In The Press

Most Innovative Local Gallery Shows (according to CP art critic Savannah Guz)

Connect 3 (Breath Yoga Studio with moxie Dada). The third annual collaborative exhibition fed a rapidly expanding new-age interest: experiential healing. Connect, featuring Allison Hoge's and Joan Ricou's sensuous canvases of saturated oranges and blues, was co-curated by Moxie's Christine Whispell and Breathe's Kristi Rogers.
More about Connect

Market District Condos

Over the store: Shadyside condos linked to Giant Eagle Saturday, May 27, 2006 By Gretchen McKay, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Art Jump-Start" Pittsburgh City Paper

Friday, September 09, 2005 Writer: ROBERT ISENBERG

ASH Galleries is like a mini-paradise for interior designers: The converted three-story apartment building has a quaint little vestibule and hardwood floors. The show space is small but open, with generous windows admitting a flood of natural light. Toward the back, glass doors open onto a brick patio packed with well-spaced metal bistro tables. It’s every aesthete’s dream -- perusing paintings and discussing over coffee. And it all happens in a quiet corner of Lawrenceville.

“I wanted to do something entrepreneurial,” says Allison Hoge, the proprietor of ASH. Hoge is a short, skinny young woman with straight blonde hair and sleepy eyes. She laughs easily and speaks in a grave deliberate manner. At 26, Hoge is among the youngest gallery owners in Western Pennsylvania. “I thought about owning a restaurant or a coffeehouse or an art gallery.” In the end, she settled on the gallery -- with room for a prospective café.

But Hoge has bigger plans than a mere show-space for emerging artists. She hopes to weave a web of young artists, with ASH as their home base.

Hoge always wanted to be an artist. Growing up in nearby West Alexander, Pa., she watched Bob Ross and tinkered with brushes. As a college student, she hoped to become a graphic designer and children’s-book author; it took only one foundation course (basic painting) to find focus in canvases. The graduate of Philadelphia’s University of the Arts was both inspired by Philly’s energy and verve and disenfranchised by the expense and exclusivity of its culture circuit. Painters seeking spaces often must pay hefty membership dues.

“My goal is to create an artists’ network,” Hoge says. That is, ASH will gather the talents of creative artists in the 18-to-40-year-old set. To this end, she offers a month-to-month membership fee (an affordable $25), or a free online membership, which allows artists to post their work. “I want to make something that artists can use that isn’t expensive,” Hoge says. “I want to help Pittsburgh become aware that there is an arts scene here.”

Hoge’s do-it-yourself spirit has permeated ASH Galleries since day one. Her father, a financial consultant, and her mother, a former antique-shop owner, were essential in procuring a loan. The Hoges bought the Lawrenceville property, settling on an old, family-owned three-story brick house. “The building was livable,” Hoge says, “but there was no central air or heat. There was this yucky green carpeting.”

Post-renovations, Hoge literally lives with her work: She occupies a one-bedroom apartment upstairs, also tastefully designed and swankly decorated. Her days are busy with beloved activities -- waking up, descending the stairs, running the gallery, painting, creating graphics for her father’s company and, come fall, studying for her master’s degree at Duquesne University.

Still, ASH operates less like a co-op than a collaborative business. Hoge uses terms like “network” and “entrepreneurial” with ease -- words suggesting a more venture-capitalist mindset. Her shows are tightly themed: Her first, DIY Revolution, featured graphic, zine-style works. Her second, Get Naked, debuts Sept. 1 and explores themes of sexuality and womanhood.

Hoge functions as an agent as well, taking 20 percent of the total price for paintings sold through her gallery. “But I think it’s pretty reasonable,” she says. “Galleries in Philly usually charged 75 percent or more.”

To date, the biggest seller has been a piece by Hoge herself, a soft-focus Cubist landscape called “Windows.” The painting, which has been featured in several publications and duplicated as postcards and posters, sold for $1,900. Currently it stands in her corridor, awaiting pick-up. “The guy who bought it is doing renovations,” Hoge says. “So he’ll pick it up whenever that’s done. We’re pretty casual about that kind of thing.”

Girl Art Now!

Similarly intense are the images of a pear-shaped heart wrapped tightly by a thorned vine (Julie Harris’s Slip), or a bulging, anatomically-correct heart with pins stuck into it (Allison Susanne Hoge’s Love Letters).