APRIL 22 • 2021 | 41

T

wo longtime artists and one emerg-
ing artist are among those juried 
into this year’s digital “Our Town 
Art Show and Sale,
” the 36th, sponsored 
April 22-May 6 by the Community House 
of Birmingham.
Their entries, introducing new individual 
directions, will be among 200 chosen with a 
goal of having a mixture of art forms.
Steffanie Samuels, a nationally recognized 
ceramist for 20 years, has turned to oil pastels 
over manipulated photography to explore a 
different dimension in her creativity. 
Paula Zaks, who taught various art 
forms at Akiva Hebrew Day School and 
was an arts and crafts supervisor at Camp 
Tamarack, has zeroed in on encaustic (uti-
lizing heated wax) prints.
David Bloom, whose career has been 
based in purchasing for an automaker, 
hadn’t thought about art since junior high 
school but recently felt inspired when con-
templating additional pursuits. He turned to 
multi-media for an enhancement to paint-
ing and came up with abstracted work. 
For Samuels, the “Our Town” exhibit 
offers a popular platform to spotlight her 

evolution.
“I’ve moved from three-dimensional 
to two-dimensional,
” said Samuels, a 
resident of Royal Oak and member of 
the National Council of Jewish Women. 
“I’m showing two pastel paintings 
enhanced by other media — Taking 
Shelter After the Rains and Shrouded 
Trees.
“I said what I had to say with clay and 
took a break from art by working for 
the University of Michigan as director 
of development for specific medical ser-
vices. As time went on, I missed the cre-
ativity of the art world and discovered 
the joys of oil pastels and photography.
”
Samuels, whose sculptural work has 
been featured in exhibitions at the White 
House and Smithsonian Institution, 
starts her newer projects with photographs 
taken in rapid succession, digitally manip-
ulates the images, prints them on archival 
cotton rag paper and uses colored inks as 
base tones before layering oil pastels in a 
variety of methods. 
While Samuels gives her personal touch 
to the two-dimensional techniques, her 

sculptural projects still can be seen in the 
permanent collections of the Blue Cross/
Blue Shield Corporation of Michigan and 
Archie Bray Foundation in Montana among 
other buildings, as well as in art books and 
magazines.

ABSTRACTED IMAGES
Zaks is showing two very different works. 

Birmingham 
Community House 
online art show
features 200 works.

 Our
 Arty
 Town

SUZANNE CHESSLER 
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Details

“Our Town Art Show and Sale” can be 
viewed online April 22-May 6 at 
communityhouse.com/event/our-town-
art-show-sale.

David Bloom 
works in 
mixed media.

European Graffiti by Paula Zaks

continued on page 42

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