Release Date: June 3,2026
Akron Soul Train Presents Summer 2026 Exhibitions Featuring Artists-in-Residence Josh Maxwell and Kristen Mimms Scavnicky, with Emerging Artist Nick Lee
June 3, 2026, Akron, Ohio — Akron Soul Train is pleased to present new exhibitions featuring 2026 Artists-in-Residence Josh Maxwell and Kristen Mimms Scavnicky, alongside emerging artist Nick Lee in the CapSOUL Gallery. The exhibitions will open with a public reception on Friday, June 12 from 5:00–7:30 PM at Akron Soul Train, located at 191 South Main Street in downtown Akron. All exhibitions and events are free and open to the public, on view Wednesday, June 10 through Saturday, July 18, 2026.
Josh Maxwell’s Working Woods: Altered But Not Erased
Josh Maxwell’s exhibition presents a body of sculptural works and paintings rooted in the forests and landscapes of Northeast Ohio. Drawing from long-term observation and engagement with sites across Cleveland, Akron, and the surrounding region, Maxwell treats forests as living archives—records of ecological change, human impact, and ongoing renewal.
His paintings function as site-based studies, focusing on moments of encounter within the landscape—tree wounds, hollows, and surface textures that reveal layered histories of contact across species and time. The sculptural works extend this inquiry into physical form, transforming carved timber into expressions that exist between documentation and interpretation.
“A hollow is not a void—it is an architecture of survival,” Maxwell writes. “A fallen trunk can become a nurse log: a fallen body becoming ground for what comes next.”
Through this lens, Working Woods: Altered But Not Erased offers a contemplative exploration of resilience, stewardship, and interconnected systems, encouraging viewers to see themselves as participants within shared ecological narratives.
About the Artist Josh Maxwell:
Josh Maxwell is a Cleveland-based multidisciplinary artist, designer, educator, and tree steward whose practice translates careful observation into public understanding. Trained in Biomedical Art & Design at the Cleveland Institute of Art, with minors in sculpture and graphic design, Maxwell developed a precise method for studying bodies, life stages, and complex systems. His work as a scientific illustrator with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and interpretive experience designer with Cleveland Metroparks extended that training into public-facing experience: helping people feel connected to place while learning how systems work. Across art, design, civic practice, and stewardship, Maxwell works through immersion. He enters a landscape, community, or visual system; studies its visible and hidden patterns; and translates that experience into accessible forms of meaning and action.
Kristen Mimms Scavnicky’s Siting Ritual: Holding Renewal, Inscribing Resilience
Kristen Mimms Scavnicky’s installation explores the transformative power of everyday rituals—washing, eating, and gathering—as acts that sustain cultural identity across generations. Through sculptural soaps, etched tablescapes, and material experimentation, Scavnicky creates what she describes as “soft architectures,” objects that exist both in intimate and within communal space.
Her work draws on a range of historical and cultural frameworks, including bell hooks’ concept of the Black homeplace as a site of resistance and care, as well as the legacy of spatial injustice during the Jim Crow era. These references inform a practice that bridges the intimate and collective, asking how ordinary gestures can carry both trauma and resilience.
“In Akron in 1851, Sojourner Truth delivered the speech ‘Ain’t I a Woman?' at the Women’s Rights Convention. She challenged systems of exclusion and affirmed dignity across race and gender. Her presence in Akron reminds us that spaces of gathering—whether a convention hall, a church, or a kitchen table—can be charged sites of both activism and belonging. My project draws from this lineage by transforming everyday rituals like washing and dining into acts of resilience and resistance, echoing how Truth’s words turned ordinary space into revolutionary affirmation,” says Scavnicky.
Through this work, Scavnicky invites viewers to reconsider how daily acts of care and connection become powerful expressions of memory, cultural presence, and belonging.
About the Artist Kristen Mimms Scavnicky:
Kristen Mimms Scavnicky is an artist, designer, and educator who explores how the spaces around us hold memory, identity, and emotion. Through drawing, installations, and design projects, she creates work that reflects on culture, community, and how environments shape our well-being. Her projects have been supported by grants from organizations including Kent State University and Akron Soul Train, and have been shared through exhibitions, publications, and talks in the United States and abroad. Kristen earned a Master of Architecture from the University of Cincinnati and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of Kentucky. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Kent State University, where she teaches students to think about design as a way to care for people, tell stories, and make communities more visible.
Nick Lee’s Through Our Nikkei Eyes (CapSOUL Gallery)
In the CapSOUL Gallery, emerging artist Nick Lee presents Through Our Nikkei Eyes, a group exhibition featuring artists of Japanese descent working across the United States. Through painting, sculpture, animation, printmaking, and documentary, the exhibition explores the layered identities and lived experiences of Nikkei communities—Japanese and Japanese-descended individuals living outside Japan. This exhibition showcases Lee’s work in conversation with artists Gwen Waight, Joey Leppo, Akira Maynard, Matthew Hashiguchi, and Ritsuko Lee.
Lee’s work centers portraiture as a means of visibility and representation, challenging reductive perceptions and affirming the complexity of identity. “As Western perceptions of Japanese people are often that they are "foreign" or "unknown," I use portraiture to assert my sitter's full personhood. My paintings invite the viewer into a world of vibrant color palettes and playful compositions, asking them to get to know the community I am depicting,” explains Lee.
The exhibition also reflects Lee’s engagement with public art as a platform for cultural storytelling, connecting personal narrative with broader community awareness in Northeast Ohio.
About the artist Nick Lee:
Nick Lee (b. 1996) is a painter from Akron, Ohio. Lee received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art from Kent State University in 2021 and he is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Iowa. Lee’s work is inspired by the diversity of human experience. As a Japanese-American, he strives to better represent minorities like himself in American portraiture and Western art. Another motivation for his work is self-discovery. Lee uses symbolic Japanese objects in his paintings to connect with a culture that was never taught to him growing up. Lee is the 2023 recipient of the Distinguished Citizen for Art Education for the Northeast Ohio region by the OAEA. Lee is also the recipient of the 2024 Arts Alive Emerging Artist award by Summit Artspace.
Exhibition Details
Location: Akron Soul Train, 191 S. Main Street, Akron, OH 44308
Opening Reception: Friday, June 12, 5:00–7:30 PM
On View: June 10 – July 18, 2026
Free and open to the public
About Akron Soul Train
Akron Soul Train is a nonprofit artist residency program dedicated to supporting visual, literary, and performing artists through stipends, exhibitions, and community engagement. Since its founding, the organization has supported over 100 artists and continues to foster creative exchange, amplify diverse voices, and contribute to a vibrant cultural landscape in Akron and Northeast Ohio.
For more information about these exhibitions and opening reception, visit our website and events page at www.akronsoultrain.org or contact Akron Soul Train at info@akronsoultrain.org.