Visual Arts: Page 26

ArtsHound

Visual Arts

How is the American identity defined today? When a certain Fanta-faced presidential nominee is targeting American minorities with threats of deportation or supporting heightened “security” of browner neighborhoods, the question takes on a new urgency. Two artists, Victoria Suescum and Lee Michael Peterson, tackle the question by exploring their identities as Latin@s (the gender neutral term for people of Latin American roots) within American culture in the new ¿Identity? exhibit up through Sept. Continue reading →

Poster Child

Artist Ila Rose makes her mark with the 2016 Oregon Country Fair poster

Visual Arts
Ila Rose with her first public mural in the Whiteaker at 5th Alley and Blair Boulevard

The Oregon Country Fair poster is as much of an institution as the Fair itself. Around May each year, the OCF poster committee reveals the winning design and, like a harbinger of summer, it becomes increasingly ubiquitous, pinned to bulletin boards and taped to storefronts around the region. Artist Ila Rose had submitted work to the committee in the past, to no avail. This year, she nabbed the commission — in a year that, according to the poster committee, had a record-breaking number of submissions. Continue reading →

ArtsHound

Visual Arts

Pop surrealism descends on Eugene: Gallery newcomer the Alexi Era Gallery, tucked neatly between downtown and the Whiteaker (at 245 W. 8th Ave.), joins the festivities for First Friday ArtWalk 5:30 to 8 pm Friday, July 1. Owner and curator Aunia Kahn recently relocated the gallery from St. Louis, where it was part of the pop surrealism — a descendent of low-brow art — and new contemporary art movement. This gallery could be a huge boon for the edgier corners of the local art community, as remaining galleries in Eugene tend to show more traditional, safer works. Continue reading →

If a Tree Falls

Local artist Josh Krute on creating a life-size print of the world’s largest felled tree - The Fieldbrook Giant

Visual Arts
Josh Krute

Josh Krute likes wood — I mean, he really, really likes it. We sat in a coffee shop (at a wooden table, of course) and he ran his hands over the tabletop’s grain, sputtering off details about it with a pretty serious expression on his face.  “In the last six or seven years, I’ve been printing sections of wood,” he explains. “I’ve been transferring their grain patterns onto paper — a process called relief.”  Continue reading →

Her Compassionate Canvas

A longtime staple in the local art scene, painter Ellen Gabehart still challenges, and delights, with her work

Visual Arts
Ellen Gabehart

Eugene painter Ellen Gabehart’s home is far from a Martha Stewart-esque suburban rambler stocked with Ikea purchases. Gabehart has art covering every inch of her cozy space, furniture included. She reminds me to check the art in the bathroom before we sit down in her studio. Gabehart strikes me as the epitome of a Eugene artist with a history of activist work, community building and a mix of both trippy and political art pieces.  Continue reading →

Painting the Good

In an era of vitriolic hyperbole, local artist Simon Graves focuses on the positive

Visual Arts
'Chief Joseph’ and ‘Frida Kahlo' portraits

Oil paintings of Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Frida Kahlo and Abraham Lincoln, among others, lined the walls of downtown Eugene’s Townshend’s Teahouse amidst the chatter of conversation and the clinking of ceramic mugs against tabletops.  These portraits are the work of Simon Graves, a Eugene artist whose current oeuvre is focused on the importance of the constructs of good and evil — and specifically the characters we tend to conceive as being good on an iconic, archetypal level. Continue reading →

ArtsHound

Visual Arts

Purple pages: Storm Entertainment, a Portland-based comic and graphic novel company, has just released the comic book biography Tribute: Prince in honor of the late artist and his June 7 birthday. Michael Frizell wrote the 24-page comic and Ernesto Lovera and Vincenzo Sansone created the art. “His sound and lyrics defined the era for me in ways that Michael Jackson didn’t and, quite frankly, couldn’t,” Frizell says via press release. Continue reading →

ArtsHound

Visual Arts

With the sun shining more often than not these days, it’s primo mural-painting time. The Whiteaker Community Art Team has a mural going up at 4th and Blair. Half a block north, CALC (Community Alliance of Lane County) is celebrating its 50th anniversary by creating a new mural with the theme of “50 years of struggle for social justice.” Prolific local muralist Bayne Gardner will work with youth to paint that mural in CALC’s front yard, to be debuted during the Whiteaker Art Walk Aug. 26. Continue reading →

ArtsHound

Visual Arts

The Maude Kerns Art Center opens Photography at Oregon Commitment to Vision: 50th Anniversary Retrospective Exhibit 6 to 8 pm Friday, May 20. The late Bernard Freemesser, a longtime photography professor at the University of Oregon, started Photography at Oregon, a fine arts photography exhibit at the UO in 1966. The 50th anniversary show features the work of more than 80 artists including Ansel Adams, Brian Lanker, Barbara Morgan, Mary Ellen and Brett Weston. Continue reading →