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The Weston Public Library May Art Exhibit is up and it features your absolute favorite thing in the whole world: owls! No, I mean art. “Inspirations from Nature” with Zhonghe (Elena) Li is available for oohing and aahing in the art gallery.

Zhonghe (Elena) Li is a multi-media artist, living and working in Cambridge, MA. Her artistic motivation has consistently been a love of nature’s diversity and a profound concern for the environment, species extinction, and humanity’s role and future in these processes. She is deeply influenced by the Taoist philosophy of “being one with nature” and seeks to promote the principle of living in harmony on the earth through her art. She was awarded a grant from Mount Auburn Cemetery’s Artist-in-Residence program in 2021, and grants from the Cambridge Arts Council to support her work on related projects about species extinction: “The Last Rhino,” ”The Art of Living Together,” and “The Art of Nature Around Us” in 2021, 2022, and 2023. She was a Massachusetts Cultural Council Traditional Art Fellowship Finalist in 2022 and is a recipient of Massachusetts Cultural Council Traditional Arts Apprenticeship for 2023-24. Elena practices and teaches traditional Chinese papercutting, using her own combination of watercolor and papercutting. For this Weston show, along with the traditional art of papercutting, and watercolors, she has included experimental work, from papercutting to silkscreening and monoprints.

To see more of Elena’s work, follow her at hehe.li@instagram, her blog wildcraneblog.wordpress.com, or “wildcrane art” on YouTube. Who here wants to convince her to do a class at the AIC? Me.

The Weston Public Library is located at 87 School Street.

Image: “Barred Owls Waiting for the Spring “, papercut with a pair of scissors only on red rice paper with gold leaf.