The Scottsdale Arts staff is showing its arty side.
Teryn Ashleigh has made a mixed-media jellyfish.
“It combines all my creative hobbies,” she tells me about the jellyfish, which is titled “Pastime” and is one among 21 pieces in After Hours, an exhibition of artwork by staff members of Scottsdale Arts running through March 3.
“I do acrylic painting, crochet and sculpting,” confides Ashleigh, who – when she’s not crocheting jellyfish – is the center’s accounts payable coordinator. “I chose assemblage because I wanted to show more than one medium and see how they would look together.” How they looked together was like a jellyfish.
“Ashleigh is actually her middle name,” Sydney Ritter tells me later. Ritter’s a press flack at Scottsdale Arts who also has a piece in the After Hours exhibit. “But she uses it as her last name when she’s being an artist, if that’s OK with you.”
It was. I liked that Ritter, who uses the same name no matter what she’s doing, had made a piece that looked like one of those little libraries one sees on city street corners.
“People who work behind the scenes in the arts are often artists themselves,” she explains. “This show is an opportunity for us to showcase staff members.”
The exhibition is presented in what looks like a long hallway in the theater across from Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, but which Ritter swears is a gallery space. There, I talk to a man named Milo Sheridan, who has made a ceramic bust of a video game character that he’s titled “Gregory Duke of Midness.”
“I like to work with clay,” he tells me. “I work in security at the museum, and I try to do ceramics in my free time. It relaxes me.”
Sheridan tells me that every Scottsdale Arts staff member was invited to submit work to After Hours. I ask if it’s awkward to work alongside people every day whose art didn’t make final cuts and isn’t in the show. “It wouldn’t be,” Ritter says, “because we don’t know who got passed over. Maybe no one did.”
Across the way at the museum, she introduces me to Mary Celaya, a darkroom photographer who works the front desk. I compliment Celaya on the lumen prints she has in the exhibition and ask if she sometimes sneaks away from her post to go look at her art, on display in an actual Scottsdale gallery.
“I don’t have time,” she says. “I’m too busy.” And then, right on cue, a museum visitor interrupts to ask Celaya a question.
“We don’t get opportunities like this very often,” Ritter says of After Hours, the first staff exhibition since the pandemic.
“The best thing about this show has been learning about the people we work with,” she says. “You think you know them, and then you look at their artwork and you go, ‘I didn’t know you had that in you!’”
