? sea? ) are color experiments that suggest horizons, and reflections of light. The translucency of silk fabric and the repeated information on both layers creates a kind of visual echo, as the forms and colors oscillate between layers. The effect of perpetual, subtle shifts challenges your eyes to land on something fixed.

Cross spends time looking at ever-changing Lake Erie, and, in general, contemplating with wonder both the intricacy and grandeur of the natural world. These observations inform these pieces, which are her modest attempt to respond to the wonder.  Close attention helps Cross keep the “crazy human world in perspective, and makes me remember why a world of such natural beauty is worth preserving.”

Perhaps, too, these lightscapes complement her paintings in this show: some are roughly the size of Cross’ height and wingspan, providing serene “bodies” or contexts for all those painted heads. And certainly, both Cross’ portraits and silk lightscapes resonate with the scale, energy and concerns of her co-exhibitor and art sister, Liz Maugans’ extraordinary pieces about self-reflection as they age.

Print media + collage on paper

42”W x 68”L

2026

I was in Kindergarten the last time I laid down on a big piece of paper and traced myself.  I turned myself into a super hero. 

The Cuban-American conceptual artist Ana Mendiata,  did this too. Her performative body tracings were part of the Earthworks movement where she often used flower petals and other materials to mark her naked body outline on the beach, in the woods and in other natural environments. So, I did it too. It was a freing ME-moment when I felt bare and open to myself. It made me surprisingly emotional,  and was like a  “this is what I got to offer you world” anthem. 

This song Feed Your Head,  was Inspired by the book Alice in Wonderland and lead singer Grace Slick embraced Alice’s same psychedelic perspective,  as Ana Mendieta embraced her body and the earth. They both were charmed with forever vulnerability and  curiosity, and a longing to find a connection with the universe.

I have never been as curious as I am today-at this very moment.  I am fascinated by everything, all at once, and it seems to only be increasing, What about you?

Print Media & Collage

50”W x 42”L

2026

 I never imagined I would live in Bay Village. Growing up in Lakewood, we called it “the Bubble” and used to make fun of it.  But in 1989, ten-year-old Amy Mihaljevic disappeared here in broad daylight, and the world I understood suddenly felt scary-breakable. I remember thinking: How could anyone bring a child into a world with the inexplicable chance of them disappearing forever?

And the losses came anyway. My nephew Gabe died suddenly in 2023. Then Dylan, a sixteen-year-old from my son’s class, died in a tragic accident. His family lived in the very house where Amy once lived. Grief had found the same place again.

Garden Song is about what we do when a young life is cut short. We plant. We tend. We remember. We make sense of how we will remember them. Gabe’s name now grows in his childhood garden among strawberries, rhubarb, and fig trees.

Maybe this is one of the small, stubborn things love can do: keep something living where someone should still be. 

Print media + collage on paper

48”W x 42”L

2026

Adho Mukha Svanasana—Downward Dog—is my favorite yoga pose because it asks the whole body to work while giving the mind a little place to rest. It is a reset and a mini-vacation moment of the yoga flow without the pina colada.

This is why I love gathering with women. We bend toward one another, toward the earth, toward whatever is keeping us upright. We laugh, cry, celebrate, bitch, moan, tell the truth, and somehow, someway, it tells our nervous systems we are allowed to soften.

Women show up with casseroles, garden flowers, hugs, and the kind of truth that arrives like a missile when you need it most. We become our own little coven of radical care and recovery.

Maybe it is because we are biologically wired for this. Maybe I learned it from the women before me. Either way, I keep bending toward the earth—with my girls beside me, pulling weeds and dahlias alike, hunting for seashells, and finding, every now and then, a little grace in the downward dog.

Print media + collage on paper

73”W x 43”L

2026

I was a lucky duck to grow up along Lake Erie, where the water was visible from my backyard. Summers meant Clifton Beach, sailing at Edgewater, and learning that the lake could turn on you in a heartbeat. I loved watching sailboats—tiny against all that water, yet somehow steady. The storms taught me early about balance, instinct, and hanging on.

This year the USS Cleveland was commissioned in its namesake city, just as my youngest son, Will, graduated and headed into the world after studying welding (and building many things with Legos). I think about his hands making things someday that have to withstand pressure, weather, and the goddamn unknown.

A mothership carries, protects, guides, and somehow keeps going. I’ve watched people my age  navigate illness, terrible accidents, divorce, job loss, and grief. And still, somehow, someway, my fellow wayfarers find a hospitable, lucky-break current, beyond that riptide shit storm, and do whatever it takes to float their boat. Even those who don’t think they have a working compass anymore, they find their way-finding their way too. 

This work lives in that space between turbulence and tenderness. Sometimes we are the ship. Sometimes we are the storm. And sometimes we just need someone to say, Come away with me. For a little while.

Print media + collage on paper

57.5”W x 42”L

My grandma MaryJane Shaw married at fifteen. A farmer’s daughter, then a farmer’s wife, she lived all 87 years on the same farm. She raised five children, had sixteen grandchildren and twenty-nine great-grandchildren, and worked her tail off.

She farmed, gardened, canned, cooked, quilted, crocheted, and took a second job at Rutters to help send my mom—the first in their family—to college. Making things by hand wasn’t a hobby. It was survival, love, and labor. Nothing was wasted- every scrap, piece of twine, and almost every material was used for something purposeful. They were also proud of the well-crafted and beautiful things they could make for their quality of life. 

It takes on average five to eight hours to crochet a ten-inch doily. These doilies have been passed down through my family and some have been thrifted. Doilies are useful and protect sofas and chairs from hair oil and are also made for wood furniture as a barrier for water stains and wear and tear.  

Maybe that’s what women have always done. Made something beautiful from what they had. Held things together. Kept going.

As Dolly Parton says, “I ain’t got time to be old.” Neither did my grandma.

Print Media & Collage

56.5”W x 42”L

2026

When I was 20, five other Kent State art students and I rented a little studio for $50 each a month. We called it Gallery 425. It became our studios and our gallery after the university turned its space into a computer lab.

I remember working there late into the night, completely in love with making art. Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians were always playing. I felt like I had finally arrived.

Forty years later, I still feel that same swell of love when I walk into my studio and get lost in the waltz of being an artist.

Recently, I learned that the Old Bohemians were a pioneering group of 19th-century artists and intellectuals who gathered in downtown Cleveland. Later came the Brush and Palette Club and the Kokoon Arts Club, carrying that creative spirit forward.

What a sweet surprise—to discover that the energy I fell in love with at 20 has deep roots here, and that somehow, all these years later, I’m still dancing with it.

Print Media & Collage

42”W x 52”L

2026

I have written eulogies for people I loved. I’ve sat with funeral directors that are complete strangers and had to make choices that felt impossible: selecting flowers, remembrance cards, readings, suggested rituals. Faced with catalogs of stock images and familiar motifs—roses, doves, sunsets, crosses, landscapes—we are asked to choose something that will somehow stand in for a life. Something appropriate. Something suitable. Something that says this was them.

Perhaps you have done this too. It always feels unfair. How can a bouquet, a photograph, a poem, or a folded card contain the enormity of a person? How can any arrangement of symbols come close to expressing the avalanche of missing that follows loss? We are asked to distill a beloved life into a handful of decisions while grief is still unfolding around us.

And yet, we do it. Again and again, across centuries and cultures, we gather the dust-in-the-wind fragments and order the damn bouquet. We remember this strange human ritual of selecting images and flowers to try and speak- when language fails. 

Print Media & Collage

60”L x 42"W

2026

The older I get, the world can feel like a lot. Especially for women.

I know so many women who spend their days helping other people find their way back to themselves—counselors, therapists, advocates, caregivers. They become mirrors and guide dogs, holding a little light while someone else tries to find the damn path home.

But those stories don’t stay at the office or disappear when the session ends The grief, fear, rage, and heartbreak is full time and comes home in their bodies too. I see it. I sit beside them. I watch them carry the nightmares of other people and somehow keep making dinner, laughing, loving, showing up.

There is an invisible labor in this kind of love. I am in awe of it.

Print media + collage on paper

42”W x 36”L

I am 59 years old this year. It is a time when friends consider retiring or are retiring, while others are trying to reinvent themselves.

While on vacation in the Outer Banks, North Carolina, I saw a guy, probably in his mid-70s, with a metal detector combing the shoreline. He was wearing headphones with the detector strapped to his wrist and a digging tool in his other hand. He slipped off his headphones as I approached and I asked him, “Where is the best place to search?” “What’s the coolest thing you ever found?” “What are you listening for?”

 Tuned into the morning heat and completely attentive to the task at hand,  I asked if he gets together with other detector enthusiasts. “Of course,” he replied. “There is a regional chapter of folks who meet up regularly and some of us have been meeting for over 50 years.” 

Yesterday is Here is an invitation to search, find a story worth telling, and seek moments beyond what you already know. I identify with being a detectorist as much as a detective. I love taking  creative chances, following a hunch, and listening to the Earth as it sends unseeable vibrations to me. I recognize that every received signal is an endless possibility of the search itself, a process of heightened attention, curiosity, and imagining what is worth uncovering.