Anchorlight is home to 26 semi-private individual artist studios.
There are currently no studio spaces available for rent and we do not keep a wait list. Sign up for our newsletter to be notified when applications for an open studio are available.
CURRENT STUDIO ARTISTS
Luke Buchanan
Luke Buchanan is an artist and a designer who lives and works in Raleigh, NC. His work explores the relationships between the self and the spaces we occupy, both physical and spiritual. Buchanan has also painted several high profile murals in the Raleigh community, most of which feature his two cats, Billy and ZZ.
Nick Osetek
Nick Osetek is a visual artist and fabricator based in Raleigh, NC. Gearhead, printmaker, and former helicopter mechanic, Osetek enjoys working in process-involved mediums and applies a meticulous sense of detail in his work. His practice as a whole is interdisciplinary among 2D and 3D mediums, but his focus lies in traditional works on paper; specifically graphite, ink, and print. Intrigued by the surreal, the macabre, and themes of internal and external conflict, his work aims to explore complex emotions and relationships within nature and within ourselves.
Shelley Smith
Shelley Smith is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in her hometown of Raleigh, NC. Works on cloth serve as the foundation of her practice, which overlaps contemporary digital technologies with ancient techniques of hand embroidery and fabric manipulation to produce otherworldly compositions from otherwise mundane, overlooked moments found in the natural world.
Since 2016, Shelley has advocated for her local art community through her work at Anchorlight, where she is the Co-Founder and Director
Janet Link
Janet Link is after a measure of the truth of her subjects rather than an accurate set of facts about them. Each drawing is composed of thousands of marks, a process that takes many hours and involves slowing down the act of looking. Her work is an account of time spent observing closely and also the futility of attempting to catch something without material form.
Elisabeth Effron
Elisabeth Effron combines photography, encaustic painting and collage to create works that explore the complexity of perspective. She’s interested in how emotion and empathy can change circumstances, experiences, and places. Her current work includes photo encaustic collage pieces and photographic silk panels reflecting ordinary moments of mindfulness.
Claire Ashby
Claire makes handcrafted jewelry and other metalworks from a variety of media including (but never limited to) enamel on copper, sterling silver, steel, vermeil and filled gold, cast bronze and other alloys, and found objects. She is inspired by current events, the natural world, color, good design, and the satisfaction of a job well done.
Anne Storie Willson
Anne Storie Willson works with reed and other natural materials to create sculptural weavings using a random weave process. With a nod to wildness, the process allows Anne to simultaneously explore light and shadow, the laying down of a line, the building of form, and the working edge of a traditional medium.
Katie Stewart
Katie Stewart is a photographer, graphic designer, self-described maximalist, and rainbow incarnate. She specializes in creating immersive photo booths, custom props & unique wearables.
Clarence Heyward
Clarence Heyward is a painter and collagist. His work investigates life as a Black American.
Alia El-Bermani
Alia El-Bermani is an internationally acclaimed figurative artist and teacher. She has exhibited her work in several solo exhibitions across the nation and recently had a work acquired by the Museu Europeu d'Art Modern (MEAM), in Barcelona, Spain for their permanent collection. El-Bermani opened her own teaching studio, Alia Fine Art Studios in Anchorlight in January 2017, where she currently teaches ongoing classes as well as hosts award winning visiting artist workshops.
Ryan Fox
Ryan Fox reinterprets photographs using experimental techniques, colors, unique surfaces, and texture in watercolor. His art represents memories of travels and depicts the spirits of places captured in time. He is a signature member of the American Watercolor Society (AWS).
Sherrill Roland
Roland’s interdisciplinary practice addresses the complex construction of these three core entities: innocence, identity, and community; and reimagines their social and political implications in the context of the American criminal justice system.
“For more than three years, I was forced to relinquish control of my life to the criminal justice system due to wrongful incarceration. After spending ten months in jail for a crime I was exonerated for, I looked to art as a vehicle for self-reflection and an outlet for emotional release. I began a year-long performance at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro in which I wore an orange jumpsuit every day until graduation. The Jumpsuit Project challenges audiences to address their prejudices about the jumpsuit, my body, and the issues surrounding incarceration. The work reshapes the narrative of returning citizens and provides support for those most impacted. By sharing my story, and creating a space for others to share, I work to illuminate the invisible costs, damages, and burdens of incarceration.”
Roland is looking to create new forms of content through performance, sculpture, drawing, and community workshops.
Ann Marie Kennedy
Ann Marie Kennedy is a paper artist who explores her relationship to the natural world through works in printmaking, installation, and book arts. In her studio you'll find handmade paper, paper art, monoprints, cards and hand stitched books.
photo credit: Kelly Starbuck
Tonya Solley Thornton
Tonya Solley Thornton’s work is rooted in a fascination with craft materials, and in discovering and amassing source materials from thrift stores and flea markets. The materials guide the compositions, like puzzles that are created and solved in the process of making. Through collage and found object sculpture, she explores the expressive potential in the subtle interaction of shape, color and texture. Each piece is a conversation between its disparate elements, which connect and intertwine in unexpected ways, creating abstract forms with a peculiar emotional resonance
Ben Galata, Galata Designs
Ben Galata creates one-of-a-kind metal architectural elements, furnishings, and sculpture.
Evan Lightner, Evan Lightner Studio
Established in 1999, Evan Lightner Studio designs and creates handmade, one-of-a-kind furniture pieces in our Raleigh, North Carolina workshop. Our process—from initial conversations about your ideas and preferences to the final delivery and installation—ensures you receive heirloom-quality pieces that fit your space and aesthetic.
André Leon Gray
André Leon Gray is a multidisciplinary artist who explores and investigates power structures, social hierarchies, culture, and history by synthesizing the past with the present into eye-opening commentaries to give the viewer a visual meal for the mind. His coded visual language contains multiple layers of meaning embedded within each work, which frequently combines pictorial or reclaimed objects, symbols and text in a complementary and contradictory relationship through the practice of assemblages, tar paintings, collage, drawings and installations.
Oami Powers
Oami Powers is a visual artist whose expressive and gestural drawings, ceramic sculptures and installations delve into themes of memory, nostalgia, grief, understanding of home and self. Raised in California and New Zealand, she has now lived in North Carolina for over a decade. Powers graduated from the University of Canterbury with a B.A. in Art History and Classical Studies. Her work has been in juried exhibitions nationwide, and was recently acquired by Duke Energy.
Casey Allen
Casey Allen is a long time Raleigh resident and small dog enthusiast. She enjoys painting fine lines and bright colors.
Precious D. Lovell
My creative practice explores the narrative potential of cloth and clothing. When I pick up a piece of fabric, a needle, and thread, I am reminded of how stories and histories are revealed in cloth and clothing. Dismissed and devalued techniques traditionally considered “women’s work” including sewing and needlework are the foundation of my practice. Through a love for making I continue the labor- intensive multigenerational craft practices of my ancestors. I combine these traditional craft-based textile skills with contemporary technologies in the production of my work.
Susan Martin
Susan Martin's compositions of contrived objects exist only as staged memorials on paper with no documented history or lineage. The works are purposefully fictitious but flirting with reality. She primarily works in the centuries old medium of drypoint intaglio, a technique sheI favors due to the patience required to achieve complex line and tone.
Caroline Ford
Caroline is an artist and designer. She is inspired by mystery, emotion, nature, archetypes, and the underlying structures that inform our lives.
Becky Joye
Becky Joye enjoys escaping to an invented world of color, pattern, and impracticable structures. Ordinary dwellings and structures become vehicles of her imagination for images that visualize the interior human experience. In her meticulous mixed-media paintings and collages, she marries the order of architectural elevation drawings with the comfort of her grandmother’s quilts through the application of fabric, paint, and pencil on paper.
Murphy Ayala
Murphy Ayala is a visual artist exploring the parallels between architecture and painting. She examines buildings and other structures through an historic lens, and social and political issues related to housing and preservation with a keen aesthetic for design principles such as pattern, repetition, and geometry.
Martha Thorn
Martha Thorn is a painter who lives and works in Raleigh, NC. She remains committed to an intuitive painting process, and her practice examines the tension between chaos and control through juxtaposed poured, painterly forms and graphic planes.
Kenny Batch
Kenny is a custom art framer and handler. He mastered his craft through 20+ years of creating customized frames and designs for SAS Institute and the Umstead Hotel. Kenny works in collaboration with artists, collectors galleries, and studios crafting frames that enhance each piece. In addition to art framing, Kenny offers sign vinyl and laser engraving. Kenny has never met a stranger, his talent as a framer is only exceeded by his kindness as a human.