Artist Meet and Greet

Stop in to meet our current artist, Sheila Squillante. Sheila is a Pittsburgh abstract mixed media artist. A member of the Confluence Women’s Art Collective, her work has been part of the group exhibition, “Down on Paper,” at Vestige Concept Gallery in Lawrenceville, and has been featured in several literary journals including Brevity, A-Minor and Dogwood. A widely published poet and essayist, Squillante is the author of 9 books, most recently All Things Edible, Random and Odd: Essays on Grief, Love and Food (CLASH Books, 2023). She directs the MFA program in creative writing at Chatham University where she is associate professor and editor of The Fourth River, a literary journal of nature and place-based writing. During the pandemic, she got serious about making visual art after a lifetime of appreciation and play, and now maintains a regular practice of painting in addition to writing. Her collection, “Serendipitous Gestures” includes meditations in watercolor and ink created over the last three years. She is attracted to the way water media resists her control finding its own form and music, and enoys the way visual art compliments and feeds her writing (and vice versa) in unexpected and meaningful ways. This connection is the theme of her new podcast, My Other Pen: Conversations with Writers Who Have a Second Artistic Practice, which will launch in fall, 2024. Squillante lives in the Hazelwood neighborhood of Pittsburgh with two dogs, a bird, two teenagers and a philosopher. This summer, when she is not painting or writing, you can find her tending her garden where the Morning Glories will eventually take over. She’s okay with that. Learn more on her website or on her Instagram page.