Guest Artists
Lancaster Art Vault represents a number of Guest and Gallery Wall Artists. These are artists who market and sell their work through Lancaster Art Vault but do not need studio space. Our Gallery Wall Artists rotate every 2 months so there is always something new to see at Lancaster Art Vault.
Elizabeth Gregory is an artist based in Lancaster City, PA and graduated Pennsylvania College of Art and Design in 2025 as class Valedictorian. Her work mixes unsettling undertones with bright and nostalgic colors that creates a blast from the past for her viewers to experience. By working with printmaking, found objects, painting, and stitching, this allows Gregory to have an expansive and immersive portfolio of work. She spent her years at PCA&D working in her college's print shop as the print tech by assisting her peers in creating prints that require various techniques. In recent years, Gregory held her solo exhibition Show and Tell at PCA&D and group exhibition, As it is, at the Demuth Museum. In the future, Gregory plans to create works that continue the story she is telling to create a larger, stranger body of work.
ELIZABETH GREGORY
ABBOTT ABSTRACTS – BRENDA & ALLI ABBOTT
Brenda and Alli Abbott are a mother-daughter duo based in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Working side by side for over a decade, they share a love for abstract expression and the freedom it offers. Each painting is a collaboration of intuition, emotion, and spontaneous experimentation in the studio. They don’t follow formulas or work in series—instead, they let each piece unfold naturally, guided by movement, color, and trust in the process.
Brenda and Alli lean into intuition and movement as they paint, often responding to one another’s ideas in real time. Their process is fluid, playful, and bold — reflecting the trust and creative energy they’ve cultivated over years of working together.
By choosing not to sign the front of their paintings, they invite viewers to connect with the work itself. Their paintings are known for rich textures, layered color, and a sense of raw, expressive energy that turns any room into a space that feels more alive.
Evan Summer was born and raised in Buffalo, New York. His college education began at SUNY College at Cortland where he received his BS in Chemistry. He went on to study printmaking and painting at SUNY Buffalo where he had the opportunity to study with Harvey Breverman and Seymour Drumlevitch. In 1975 he received his MFA in Printmaking at Yale University, where he studied with Gabor Peterdi and Richard Ziemann.
Science has had a strong influence on his artwork from the use of uncommon materials in printmaking to mathematical perspective and geometry. He works primarily in printmaking, especially etching and collagraph making.
Teaching has been an important part of his career. In 2019 Evan retired from Kutztown University where he taught printmaking since 1984. He received Kutztown’s two highest awards, the Chambliss Award for research and the Wiesenberger Award for excellence in teaching.
For many years he has exhibited his work in print competitions around the world. His prints have been shown in more than 300 exhibitions including competitive exhibitions in Krakow, Taipei, Beijing, Tokyo, Guanlan, Fredrikstad and numerous other locations in the United States, UK, Russia, Italy and Bulgaria.
Evan has had many solo exhibitions including the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (1999-2000), the Reading Public Museum (Reading, PA in 2001 and 2005-06), the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice (2007), the East Area Gallery of the Guanlan International Print Workshop in Guanlan, China in 2010, a 2018 solo exhibition at the China Printmaking Museum also in Guanlan, and Il Bisonte in Florence, Italy (2023). He’s also had numerous overseas residencies in both Italy and China.
His work is in many public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Brooklyn Museum, the China Printmaking Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
EVAN SUMMER
JOSHUA RUGERRI
As a Neo-Pop Visualist, Joshua is interested in exploring the intersection between color and popular culture through paint to surface. Joshua’s work is a celebration of the bold, bright hues that saturate our visual landscape and the impact they have on our emotions and perceptions. Through his art, he seeks to examine how color is used to create meaning and evoke particular reactions from audiences.
The work takes inspiration from this rich visual language, re-contextualizing it in new and imaginative ways. Joshua is particularly drawn to the way that advertising has subverted color, typography, and symbols for use as tools in marketing and branding. Using his variety of tools such as acrylics, oil sticks, aerosol, collage, and mixed media, he creates vibrant and distinct compositions. Whether exploring narratives of consumerism, celebrity, music and the role of technology in our lives, Joshua believes that art can play a vital role in shaping the way we see the world around us.
Joshua Ruggeri was born and raised in West Chester, PA and exhibits his work nationally and inter-nationally. He currently operates a gallery called The Corner Art Collective in downtown West Chester, PA. Follow the artist on Instagram at @jruggs
Jonelle Peréz (b. 1987, New York, NY) is a figurative-abstract artist and painter with 10+ years of studio practice. His work is characterized by figurative elements and expressionistic brush strokes. It teeters the line between whimsical and comical themes, melancholy with underlying commentary. He has exhibited his work in galleries and fine art fairs throughout several boroughs of NYC. He currently lives and works in Lancaster, PA
“I've always been fascinated by the imperfections in paintings. As a young boy, my mother would take me to museums and gallery’s where I would closely inspect the details in paintings. The accidental or not so accidental brush strokes—the paint drippings. They offer a glimpse, a behind the scenes look at how the artist created the work.
Today, I continue to draw inspiration from the masters of abstraction. I work from feeling, constructing figures and then distorting them. I want the image to surface almost by chance. I work best with order on one side and chaos on the other. I am a student of life; forever learning and sharpening my craft. I am interested in everything, especially things I've never heard of. I am not afraid to be vulnerable in my art and share my defects of character or celebrate my virtues, because being an artist means healing your own wounds, and at the same time continuously exposing them. I think art should raise more questions than it answers, and because of this I feel a duty to comfort the troubled and trouble the comfortable.”
JONELLE PEREZ
JULIO CESAR CEPEDA DUQUE
Julio César Cepeda Duque is a Cuban artist whose work centers on the expressive power of drawing as a primary mode of communication. With a fluid and often spontaneous line, his imagery evokes the raw intensity of emotion, frequently drawing upon animals as symbolic figures tied to fables, folklore, and oral traditions.
At the heart of Cepeda’s practice lies a deep and personal reflection on the social, political, and emotional landscape of his homeland, Cuba. “Cuba is a people with a warm, vibrant soul,” he says, “but it is trapped in an archaic and dysfunctional economic and political system, making it feel almost lost.” This duality is explored in his powerful series of Monotypes titled Comfabulation, where the turtle—used as a recurring motif—serves as a metaphor for stagnation, isolation, and the slow, burdened progress of the Cuban people.
Cepeda’s compositions, while at times chaotic or seemingly desolate, are rich with intentional detail. His work grapples with themes such as blackouts, sporadic labor, systemic control, forced migration, the commodification of Cuban identity, and the suffocating effects of nepotism and political conformity. Each piece invites close inspection, revealing layers of meaning embedded in every mark.
In contrast, his pop-inspired works embrace the aesthetics of classic Pop Art: bold color palettes, sharply defined shapes, and iconography drawn directly from mass culture. These pieces frequently reference comics, film, and television, bridging the gap between high and low art. Cepeda intentionally blurs the line between the polished and the raw, incorporating stamped texts, graffiti-like flourishes, and playful imperfections to question the authority of formal artistic traditions.
Julio César Cepeda Duque’s work is a powerful exploration of identity, resistance, and resilience—rooted in personal history and expanded through a visual language that speaks both of and beyond Cuba.
Dana Bechert (b. 1990) is a full-time ceramic artist based in Conestoga, Pennsylvania. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2012 and founded her eponymous ceramics studio the following year. Dana creates functional art objects, often hand-thrown and adorned with intricate sgraffito designs—pictographs etched into pigmented surfaces to reveal a contrasting layer of white porcelain beneath. Her graphic patterns draw inspiration from nature, Native American pottery, and American quilts, resulting in work that ranges from geometrically complex to playfully improvisational.
Dana’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Architectural Digest, Dwell, Martha Stewart Living, Metropolis Magazine, and more. Her work has since been featured in numerous publications including, The New York Times, Architectural Digest, Dwell, Martha Stewart Living, Metropolis Magazine, and more. Her work can be found online at shopdanabechert.com, in galleries and shops worldwide, and at national juried art fairs like Longs Park, Mount Gretna and the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show.
When not in the studio, Dana tends a large vegetable and flower garden and enjoys exploring Lancaster County’s many nature preserves.
DANA BECHERT
VALERIE R. DILLON
Valerie R. Dillon is a teaching artist from Denver, Colorado who currently resides in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Valerie has a BFA in art education and fine art printmaking from the Metropolitan State University of Denver in Colorado and an MFA in Studio Art focusing on printmaking and sculpture from Penn State School of Visual Arts. Her artwork has been exhibited regionally and nationally at venues including Washington Printmakers Gallery in Washington, D.C., Manhattan Graphics Center in New York, and Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, PA. She is an active member of the American Color Print Society and Monotype Guild of New England and began exploring the collagraph techniques found in this recent work, during a three-month live-in artist residency at Rubber City Prints in Akron, Ohio.
Al Moretti is a formally trained musician and a self-taught visual artist. He has a Master of Music Degree in Composition and Trumpet Performance and a BS in Music Ed., from West Chester University of Pennsylvania. Playing trumpet commercially for many years, Al has performed with world-class jazz guitarist Pat Martino and forged friendships with Stan Getz and other notable artists.
His art education began in the early 1970s, when he had the good fortune to participate in the avant-garde movement in New York City. Music compositions were multi-media experiences then; mixed artistic disciplines blended to create greater dimensions in composition. Music, painting, poetry, electronic and acoustic instruments, recordings, found objects, newly created instruments, and electronic effects mashed together to form a “life is art” presentation.
Though his artistic experiences have been predominantly in music, today Al focuses on painting. His works can be seen at West Chester University, Wells School of Music and the Science Engineering Center and Commons building on WCU campus, Meridian Bank, Malvern, local galleries, restaurants, art and music festivals.
AL MORETTI
MARIANA RUSSO
Mariana Russo was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina where she studied art and technical drawing. Mariana attended the Technical National University graduating with a major in Technical Design Professor. Mariana also attended National Art School to specialize in mixed media and art installation. She worked with her mentor for one year developing different mixed media techniques and working with a variety of materials. She taught art and technical designs in the Argentina public education system for 6 years. She also worked for the University of engineering as a Geometry teacher and as a technical designer.
Mariana has lived in the United States for the past 29 years. Showing her work teaching lessons and hosting workshops.
Cynda Valle has been painting daily for 30 years. She emerged onto the art scene in Los Angeles in 1980 and currently resides in South Pasadena with a studio at the Los Angeles Brewery. She has an extensive national exhibition record including; SFMOMA Artist's Gallery, Grace Hudson Museum (Ukiah, CA), Long Beach Museum of Art, The Lobby at The United Nations, Armory Arts Center (West Palm Beach , FL), Riverside Art Museum, Couturier Gallery (Los Angeles), Barnsdall Municipal Art Gallery (Los Angeles), LeBand Art Gallery (Loyola Marymount University.)and the Cultural Arts Center (Las Vegas, NV), to name a few. Cynda Valle's work has been reviewed and appeared in many publications including; LA Weekly, American Artist Magazine, ARTnews Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, Artweek , as well as numerous exhibition catalogues.
Cynda Valle has taught painting at Scripps College, Pomona College, The Claremont Graduate School, Ohio University, Mendocino College, and Chino Men's Prison.
CYNDA VALLE
