March is Women’s History Month. And, Ohio Northern's Department of Art and Design is highlighting some stories from its alumnae.
Here is Marilyn Lysohir's story. She is a 1972 ONU graduate.
Born in Sharon, Pa., Marilyn has studied at various universities including the Centro Internazionale Di Studi in Verona, Italy (1970-71) and at Washington State University (MFA ’79).
She also has taught at various schools such as the Kansas City Art Institute, the Ohio State University and New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred. In 2000, she was a visiting artist in residence at Ohio Northern’s department of art & design.
During the 1980s, Marilyn earned a reputation as one of the country’s foremost ceramics artists. Today, you will find her work reproduced in almost every ceramic book published in the last 15 or 20 years.
Her career gained momentum with pieces like The Fourth Sister, which featured three different brides looking at three different wedding cakes, and The Alligator’s Wife, a ceramic version of herself lying atop a 15-foot ceramic alligator.
In 1984, she landed her first solo show in Los Angeles, featuring Bad Manners. After the piece sold, Marilyn was granted a second solo show for which she created The Dark Side of Dazzle, the battleship that she says commemorates her father’s time as a soldier in World War II.
Other works of note include The Last Immigrant completed in the late 1980s, The Tattooed Ladies and the Dinosaur in the early 1990s, Good Girls 1968 in 2003, and her most recent work, Flower Girls.
Marilyn also is an entrepreneur who turned what she loved into a livelihood—chocolate. She is the founder and owner of Cowgirl Chocolates, a company that successfully sells chocolate infused with chili peppers. http://www.cowgirlchocolates.com/
Cowgirl Chocolates started out of a combination of Lysohir's curiosity to learn how to successfully sell and market a product and her conviction that her brother's seemingly hairbrained idea of infusing chocolate with chili peppers was brilliant.
She started the company out of her kitchen in 1997, and in 10 years, Lysohir has become a successful chocolatier.
After Cowgirl Chocolates won several awards in the fiery food business, it appeared on the Food Network and in several magazines and newspapers. The company took off, launching what had begun as an in-home business into a line of specialty chocolate products.
