Garden Party: Parallel Encounters
From December 13, 2013 to February 15, 2014 Coos Art Museum will be featuring Garden Party: Parallel Encounters in its Mabel Hansen Gallery. The exhibition opens with a free public reception on Friday, December 13 from 5 to 7pm. Garden Party, an effort of the Leach/Werner Studio, challenges the viewer with pictorial experiences in which gestural abstraction combines with floral motifs. The results are bold, brightly colored paintings. Jon Leach and Holly Werner began their painting collaborations in the spring of 2011 in their shared studio in Roseburg . Jon, a mixed-media abstract artist from Seattle, and Holly, a contemporary floral artist and a native of Roseburg , found that utilizing their skills in this seemingly cooperative way produced a calm yet energized magic! This process began with Jon’s request for Holly to paint into one of his paintings. Because neither of them had a space suitable for such an enterprise at the time, they established a studio and began working toward the development of their approach. Since there is no established mechanism for such collaboration, how the paintings will turn out depends heavily on chance, which adds to the excitement of the work. Coos Art Museum has been a cultural focal point of Oregon ’s scenic Southern Coast since 1966. It occupies the historic 1936 Art Deco US Federal Building in downtown Coos Bay . The Museum offers a wide range of arts activities including exhibitions, art classes and lectures. Hours are 10:00am to 4:00pm, Tuesday through Friday and 1:00 to 4:00 pm on Saturday. Museum admission: $5 general, $2 students, veterans and seniors, free to Museum members.
Art of the Hawthorne Family
From December 13, 2013 to February 15, 2014 Coos Art Museum will be featuring The Art of the Hawthorne Family in its Uno Richter Atrium Gallery. The exhibition opens with a free public reception on Friday, December 13 from 5 to 7pm. This exhibition presents the artwork of the multi-talented and multi-generational Hawthorne family artists. Members of the family are also proprietors of two highly regarded Pacific Coast galleries. These are the Hawthorne Gallery at Big Sur , California and the Hawthorne Gallery at Port Orford, Oregon . The Hawthornes are a true dynasty of talented and successful artists, whose family members work across many mediums including sculpting, ceramics, jewelry, painting, glass, and architecture. Among the painters participating in the exhibition are Gregory Hawthorne and nephew Daemian. Gregory is the oldest of the Hawthorne siblings and helped to found the first Hawthorne Gallery near his home in Big Sur , California . Chris Hawthorne of Port Orford is known internationally for his blown glass art and his niece Shelby will also be contributing her glass art to the exhibition. Julie Hawthorne the wife of Chris is a ceramic sculptor and has also contributed several works to the family exhibition. Brother-in-law Steve Kuntz is a wood sculptor living in Coquille, Oregon who participated in last year’s wood invitational at Coos Art Museum. His wife Lisa Hawthorne is a jewelry artist who is particularly noted for her work with enamels.
The Geometric Fantasias of George Espinoza
From December 13, 2013 to February 15, 2014 Coos Art Museum will be featuring The Geometric Fantasias of George Espinoza in its Clare Wehrle Community Gallery. The exhibition opens with a free public reception on Friday, December 13 from 5 to 7pm. All the works in this exhibition date 2010 and 2011 during a period in which George Espinoza was at Snake River Correctional Institution. He has since been released and is living in Northwestern Oregon . All the works were done on 9” x 12” paper with colored pencils with a great sense of color and design. Though most are geometric abstracts they carry within themselves symbolic relationships and concepts developed by the artist. In 2009 Coos Art Museum hosted an exhibition curated by Victoria Tierney and featuring art produced in Oregon State prisons. This one-person showing is an outgrowth and continuation of that exhibition.
“PLAYING WITH FIRE: Glass Art in the Pacific Northwest ”
Dangling jellyfish, butterflies, a 35” salmon, an old-growth tree lying horizontal in a forest, the marriage of the sun and the moon —–all made of glass — will be arriving at Coos Art Museum on Friday, December 13 when “PLAYING WITH FIRE: Glass Art in the Pacific Northwest” opens with a reception for the public from 5-7 pm and remains on display through February 15, 2014. The show’s title, “PLAYING WITH FIRE”, grew out of the technique of blowing glass which involves heating the glass in the red-hot “glory hole”, then shaping the molten substance by blowing through a metal tube into the sticky substance as it is whirled about in a wild dance by artists. The glass pieces created, which look so cool and still, are mute testaments to transformation by inferno. The show, which was made possible by a grant from the Antonin and Vladimir Kulaev Foundation (AVK Arts), will feature works by some of the foremost glass artists from the Seattle and Portland areas, as well as artists from Coos and Curry counties. Local glass artists, Karin Richardson and Dana Rieck, and the show’s guest curator Victoria Tierney, have been visiting the studios, galleries, and museums in Seattle, Tacoma, and Pilchuck, and have rounding up a world-class exhibition of glass art. Works by many of the founders of “The Glass Art Movement” will be shown at the Museum, including works by internationally recognized artist, Ann Gardner, who grew up in Coos Bay. Ann’s architectural mosaic glass structures adorn buildings around the world. Other Seattle – based artists include Martin Blank, whose “Crystal Skin” is a ten-foot-long “tree” of glass; Joseph Gregory Rossano, whose images of fish and butterflies will be accompanied by interactive information available to anyone with a smart phone; Richard Royal. who has worked with Pilchuck founder Dale Chihuly; Cappy Thompson and Dick Weiss, two early Pilchuck artists, who paint on glass; Paul Marioni, whose surreal and humorous pieces are cherished by collectors; Jenny Pohlman and Sabrina Knowles, whose striking blown glass heads and torsos are bedecked with beads and swords; Preston Singletary, who combines brilliant glass artistry with his native-American heritage; and Raven Skyriver, whose 35” “Salmon” will be coming to Coos Bay direct from a museum exhibit in Denmark. From Portland, courtesy of Ashland’s Davis & Cline Gallery, are works by Catharine Newell and Linda Ethier. Catharine’s works are overlays of subtle images on flat glass—ethereal and poetic, while Linda’s sculptures evoke nests filled with fluttering white crystal feathers—-mysterious and lovely. Local glass artists include: Karin Richardson, Dana Rieck, James Shaw, and Kirk Day who will be showing his large fused-glass forms. Other participating South Coast artists include Bessie Joyce of Lampa Mountain Glassworks, Dutch Schulze of Bandon who until recently ran the Glass Art Studio on Highway 101, the late Charles Tatum whose wooden sculptures Dutch has cast in glass, and Chris Hawthorne whose blown-glass jellyfish and blown-glass vessels may be seen at his own Hawthorne Gallery in Port Orford. Hawthorne, who springs from a family of artists, will be celebrated at an accompanying exhibit upstairs in the Museum’s Uno Richter Gallery. “PLAYING WITH FIRE” will also be an unveiling of a major glass artwork belonging to the museum but not seen in years. It is a work by the late Frederick Heidel, who was represented by the prestigious Laura Russo Gallery of Portland. James Shaw, glass artist and collector, will also be lending some of his exquisite Paul Stankard crystal balls for this exhibit. “The artists whose work will be on show at the museum from Friday 13 through February 15, are some of the finest anywhere,” according to curator Tierney “This show will be a fitting memorial to AVK Arts, whose founder, Elena Karina Canavier, passed away in 2010, and whose past president, her partner Bill Scott, passed away this year. Canavier and Scott, who were based in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., had been building a 10,000 square foot studio on a mountaintop in Langlois.”…“It was Elena and Bill’s dream to help foster the growth of Coos Art Museum by underwriting shows.” Tierney, who has curated over 50 shows in Bandon sponsored by AVK Arts, has previously curated exhibits for Coos Art Museum: “SHADOWS 2000” (1998), “CATS & DRAGONS” (2000), ‘THE DOG & PONY SHOW” (2002), and “OREGON PRISON ART” (2009). This exhibit combines Tierney’s connection to Coos Art Museum and her connection to AVK Arts. Another exhibit, “The Geometric Fantasias of George Espinoza”, which grew out of the Oregon Prison Art show in 2009, will also be on exhibit from December 13, 2013 through February 15, 2014, in the Clare Wehrle Gallery upstairs.