For October, DCA will present two new exhibitions.

The Front Gallery will feature “Natural Evidence” by Mary McCoy. Mary is an environmental artist and writer whose interdisciplinary work grows from her curiosity about the natural world. Living on a working farm beside a tidal river that flows to the Chesapeake Bay, she works with traditional art materials, the written word, and natural found materials, from grapevines and oyster shells to butterfly wings and bones. Her work has been exhibited in the United States, Ireland, Wales and New Zealand. She is the recipient of a 2022 Independent Artist Award in Literary Arts from the Maryland State Arts Council.

McCoy will also be participating in an evening of new readings with the faculty of the Johns Hopkins | Krieger School of Arts & Sciences | Writing Seminars on Saturday, Oct. 1, at 7 p.m. Readings will be offered by Mary as well as Lysley Tenorio, Bruce Snider, Shannon Robinson and James Arthur with JHU. DCA member tickets are $10, non-members $15. Authors’ books will be available for purchase at the event. All are welcome.

Sabra Richards and her daughter, Lynn Richards, are featured in the Main Gallery exhibition entitled “Richards & Richards: Glass, Light and Steel.” Sabra works in kiln-formed glass as her medium of sculpture. She starts with sheets of Bullseye fusible glass. She creates the design, adding and subtracting glass and, most importantly, adding cane and components made at the furnace, usually at the Corning Glass Museum. Sixteen pieces of glass, formed into a block, fired and then put into the furnace, turned and heated until malleable, and then “pulled” into the cane that you see in her work. Then she combines the finished glass with previously welded steel, or layers of metal or constructions for wall pieces.

As a third-generation artist and long-time urbanist and cyclist with degrees in environmental science, Lynn Richards transforms streetscape elements into glass and steel sculptures. She has been working in glass for eight years and apprenticed under a master glass artist for more than 10 years. Over the past 30 years, Lynn has participated in a number of workshops in watercolor, print making, sketching, paper-making and glass, which has given her significant knowledge of different materials and design elements.

Both exhibitions run through Oct. 29. The Second Saturday Artists’ Reception will be held on Oct. 8 from 5-7 p.m. with music, light refreshments and talks with both Mary McCoy and Sabra Richards. Lynn Richards will present a lecture the following week on Oct. 15 at 5 p.m., with a focus on her glass houses.

For more information about additional programs and events at the Dorchester Center for the Arts, stop by 321 High Street, call 410-228-7782 or visit online at dorchesterarts.org. Find DCA on Facebook.

Programs at DCA are supported by the Maryland State Arts Council.