Middlefield artist Annie Peters has been a frequent participant in the annual Burton Public Library Art Show. She can now say she has experienced the honor of submitting a winning piece, as her three-dimensional creation Basket for Your Thoughts won first place at the Show in October.
“It was very nice,” Peters told The Weekly Villager. “I have been making art for many years, so it is always nice to win an award because it validates what you do. It does not always mean you have to win an award but when you do, it is just a very nice validation.”
In addition to earning the honor as the 2025 3-D winner, Peters also received a monetary prize from the Burton Public Library.
Peters’ winning piece was a large basket woven of willow and thyme, called A Basket for Your Thoughts. It contained a ceramic vessel with pieces of paper in it, allowing people to write their innermost thoughts and place them inside the basket.
According to Peters she recognized how people have so many thoughts and wanted to build an interactive piece that celebrated everyone’s right to their personal thoughts. She said that she has read a lot of the brief messages that have been placed in the basket and has been fascinated by what she has read so far.
“Broadly I had things that children wrote like ‘I love my mom’ and ‘I love my dad’,” she noted. “It was very cute and quite obvious that a little child wrote it and in addition to comments that were everything from ‘I wish I wouldn’t have broken up with my boyfriend’ to ‘I am wondering if I am making the right decision’ to politics, it was really interesting.”
She said that her piece was a merge of crafts, traditional basketry and art, which helped distinguish it from being just an ordinary basket. It was the second time her piece was well-received, previously entering the 3-D piece of art in a separate art show in February, where it also received high marks, although the previous art show was curated as opposed to the Burton Public Library Art Show, which was a juried event.
For Peters, it was another highlight in her tenured career as a professional artist. Although she has been a Middlefield resident for 40 years, her artistic career originated when she was living in Europe as a child.
“It enabled me to be able to adapt to wherever I landed, and I think that was a real benefit to me because all of those experiences that you have in person feed into the work that you make as an artist,” she noted.
Peters said that her father served in the military and was stationed overseas. She briefly returned to the United States after her father passed away but returned to Europe when her stepfather received an overseas assignment.
She noted that within a 12-year span, she attended 12 different schools while living in Europe. Although she constantly was on the move, Peters said that she always searched for independent art lessons wherever she was.
She said that she was fascinated by art because of the variety of expressionism and the endless possibilities an artist has at their disposal.
She returned to the United States after graduating from high school and pursued an undergraduate degree in art education while studying for her master’s degree in fiber art and sculpture. She said that developed an affinity for three-dimensional art.
“After undergraduate school, I taught art and then I studied basketry with world-class basket makers and started making non-functional furniture,” she said. “Big pieces that had a social comment and that evolved into winning an Ohio Arts Council Grant and that evolved into having a show at the Cleveland Museum of Art.”
Following her college graduation, Peters moved to Middlefield and taught art at Grand Valley High School. She said that she cherished the opportunity to instill her passion for art in the next generation and has seen several of her students go on to become professional artists or art teachers.
She also came to love Middlefield, as the rural nature provided the perfect resources for her to create artworks directly from the land itself.
“I look at a lot of my work as three-dimensional, and even the basket piece I won for, if you look how it is made, you can just see it using three-dimensional lines,” she said.
She has since retired from full-time teaching but still teaches Beginning Watercolor and Beginning Drawing twice a week at the Orange Art Center in Pepper Pike while frequently submitting pieces to local art shows in the Northeast Ohio community.
