Ann Meleney

About

Ann Meleney moved to Martha's Vineyard in 2012 after vacationing there with her family for decades. The island life awakened something in her, drawing her fully into her artistic life and into the heart of its community. Featherstone Center for the Arts became a second home — a place to deepen her practice across watercolor, mixed media and collage, and to venture into new territory, including ceramics. Her work draws from the natural world, from the oceanic landscape around her, but she isn't afraid to turn her eye toward the political — meeting the moment with the same directness she brings to everything else.

Life off the canvas is just as rich. Ann teaches swim to babies and children with special needs, does water aerobics, and hosts the kind of Friday neighborhood dinners people look forward to all week. Summers mean long afternoons on the porch with board games and whoever wanders by. She's also won many ribbons at the MV Ag Fair in all sorts of artistic categories, but her pride-and-joy are her Tallest Sunflower ribbons. Her husband, Dan, has his own creative outlets in bonsai and in gardening from seed. And filling out Ann's heart in recent years are her two granddaughters, Anya and Ramona, both toddlers and already busy at their easels.