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 […]
Art Beat
Artists, galleries, museums, arts nights and shows around the county.
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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
Posted inArts + Scene
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 […]