The Akron Area Arts Alliance (AAAA) is showing off – its award-winning visual artists that is. And why not? The organization has been organizing and advocating the arts in the area for 20 years now.

Ten years ago AAAA worked with the city of Akron to create Summit Artspace – a Knight Arts grantee – which is a facility that houses two galleries, highly serviceable studio space, along with small conference and meetings rooms.

T o commemorate these milestones, Summit Artspace gathered works by the AAAA’s eight previous and current visual artist award recipients and curated an exhibition of their work entitled “Why Art’s Alive in Akron.”

Every two years a committee gets together and goes through nominations to see if it wishes to grant a Visual Arts Award to a deserving person within its Arts Alive! Awards program. In a way like the international Nobel committees, the committee may, according to former recipient Joan Colbert, decline to select.  “Maybe there’ll be a winner,” she said. “Maybe there won’t.” The same goes for Lifetime Achievement Awards.

The exhibition is a real eye-opener – if for no other reason than the eight artists don’t overlap in specialty (a sure plus for the viewer). There’s pastel Portraitist Judith Carducci, printmaker Joan Colbert, metal sculptor Don Drumm, pastel landscape painter Barbara Gillette, electgrostatic collage artist Miller Horns, abstract painter Craig Lucas, digital printmaker PJ Rogers and mixed media artist Mark Soppeland.

What’s more, the artists got the chance either to pick out the best of the best within their careers to put on display or choose to introduce new creations – a really nice perk for them.

This year’s Lifetime Achievement Award winner PJ Rogers picked 11 representative works from over a 40-year span. The crowning touch is the last piece to be seen – “Sunflower Plus 1,” which many viewers may be tempted to see as the “best in show” for it depicts the care and detail of Rogers’ touch in her images, much like a master painter in oil.

Overall, though, the exhibition has an internal logic to the way it’s laid out. It wraps around the walls, beginning with current award winner Gillette’s landscapes and Carducci’s portraits until it reaches the mataphoric and iconographic workings of Irish myth and the retelling of earlier religious shrines in the works of Colbert and Soppeland.

One thing clear from this exhibition – Akron is a cornucopia of visual arts, and Summit Artspace separates the wheat from the chaff. “Why Art’s Alive in Akron” runs through June 3. Hours are Thursday-Sunday, 12-5 p.m. Admission is free.Summit Art Space, 140 E. Market St, Akron; 330-376-8480; summitartspace.org