"Abstraction" by Joan Ladendorf

The Addison Center for the Arts was excited to host "Abstraction" by an award-winning artist Joan Ladendorf. Her solo exhibition, featuring a wide variety of mixed-media work, was on display at the ACA Gallery from October 11 through November 8, 2025. 

Joan Ladendorf is a self-taught artist who has been exploring a variety of media and subject matter on her artistic journey over the past forty-odd years. At the heart of it all is color and shape. This “Abstraction” show was a celebration of those qualities without anything recognizable getting in the way.

Joan began with theatre costuming and graphic design, then progressed through traditional quilt making and various art quilt techniques and styles. She then developed an innovative technique using cotton batik fabrics hand cut with scissors and assembled with a sheet of mounting adhesive.

Joan then returned to photography, a place she had visited before, back in the old days of film and darkrooms, but the digital offered so much more. She focused on local sites, collecting thousands of images from her backyard creek, auto junkyards, the Chicago Botanic Garden, Spring Valley Nature Center, the Illinois Railway Museum and many other great facilities. She used her collection originally as stand-alone images but quickly moved into using Photoshop’s layering capabilities to create composite work.

Currently, she is creating what she likes to call “Photo Collage,” imagery made from pieces and part of her photographic collection of textures and landscapes. Hand-painted and hand-altered repurposed papers are scanned and used as ingredients as well.

​Joan’s work has been featured in area galleries since 2005, and she has participated in juried fine art shows for many years, winning multiple awards. Learn more about the artist here.

Joan Ladendorf's reception was on October 18, 2025.