Art Beat

Dare we consider a festival under the banner of visual art? Reader, in 2016, I think we must. This week let’s consider the notable sights from last week’s Reggae on the River festival. This year the festival was graced with an officially designated “Art Cave.” The compositions within its precincts were consumed by tightly rendered, […]

Asher and Ellis Russo’s collection of poultry wishbones looks like a series of spider-fine, upside-down capital Ys, hung neatly in order from small to large on parallel wires. It is one of the most visually arresting groupings at this month’s small and engaging exhibition of collections made by Humboldt County residents at the Morris Graves […]

Now that it’s July, the farmers market has reached max volume and we’ve got the full scale of summer fruits and vegetables on our collective mind. I’m going to say this means it’s a good time to revisit the importance of being local. Each Saturday morning, the Arcata farmers market serves up a mind-expanding object […]

An early work of language art by Jenny Holzer reads: “With all the holes in you already there’s no reason to define the outside environment as alien.” Sebastopol-based artist Brooke Holve’s show, Cuts Make You, about sliced and broken surfaces, brought that phrase to mind. The exhibition’s name sounds like a joke about collage but Holve […]

I know: The timing is counter-intuitive. Summer is supposed to be the season for doing things outdoors: swimming at the river, hiking, fishing and biking. But without detracting one iota from those pleasures, this article advocates for the less strenuous summer activity of watching regionally themed YouTube videos indoors, in the name of art. Peep […]

Portland-based painter Tripper Dungan likes UFOs, aliens and other subjects of pop conspiracy. A slew of his small, irregularly shaped paintings are scattered at rakish angles around the Sanctuary’s comfortable, pew-filled exhibition space, as if someone fired a cartoon shotgun around the room. UFO Cult might be the only exhibition you see this year in […]

It is possible to look right through the surfaces of Natalie Craig’s mixed media paintings, admiring their airy architecture. They are multi-layered, like baklava or Jenga. Inside the laminate picture planes, each translucent leaf is differently inscribed. Pencil, oil, gouache and digital photo prints — each medium embodies different moments of the process. Craig said […]

Approached through fog and driving rain one recent afternoon, the unassuming Westhaven Center for the Arts rose out of the mist like a rustic scholar’s retreat. Inside, a colorful blitz of paintings galvanized the space. The tiny, somewhat out-of-the-way and absurdly charming “nonprofit gallery and grassroots community center” has been serving artists from the immediate […]

“After my bantam Bootsy survived two visits from the neighborhood hawk, I began taking shallow depth-of-field morning poultry portraits,” said Matthew Rooney. This month Rooney shows pictures of chickens, local produce and fungi at Ramone’s under the series title Myrtletown. He shot the images with a Nikon D800 camera in natural light, and every bud, […]