New This Month at Spinning Plate Gallery

April 06, 2026

Spinning Plate Gallery

hosts

made by hand on the mountain

Upcoming at Spinning Plate Gallery in East Liberty is an exhibition that speaks to the persistence of creativity that emerges in the most ordinary circumstances and places.  A group of friends, self-dubbed as “eight wild-ish women,” began a tradition of gathering in the Laurel Highlands for a week of friendship, relaxation, and art making about ten years ago. 

The property owner is Lee Grice, retired Operations Manager of our own Standard Clay. With a cozy cabin and an outbuilding converted to a ceramic studio, her mountain retreat inspired these women to make – to make pots, platters, plates, pitchers, planters, paintings, poems, totems, and some very delicious meals.

Group spokesperson Michel Demetria Tsouris, a local Pittsburgh painter who lives and works at Spinning Plate Artists’ Lofts, describes the experience:

“Art, friendship, working with our hands, learning more and more from and about each other – we engage in making life more textured…”

Tsouris curated the exhibit, which includes works from these eight women who were among the co-owners of Wild Sisters Coffeehouse, an early feminist bar and café that broke barriers in the early 1980s.  Somewhat mellowed but still wild-ish, these women present works that reveal their decades of experiences and vision, nourished by nature’s beauty and wildness.

made by hand on the mountain will open on April 17 with an evening of Art, Music, Poetry, Conversation, and Community, from 5-8 pm and will continue through April 30. 

Wild-ish Women

Cheryl Boeckmann, Dawn Durain, Mary Pat Donegan, Lee Grice, Sheila McBride, Michel Demetria Tsouris, Dana Ventriglia, Judith Vollmer

 

For more information, visit https://www.facebook.com/michel.tsouris  or https://www.facebook.com/SpinningPlateGallery/