Louis Marak’s illusionistic ceramics stretch the capacities of clay in unexpected ways. Fired ceramic slabs become surfaces to draw and paint upon. Images are full of illogical juxtapositions. Even when this is not the case, the way the pieces play at being both objects and images yields surreal results. Glazed bowls, reliefs and ceramic slabs […]
Art Beat
Artists, galleries, museums, arts nights and shows around the county.
Posted inArts + Scene
No Spectators at Outer Roominations
Outer Roominations, Humboldt’s first outdoor, time- and site-sensitive art festival, took place on a Memorial Day that started out cool and shadowless. By midmorning, Table Bluff remained overcast in shades of gray and green, foliage draped in dewdrops. On a hillside meadow, people who’d made the drive wandered in pairs and small groups. Apart from […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Mapping Seven Artists, Seven Paths
The exhibition Seven Artists, Seven Paths is back. The exhibition reopens this week at the Morris Graves Museum of Art after a months-long virtual interlude due to pandemic restrictions on social gathering. The seven Humboldt artists whose work it features — Leslie Anderson, Becky Evans, Mimi LaPlant, Sanderson Morgan, John Pound, Emily Silver and Karen […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Grace under Fire
Artist and blacksmith Monica Coyne works in steel and her sculptures are riddled with reminders of the forge. That’s enough to make them strange. We’re used to thinking of steel as a substance that comes in identical prefab units, from I-beams and girders at construction sites to the machine-finished tools hanging on the wall at […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Beats from the Underground
The artist known as Knox the Dog just dropped a mixtape tailored to sync with the 1988 sci-fi epic Akira and it could scarcely arrive at a better time. Anime and electronica fans have been starved for diversion since the pandemic hit, and Knox’s new release, Akita, brings the sustenance they crave. Akira, the landmark […]
Posted inArts + Scene
He Shoots, He …
For serious sports fans and weekend warriors, what happens on the field has far-reaching significance. The games we play and watch can become an organizing force in our lives. Sports divides and unites. Love of a game can be passed through generations. Sports can even become the sole topic of discussion between people with no […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Human Stain
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 […]
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 […]
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‘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 […]