The Oil Region Alliance and ARTS Oil City hosted a ribbon cutting ceremony Wednesday for the three most recent creative professionals to move their businesses into studio space in the National Transit Building in Oil City.
The three new businesses are McGuire Studio operated by Susan McGuire, Dazzle Me Permanent Jewelry operated by Jamie Duarte, and Mike Hoover Encaustic and Suiseki Studio operated by Mike Hoover.
The ribbon cutting, which took place on the second floor of the Transit Building, was “the first-ever ribbon cutting on the artist floor of the Transit Building,” according to ARTS Oil City coordinator Barbara Pierce, “but it will not be the last.”
Hoover and McGuire both relocated to Oil City from California, while Duarte is a lifelong Oil City resident.
Hoover moved here a year ago because of the wildfire smoke in California, he said.
“We looked at every state in the Union and narrowed it down to the Northeast, and we narrowed it down, and we narrowed it down,” and finally, settled on Oil City, he said. “We really like it here.”
Hoover does encaustic paintings, which use melted colored wax as the medium, as well as suiseki, an ancient Japanese form of art borrowed from the Chinese, in which rocks evoking something in nature, such as mountains or waterfalls, are mounted onto stands in their natural state with no alterations.
She moved to Oil City in 2015 after discovering the arts community there a few years before and telling a friend about it, who then moved to the area before McGuire.
“I was looking for lifestyle options,” McGuire said. “I was tired of being in the San Francisco area.”
McGuire also has a selection of paintings in her studio that she is giving away for free from her friend Wakar Amarra, another Oil City Transit artist who passed away last June.
“She wanted to give them back to the community,” McGuire said, saying Amarra had a vision of “front porch Fridays” to give away free artwork from the porch of her Oil City home every Friday.
But that vision never came to fruition because of the COVID lockdowns shortly after Amarra purchased her house.
Duarte said she just started her permanent jewelry business last December after discovering the trend on TikTok for jewelry that, rather than having a clasp, holds the ends together permanently with a jump ring that is welded together.
“You can design your own custom jewelry,” Duarte said. “It’s all custom-fit. It can be hard for people to put bracelets on themselves…it’s fairly new to the world.”
