Heroin Hilton, Jesse Wiedel’s guerrilla public artwork, hit Eureka’s streets in the early afternoon hours of Dec. 7. Five oil paintings materialized in Old Town with no advance publicity, just as crowds gathered for the monthly Arts Alive! event. Bolted onto plywood sheets boarding up the windows and door of a condemned building near the […]
Gabrielle Gopinath
Gabrielle Gopinath is a critic who writes about art, place and culture in Northern California. She lives in Arcata. Follow her on Instagram @gabriellegopinath.
Posted inArts + Scene
The Landscape Gives You Information
When you think about landscape, it’s hard to get past the Impressionists. This has been true for more than a century, ever since Manet, Monet, Pissarro and the rest of the gang who showed at the Salons des Refusés in the 1870s and 1880s reinvented representation with their small, luminous, rough-hewn canvases. In the 20th […]
Posted inArts + Scene
We’re All Land Artists Now
Moon-shaped pools, underground flows and springs long-buried by sand inspired the poems, paintings and vessels in Jerry Martien and Becky Evans’ new exhibition at Piante Gallery (and the gallery’s final show before closing), Water and Power. Evans explained that she and Martien both grew up in Southern California near Los Angeles, where water and power […]
Posted inStories
Sonny Wong
Making aesthetic judgements is notoriously tough and rankings can be poorly received. Take mythology: When Marsyas and Arachne claimed to be numero uno at playing the flute and weaving, respectively, the Greek gods punished their hubris with flaying-to-death/transformation into a spider. When Paris went on the record regarding which goddess he found most beautiful, the […]
Posted inArts + Scene
‘Diary of an Artist’
Media Literacy week at the NCJ presents a welcome opportunity to reflect on the critic’s (frequently misunderstood) role. The critic, here at least, is neither judge nor booster nor native interpreter nor PR flack — just a person who narrates their experience of art in public. In doing so, the critic models the form (but […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Heartland Laid Bare
We cut from mariachi dancers to the softball diamond. Flat limitless fields, nondescript buildings, canals and barges flicker past. A hopper belches out a river of golden corn. High above the threshing blades, sealed inside an air-conditioned cab, a farmer pilots a mammoth harvesting machine across fields that stretch as far as the eye can […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Painting on the Wall
At the block party for the second annual Eureka Street Art Festival, more than a dozen artists hailing from points ranging from Bayside to Buenos Aires were steadily moving toward completion in front of ebullient crowds. Many had been working in public all week — spraying, brushing, gridding and stenciling, shimmying up and down ladders […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Epic Scrolls and Journeys
To stand in the middle of the building that houses the Morris Graves Museum of Art and look up is to feel the pull of the former Carnegie library’s Renaissance-derived architectural language. An octagonal array of veneered and polished redwood columns rise two stories to frame the view into the dome. The space is split […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Summer Stories and Floating Worlds
Summer is the season for group exhibitions. The 61st annual open-call summer exhibition at Redwood Arts Association, held in honor of longtime member Julia Bednar, opens this month with an un-themed show of mostly painting and photography on both floors. A couple blocks away at the Ink People’s Brenda Tuxford Gallery, a themed group exhibition […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Punk and the Working Stiff
Ian Carey’s solo show at the Morris Graves Museum of Art features large mixed-media figures with elements of collage. More painted figures than figure paintings, they’ve been clipped like paper dolls from their original surroundings and re-assembled free-floating on the wall. Carey’s scrappy style veers from painstaking to deliberately de-skilled, sometimes careening giddily in the […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Graduates
The annual year-end exhibition of works by Humboldt State University art majors is up at the HSU Reese Bullen Gallery. Curated by the members of the museum and gallery practice class under the direction of Ian Carey, Britt Sheldon and Gabriella Reisz, the show features artworks by graduating seniors in media including jewelry, drawing, painting […]
Posted inArts + Scene
School Daze
The juried student exhibition that just opened at College of the Redwoods Creative Arts Gallery brings together a range of student artworks produced in this year’s classes, from fantasy landscapes to lively nature studies. Juried by Susan J. Bloom from the department of theatre, film and dance at Humboldt State University, the exhibition keeps works […]