About ADZ

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Hiya. My name is Ann Zeleny. I live in rural western Maryland, between the Appalachian Trail and the Antietam Battlefield, in a little house with big windows at the end of a gravel road. This rocky paradise is where I make stuff, in a whole lot of different materials.

��I call myself a professional artist. Never mind that ��art�� is a word impossible to define to everybody��s satisfaction. To me it means I make things that are intended to be interesting to look at, and in some cases, useful in other ways too. I am a sucker for nature-inspired ornament, pure geometry, and pure color, so these things tend to turn up in my stuff. Radical as the idea may be these days, I believe that provoking a viewer to experience beauty is reason enough for a thing to exist. So, aside from any dynamic tension a piece might require, I relentlessly work to refine a flowing harmony of lines, shapes, and colors.

As for personal history, here��s the short version: I was born in Arizona, but we moved to the Washington DC area (by way of one school year in Michigan) when I was 8. I graduated with a fine art degree in ceramics, with a secondary concentration in fiber, from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. I worked for several years in DC as an ornamental moulding sculptor, then moved with my husband Carl Anderson to the western Maryland countryside to continue raising my two kids (Fred Zeleny and Gwyneth Anderson) in pastoral bliss. (They grew up to be artists too, though I swear we didn��t push them into it.) Along the way I��ve been involved in a lot of creative projects and worked in a lot of different media, and thanks to my very supportive family and friends, I��ve been able to follow my creative nose most of the time.

��In college and for 3 years after graduation, I was in a band called the Seventh Dawn, which recorded a couple of albums of all original music (recently remastered and rereleased). I had written songs, sung, & played guitar since the beginning of high school. When I met Heff Munson in college, he and his two brothers had already formed the band. Our music worked well together, so I became a band member. Heff and I married in ��74. We were both 19. Though I changed my name back to Zeleny in the early eighties, and we were divorced in 1985, we are still good friends, all these years later.

The Seventh Dawn was a couple of decades too early to benefit from the internet and the widespread exposure the web later allowed indie bands. But we had our loyal local fans then, and now the old recordings have a whole new batch of listeners worldwide.

Click here for more of my biography and philosophy.

about me

The Seventh Dawn, circa 1975 Clockwise from upper left: Bil Munson, Heff Munson,

Ann Munson (at the time), & Eric Munson

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