The face in the painting doesn’t quite meet your eyes. She gazes somewhere past you. The piece is called “Americans of Samana.” The artist is Marsy Santos. The award ribbon attached to it, blue and white and official, reads Best in Show. Santos made the work in mixed media — acrylic, texture, accumulated material — as a translation of her grandmother’s story and the stories of the women who came before her in the Dominican Republic’s Samaná Peninsula.
“A woman’s voice never truly speaks in isolation,” Santos said. “Even when generations pass, we carry their echoes with us.”
That sensibility, art as inheritance, runs through “HER Collective Voice: A Women’s Art Exhibition” at the Suwanee Arts Center, on view through April 25. The show features work across painting, mixed media, photography and fiber art. All of it made by artists who identify as women. The Suwanee Arts Center invited women artists across disciplines to submit work celebrating human creativity
What does ‘collective’ mean when every story is different?
Atlanta-based juror Drema Montgomery, whose own work draws from the visual language of northeastern Alabama, brought a specific sensibility to the selection process.
“More than regional markers or visual accents, many of the works I was drawn to had a deep sense of time,” Montgomery said. “They revealed the perspectives of a person speaking from a psychological geography.”
Psychological geography. It’s a phrase that lands differently in a gallery in Gwinnett County, where three of Scarlet Hao’s acrylic paintings hang in sequence. “Quiet Reflection” shows a woman in stillness. “Born with Wings” places a young girl alongside a golden eagle, courage rendered as something innate. “The Prayer” is the quietest of the three.
Hao’s chosen medium of acrylic speaks to this immediacy. The way it builds and dries quickly allows her to move between soft blending and sharp definition, particularly in facial expressions, she explained. The medium also connects her to Asian painting traditions that inform her subjects. “I try not to hold back,” she said, “because authenticity is what makes a work meaningful.”
Summer Lowe’s work is also part of the show. The retired art professor submitted pieces she’s shown for years, because, as she puts it, the work was already exactly what she wanted it to be. Lowe uses acrylic, too, along with oil, to create her canvases featuring the feminine form.
“The women I choose to paint give voice to non-traditional themes in the history of art,” Lowe said. “The colors and compositions are chosen for their emotional impact. My intention is to convey beauty through the integration of human and natural forms.”
No-AI art
This human touch is why the Suwanee Arts Center deliberately chose to prohibit AI-generated work from “HER Collective Voice.” The staff, all artists themselves, cited the direct impact AI is having on working creatives across every medium. In 2025, U.S. courts and the Copyright Office established that works created entirely by AI cannot be copyrighted because they lack human authorship. The center took that legal reality and made it an artistic position.
And it matters, because every piece in this show is evidence of what that position protects. Consider Santos’s layered surfaces, which took years of skill to build. Hao built each face meticulously in fast-drying acrylic. Lowe’s brushwork is loose and confident, honed by decades of muscle memory.
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Suwanee Arts Center Executive Director Athea King noted that women have bought most of the works sold so far in “HER Collective Voice.” Women supporting other women in a space that, King says, reflects exactly who Suwanee is.