The Annual Humboldt Arts Council Member Show is a juried exhibition designed to highlight the fabulous art being produced by HAC Artist Members. As always, this exhibition is eclectic, surprising and enjoyable.

“That which is here, the ways in which the entities that are here are connected, which is to say, beyond here, is what [others] investigate. But in a world sunk into shadow, speckled with flickering light, where one thing merges into another,
the questions are different. What is visible, and what is invisible, what is clear and what is obscure, what can we see and what can’t we see, and, not least, what is this feeling that so compellingly pervades what we see?” -Karl Ove Knausgaard

The Humboldt Arts Council is pleased to share the photography of Serge Scherbatskoy in the Knight Gallery at the Morris Graves Museum of Art. View selected images through the photographer's lens and look closely to see or not to see, what the artist found intriguing as he captured the image. 

Kay Harden's newest collection of work is “Shade”, both for her working technique, and to honor all of the trees which she loves to draw.  This is her first exhibition in 10 years and most of the work was created in the last 2 years. The bulk of the work is in black and white, which reflects her efforts in her personal life to pare down and simplify…everything.  Many of the pieces are of what surrounds us here in Humboldt County, though several works are from her travels to Peru, Jerusalem , and remote places here in California. 

Kay works from her own camera images;  She finds that whatever moves her to capture something on the camera will motivate her to come home and translate that image into a work of art.  It never ceases to amaze Kay how a certain scene, which she may have been passed by for years, can suddenly cause her to stop what else she's doing and make her put it onto paper or canvas.  This is part of the mystery that is “art”

Ingrid Nickelsen Trust Juried Exhibition: Celebrating 15 Years of the Ingrid Nickelsen Trust

August 6th through september 18th

The Ingrid Nickelsen Trust, in partnership with the Humboldt Arts Council, is excited to announce the Call for Entries for Ingrid Nickelsen Trust Juried Exhibition: Celebrating 15 Years of the Ingrid Nickelsen Trust is now available. All Humboldt County Women Artists are invited to submit one piece of artwork for consideration to be included in this exhibition presented at the Morris Graves Museum of Art. Work can be from the visual arts disciplines-drawing, painting, photography, ceramics, sculpture, fiber arts, and mixed media.

The juror for this exhibition is Humboldt-based, Brooklyn-born abstract painter Joan Gold. Gold received her art education at The Cooper Union and The Brooklyn Museum in New York City, and at The Escuela de Bellas Artes in Caracas, Venezuela. In 1955 she was awarded a U. S. State Department fellowship to paint and study in Venezuela where she remained for the next twenty-four years. She retired as Associate Professor of the Universidad Metropolitana, Caracas, and received awards for her service to the country as an educator. In 1990 she received a Yaddo Fellowship in Saratoga Springs, New York. She has exhibited extensively in the U.S. and abroad. Other honors have included the Victor Jacoby Award, Beverly Faben Artist Grant, and the Ingrid Nickelsen Trust Grant for Women Artists. Most recently, she received a Pollack-Krasner Grant.

Joan Gold will be selecting the work for inclusion in the exhibition as well as one Juror’s Choice Award for $1,000 and ten Ingrid Nickelsen Trust Awards for $500 each. Awards will be presented on August 6th at 5:30 p.m., prior to First Saturday Night Arts Alive! The public is invited to attend.

As an artist, Ingrid was influenced by her creative family heritage and immediate environment, especially the vast wilderness of the North Coast. An investigation of different media led Ingrid down a path of visual exploration, beginning with rustic ceramics featuring utilitarian tools in a traditional form. These explorations ultimately resulted in vibrant, expressive plein air paintings executed from her intimate connection to the environment. It was this instinctive need to work with the elements of nature that led her on a final expedition which has left a large void in the artistic community of the North Coast, even a decade and a half later.

The Ingrid Nickelsen Trust was established by the estate of the artist for the purpose of providing annual support through grants to women artists in Humboldt County and the Trust has supported countless individual artists and arts organizations to continue the legacy Ingrid left on the community. The museum-wide exhibition will highlight the history of the Trust as well original work by Ingrid Nickelsen.

Erin Lee Gafill: California Atmosphere

JUNE 4th through JULY 24TH

In a series of abstracted landscape works, Big Sur artist, Erin Lee Gafill, explores the interplay of Land, Sea, and Sky on the northern California coast. As opposed to depicting what is seen and observed, these paintings are a reverent response to the transcendent grandeur of the environment. The work will include small observed studies, painted on location and over-sized studio works responding to that observational work; a call and response of visual and spiritual inspiration. Gafill’s artistic journey is in a direct line from her great-great[1]grandmother, artist Jane Gallatin Powers, Powers grew up in Sacramento, just after the Gold Rush. Powers studied at the Mark Hopkins institute in San Francisco, and subsequently embarked on a life in the arts in Italy and France, where she abandoned California Impressionism for European Modernism. Gafill’s grand-parents, Bill and Lolly Fassett built Nepenthe Restaurant in Big Sur, where Erin was raised. The influence of her creative ancestors, the rugged natural environment of Big Sur, where she lives, and the need for “making do” in her isolated community inspired her life in the arts. Besides Erin’s original artwork, this exhibition will include a contextual installation of historic artifacts and original artwork from her unique background.

Jim McVicker: Recent Humboldt County Landscape Paintings in Gouache

june 4th through July 24th

In December of 2021 after seeing works by other painters in gouache, I decided to give them a try. For the past 20 years I have worked off and on with watercolors so I was anxious to try another water base medium. From the first painting I did with gouache I felt a very strong connection with the medium. Watercolor required lots of patience in order to save the white of the paper for the lights, but gouache being opaque allowed me to approach the work as I do with oils, yet it has a completely different feel. Immediately I was in love and jumped in head first heading out doors to many places I've painted oils over the years and seeing everything as new, fresh and exciting, full of discovery with a new medium.

Kit Davenport: New Sculpture and Drawings

May 7th through JULY 10th

Artworks are vessels, containers for meaning; clouds: nebulous, mutable, evanescent. Arcata artist Kit Davenport will present sculptures and works on paper created since 2019. Davenport’s modestly-scaled sculptures, made primarily of ceramic (along with epoxy medium, wood and paint), combine forms that allude to both human artifacts (often a cup or bowl) and biological or physical processes and structures. Layered, eroded color and simple geometric imagery on surfaces introduce an element of time as well as a conversation between surface and form.

The Divine Feminine: Barrie Love

april 2nd through may 22nd

My primary subject is the female form, and has been for over 40 years. It’s interesting now that the subject of women, and what defines a women, is a current topic, which includes all gender identities. To each their own, my last name is love after all. I was born a women, I still identify as a women, and I went through the experience of giving birth as a woman. But I actually think it’s all about our energy, I believe there is feminine energy and male energy, yin and yang, regardless of your biological sex. Female energy is something I’m very fascinated by, including the ultimate female magic trick, pregnancy. I see it as a super power and truly a miracle, so capturing that process is incredibly rewarding to me. I usually photograph my subjects in various outdoor locations. I look for various degrees of mystery, intrigue, humor, and capturing that divine feminine essence. Sometimes telling a story, or leaving you with whatever feelings it stirs inside. I started using my photographic images as a template for painting. Some images are from black and white film, from many years ago and others are more recent, done with a digital camera. I found that using metallic paints had a magical way of catching light. Depending on where you stand, time of day, it almost makes the image come alive and look 3D. I also love the variation of textures from the paint, and sometimes I use found objects. This goes back to my early days of drawing, painting, collage and hand tinting my black and white prints with oils.

I grew up and went to school in the San Francisco bay area and came to Humboldt County in 2000. I opened my lighting store called Love Lights in Eureka in 2005, which just closed in 2022. My store was also my art studio, but now my studio is at home. I am a member of Redwood Arts Association, Redwood Camera club and have participated in many of their shows, including the Arcata Airport, and other Arts Alive locations.

Journey to the Center of the Milks: Nancy Tobin

april 2nd through may 22nd

Peel back the jungly foliage and enter into the surreal prehistoric garden in which oversized appetite proliferates in an epoch where survival and art are primally entwined. 

Flashlight in hand, explore the color-lit smorgasbord of food-as-landscape. Cast your beam upon the hand-sewn tableaus to uncover themes of perseverance and messages of self-reliance. From a safe distance, observe stuffed pink umbilical cords buoying corn kernel carpeted islands that host survivalist scenes of nurturing and shelter. 

Worship at a lactating parachute volcano - the Source of the Milks - as her bosom emanates Sustenance. From her heroic crown spews a gargantuan smoke cloud that traverses overhead, skirting bloated palm leaves, cutting through the amplified sounds of a subterranean rainforest. 

Feel stalagmites of stacked grass skirts brush against your skin. Question who dwells in a tortilla-skinned den while deciphering the coded meanings of the Paleolithic paintings that blanket the cavern walls. 

A thirty foot assemblage of stuffed and stubbled vintage sleeping bags surveys the terrain, as if contemplating a selection from a conveyor belt sushi bar. Primordial cabbage patches swell in the nutrient-rich environs, as species push past their intended DNA structures, morphing into new breeds; everything evolving in unchecked isolation to larger than life capacity.

Belly up to an all your eyes can eat buffet and leave the dreamlike journey satiated with self-empowerment. Spread the wisdom of this inner landscape that is available to all who believe.

Behind the Mask: Building the Body

march 5th 2nd through april 24TH

Works by the 2022 BFA cohort of Cal Poly Humboldt

Humboldt Arts Council and Cal Poly Humboldt’s Art + Film Department are proud to present Behind the Mask: Building the Body, a collection of artwork by the 2022 cohort of Bachelors of Fine Arts students. Evoking the trauma, change and turmoil of the Covid-19 pandemic through their art, these artists grapple with the evolution and change of a developing professional arts practice, individuality and community in a time of upheaval and reinvention.

Freshwater Elementary School: Egyptian Death Masks

April 2nd through april 24TH

 Sixth graders at Freshwater School are fully immersed in their study of Ancient Egypt. The students learn science, history, art, writing and even math through the lens of the ancient Egyptians. The students create from start to finish, personalized death masks in the style of the ancient mummified pharaohs. 

Students begin creating their masks by covering their faces with plaster strips until the plaster hardens enough to form a mask. The students then build a head dress and attach hair or beards to their mask using cardboard and other materials. To strengthen the mask, students paper mache the entire headdress and connect it to the plaster. After painting the masks, students embellish and decorate the masks with traditional and contemporary elements of a shroud mask, including jewels, beads, and fabric. 

In addition to learning patience with working through a multi-day project and teamwork to ensure each child has a mask, the students learn how to use tools. Exacto knives, hot glue guns and other tools might not be the first things we entrust to a young person, but we educate our students on how to use the tools safely and effectively to complete the mask projects. 

Though Egyptian death masks were created from a variety of materials, royal masks were fashioned from precious metals such as gold and bronze by skilled craftsmen.  They were placed on the sarcophagus, or coffin, which contained the mummified body of the deceased person. They were meant to resemble the deceased in order to help their souls recognize their body and return to it. Anubis, god of the dead, would then judge whether they would be allowed to pass into the afterlife.  Though many believe that Egyptians were preoccupied with death, quite the contrary is true.  They believed that this life was so rich and amazing that they wanted to ensure that it would continue eternally. 

Youth Arts Festival

MARCH 5th through MARCH 27TH

An annual celebration of our youth in visual and performing arts all across Humboldt County.

Bernadette Vielbig: Analog

JANUARY 15th through MARCH 20TH

ANALOG

“…of or relating to a mechanism, device, or technology that represents data by measurement of a continuous physical variable, relating to or denoting an activity, process, etc., that is not online or computerized but that can also exist or happen with the help of such technology…”

Julie Smiley: You’re Invited

JANUARY 15th through FEBRUARY 27TH

Periods of our lives can seem to go by in slow-motion, where time ticks by in exquisite sharpness, our senses heightened in wonder or with the sense of alarm. These paintings attempt to capture some of such a stretch of time in my life this last year and a half; when there has been space between myself and the world while I more quietly watch and wait. I've experienced both a hesitancy to join in the action at times, and a desire to stand back to admire it; even small moments can hold great impact. Still, it's nice to step from that place of awe back into the action, so, consider yourself invited. 

Julie Smiley was born in Crescent City, California in 1977. Smiley’s main work is in oil painting, though she has often mixed media. Smiley completed an MFA in Visual Arts Education from Ohio State University, received her teaching credential from Humboldt State University, CA, and has dual BA’s in Studio Arts and Communication Arts from Gordon College, MA.

Smiley’s work is greatly influenced by her sensitivity to relationships between people and physical spaces, and ideas of social and personal control. After teaching high school arts and starting a family in the last decade, her current work focuses on the local landscapes.