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 […]
Art Beat
Artists, galleries, museums, arts nights and shows around the county.
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 […]
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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 […]
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Source Materials
More than three decades in, veteran glass artist and Arcata resident George Bucquet isn’t done with his medium yet. Arcata Artisans Gallery hosts works by Bucquet and Jim Lowry this month, where the former is unveiling a new edition of works in hot cast glass — a technique in which forms are made by pouring […]
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In Stitches
Nicole Havekost’s new exhibition at the Morris Graves Museum of Art, Massed, explores bodily experience through stitched three-dimensional forms and embroidered wall reliefs. Minnesota-based Havekost writes of one series of artworks on view, the “Sewing and Cooking Dolls,” that she “began this body of work when her son was small and she was finding her […]
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‘The Spirits There’
Lyn Risling’s clear, inviting images celebrate the Native Northern California in her exhibition Reconnecting: A Cultural Journey. Contour lines and panels of vivid color illustrate a world drawn from indigenous stories, in which human beings and animals coexist and interact as equals, without anyone making a big deal out of it. A gentle humor animates […]
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Trade Routes
Piante Gallery shows work by painter Harry Blumenthal, sculptor Marilyn Andrews and jewelry designer Scott Mitchell this month. Blumenthal’s expressionist paintings are up front as you enter the gallery. Painted improvisationally with loose gestural brushwork, they’re largely populated with animals and their creaturely subjects prance or slink through brightly colored, vaguely Fauvist landscapes that all […]
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Stem Rises
Lack of dedicated exhibition space poses a challenge for area artists, particularly students and recent grads. In the case of Humboldt State University photography students Elijah Howe and Jake Langston, deficit became a spur to creativity. In search of a space where their work could be seen, Howe and Langston founded a new photography journal […]
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Salt: Emily Silver and Holly Sepulveda
Since it opened on F Street last year, the nonprofit gallery Canvas + Clay has been staging exhibitions that approach arts programming in novel ways. Canvas + Clay is affiliated with the Eureka Studio, a fine arts center for people with developmental disabilities and the gallery’s two-person exhibitions pair studio-affiliated artists with established locals. Salt, […]
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Art for the Commute
This time of year, as many of us migrate to or from our points of origin, it’s time to consider Arcata’s biggest, newest and most noteworthy piece of public art about the experience of transit: the 256-foot-long, 27-foot-tall painting by Lucas Thornton, “Marvelous Mural of Marbled Murrelets,” sweeping across two sides of the Arcata Bay […]
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Dazzling Camouflage
The new year at Black Faun Gallery in Eureka begins auspiciously with Dazzle Shjips, a solo exhibition featuring sculpture, film projections and two-dimensional works by North Coast artist Benjamin Funke. The show offers up an abundance of recent sculptural pieces featuring Funke’s recent experimentation with new materials. The exhibition title Dazzle Shjips alludes to the […]
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Our Town
The plein-air paintings in the All Things Arcata exhibition hold up a mirror to the city of Arcata, and the city looks good in this light. There can’t have been many occasions on which the streetscapes of a town of 18,000 have been so lovingly, meticulously documented. In plein-air (“open-air”) painting, popularized by the Impressionists’ […]