MANSFIELD — A new, community-focused art gallery will celebrate its grand opening Saturday during the Mansfield Arts Festival. 

New Creations Art Gallery is located on the third floor of Mosaic, a church at 296 Park Avenue West.

There will be 25 artists on display during Saturday’s grand opening, plus a variety of family-friendly activities including arts and crafts, face painting, a kids mural and an augmented reality light show.

  • Founder and gallery director Rachel Justice created two giant mushrooms out of foam to help transform the third floor of Mosaic church into New Creations Art Gallery. 

  • The art studio at New Creations Art Gallery will be a place where artists can fine-tune their skills and offer classes to the community. 

  • Justice transformed the gallery space with foam flora and real vines.

  • Saturday’s event at New Creations will feature works from 25 local artists.

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  • hallway
  • mugs
  • displays

  • New Creations Art Gallery is housed on the third floor of Mosaic, a church at 296 Park Avenue West.

The gallery opening will also feature live music. Stan Rust will open at 11 a.m, followed by Keagan Nicolaides at noon, Dale Powers at 1 p.m., Lexington Idol’s Sarah Goff at 2 p.m. and Kyle & Myles from 3 to 5 p.m.

New Creations was founded by Rachel Justice, an artist and teacher. She hopes the gallery will be a place where artists can sharpen their skills and grow their audience. The gallery also includes a studio space where artists can give classes and community members can create works of art.

“Art can provide healing,” Justice said. “It can be an opportunity for those who are struggling to express who they are, the emotions they are feeling and create something beautiful that can serve others.”

Diane Googins, an artist and art teacher, serves as the vice chair of the gallery.

“It exists in order to awaken the creatives of Mansfield,” Googins said. “We also want to develop the next generation of creatives.”

New Creations includes display space in the rooms and hallways, which Justice has decorated with giant foam mushrooms. Real vines and handcrafted wisteria hang in one of the church’s old alcoves.

“I used to make a lot of flowers out of paper, but foam has more molding capabilities than paper does,” Justice said.

The display took a couple months to make.

“It took two van loads to get all the vines up here!” she said.

The gallery is still in a formative phase, but Justice and Googins said they hopes to see it staffed with regular hours in the future. Another goal is to have classes available for children and the underprivileged in the community, as well as mentorship programs.

“We’re still in the very beginning stages,” she said. “It’s new but I really believe it’s going to grow into something really precious.”

New Creations will serve as one of multiple locations for the Mansfield Art Festival. Others include downtown Mansfield’s Central Park, Kingwood Center, the Phoenix Brewing Company, the Renaissance Theatre, Lucah Designs, Richland Carrousel Park, Little Buckeye Children’s Museum, the Mansfield Richland County Public Library’s main branch.

This is the first year the festival will take place in multiple locations, coordinator Victoria Hoefler said.

While it will help with social distancing, Hoefler said the primary motivation behind it is to unite Mansfield’s diverse community of artists.

“This is something we wanted to try. I’ve seen it done in a lot of the larger cities and it seems to be really effective,” she said.

“A lot of people in our community do know about each different location, but they don’t understand that we are all trying to work together to build an artistic community.”

Hoefler foresees even more collaboration across the arts community in the future. She encouraged anyone interested in participating in next year’s festival to reach out to her at 419-755-7234.