ELLEN LAND-WEBER

COLLAGE IN THE TIME OF COVID

October 7th through November 19th

In the Knight Gallery

Since retirement in 2006, from a long career of teaching photography at Humboldt State University (now Cal Poly Humboldt), I have had the pleasure and time to travel to far-flung regions of the world, pursuing photo projects. If the destination involved snorkeling in warm seas, all the better.

In March 2020, my bags were packed with a few clothes and all my snorkel gear, for imminent departure to Palau and the Philippines. Then the world shut down and I had to unpack.

For the next year and a half I took a dive into the nooks and crannies of my studio, where over the decades all manner of odd collections had been stashed for potential future use in photo collage projects. The future had arrived.

Many of the resulting photo collages incorporate specimens of seaweed collected at Trinidad beach, preserved, and then scanned as transparencies to better appreciate their delicate detail, combined with images culled from a large collection of antiquarian prints and illustrated books. Nothing is off limits for my scanner: whelk egg cases, ersatz Neolithic figurines from Turkish archaeological site gift shops, cicada carcasses, and vintage wall paper, to name a few. My studio is tidier now.

Finally, in the spring of 2022, I was able to travel to the small Pacific Island nation of Palau for two weeks of snorkeling. Palau had cautiously re-opened its borders about six months prior, and the protocols for Covid testing were rigorous. About half of the proposed exhibition will be photo collages in the same spirit as those described above, but featuring Palau’s underwater marine life as settings.

THE 27TH ANNUAL JUNQUE ARTE COMPETITION AND EXHIBITION

September 20th through November 5th

in the William Thonson Gallery

Recycled Art... created from 100% recycled materials...reclaimed, reused, recovered, secondhand, salvaged, anything un-new!

Juror: Tom Herd

Tom Herd attended the Arts Students League in NY, Valparaiso University in Indiana and Webster University in Missouri, obtaining a B.A. in Art Education and Master’s Degree in Communication Arts. During a stint in Chicago, Tom took classes in natural dyes at the Chicago Botanic Gardens that led him into the challenges of batik, which he practiced in the ensuing years. Having taught art in K through 12 public schools in the Midwest, his relocation to Eureka has allowed Tom to focus his artistic skills on batik, watercolor and assemblage. His work has been included in exhibitions at St. Louis University and Jefferson College, as well as many consecutive years in the Junque Arte Competition & Exhibition at the Morris Graves Museum of Art.

BACHRUN LOMELE

BURN PILE/

THE ANDROMEDA MIRAGE

September 2nd through October 15th

This project, Burn Pile/The Andromeda Mirage, aspires to link people in heart-felt incoherence — imbuing meaning by leaching out meaning — inviting participants to toss their truths into a flow of change. Truth donors were invited to speak truth inside a private booth. Their statements were immediately leached of meaning by being scrambled with truth statements from previous donors, using a purpose-made code. Donors then had the option to release these garbled statements to be variously commemorated by the artist, or to delete them. Disparate expressions of truth flow together into a communal truth essence —scrambled, released from sense. Might this confluence of differences conjure a shimmer of unity from eddies of unmeaning?

RUTH ARIETTA

NARRATIVE PAINTINGS

& FANCIFUL SCULPTURE

August 13th through September 24th

In the Knight Gallery

“When I work on a painting, everything in it usually shows an aspect of myself. The characters aren’t meant to show specific people. As for the animals in my paintings, I don’t have them because with the little time I have to paint I can’t give them the attention they deserve. The animals portrayed are usually the pets of family and friends, or a beloved B & W dog, Buddy, we used to have when our children were growing up. My paintings show rooms and aspects that I would LIKE to have. I like my paintings to contain the human-ness, the funny moments, the private things that I imagine we all do. I think that when a person works on a painting and lets something bigger than themselves come through, they enter a trance-like state and things happen in the painting that are beyond themselves, the painter. There is intent, and things sometimes unintended come through. It is a truly spiritual experience. My art has saved me more times in my life than I can say.”

BILL LACY: ALL CRITTERS

July 1st to August 20th

In the Bettiga Gallery

Local Artist and long-time MGMA Volunteer, Bill Lacy will delight museum goers with his fantastical watercolor critters, vibrant colors and imaginative compositions from July 1st to August 20th in the Bettiga Gallery!

(Downstairs near the Museum Store!)

 “I enjoy making art. I also use art to alleviate my anxiety. The current work I do is humorous and layered in different characters. I use my imagination to create the characters that make up my work, especially critters and people.”

30,000 SALMON 

August 5th through September 17th 

“They hang there, in all shapes and forms. In all they are 30,000 representations of fish and salmon, remembering the fall of 2002 when as many salmon died quickly in a hot, shallow Klamath River.”  

--John Driscoll 

On view in the Rotunda at the MGMA is a project created in 2002 by artist Becky Evans in response to the mass fish kill that same year. Engaging educators, students, community members and artists, the project culminated in an installation of 30,000 objects depicting or symbolizing the fish die off on 30,000 Salmon at the First Street Gallery in 2004 the Klamath River, which was exhibited at the First Street Gallery in 2004. Almost 20 years later, on November 17, 2022 the Federal  Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, approved the surrender of the license for four  hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River. The order was the last major regulatory step before the dams could be decommissioned, and the removal is currently underway. This marked the start of the largest dam removal project in U.S. history, and signifies the collaborative efforts of tribal, environmental and governmental entities. The 30,000 Salmon installation, made up of small drawings, cutouts, and paper mache, suspends above objects depicting fish carcases, scales and bones; and visually illustrates the devastation and decimation that occurred. It also demonstrates the interconnectedness  of community and the generational impact that the participating children had as they contributed to the project two decades ago only to witness an objective that many never thought they would see in their lifetime.

“For nearly 20 years I saved all of the work from the original 30,000 Salmon project with the hope that the dams would come down in my lifetime. I am exhibiting the project again this summer at the MGMA as a way of celebrating all of the tribes, agencies and individuals who worked so hard and for so long to make the removal of the dams a reality. With the destruction of the first dam (Copco #2) this summer, the Klamath River restoration and renewal is finally underway.”

—Becky Evans

JIM MCVICKER

25/25

TWENTY FIVE PAINTINGS OF HUMBOLDT COUNTY ARTISTS TWENTY FIVE WORKS BY THE ARTISTS

July 19th through September 3rd

From 1989 to1991 Jim McVicker worked on a series of paintings of local artists in their studios. He painted 30 in all which culminated in an exhibition at the HAC’s Humboldt Cultural Center on 1st Street in Eureka. A couple years ago he started thinking about those works and how much he enjoyed the whole process of painting them and decided to revisit the idea. This exhibition focuses on artists in their studios as well as artists at work on location around Humboldt County alongside artwork by the artists Jim captured in his portraiture.

“All the artist outdoors were working on landscape paintings, as I tried to capture as they worked. In the studios some artists worked as I painted, others sat while we talked and I painted. I try not to have a preconceived idea about what or how the work will be, but to approach each work and situation clear and open to how I’m seeing and responding at the time. I find it exciting and challenging to work in a way that is so different from the control one would have in their own studio. It’s been very gratifying to paint these works and spend time with all these artists.”

JANICE SHARMAN-HAND

LANDSCAPES & DREAMSCAPES

IN THE ANDERSON GALLERY

July 8th through August 20th, 2023

Janice Sharman-Hand’s watercolor paintings reflects her love for nature found in the waking and sleeping worlds. Painting from nature gives her a sense of solace especially during these uncertain and troubling times. To quote from Wendell Berry:

“I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.”

She paints scenes from photographs taken by herself on local walks and hikes around Humboldt County or places she has traveled to. Janice is particularly inspired by her travels to the Southwest and the artwork of Georgia O’Keefe. In addition, her work draws inspiration from the dream world where images from the subconscious tells a story. To render these dreamscapes Janice first creates collages from magazine pictures that speak to her; providing healing and insights from the unconscious sleeping world.

Painting is what keeps Janice centered.

L.L. Kessner: Humboldt County Lost & Found

JUNE 10TH THROUGH AUGUST 6TH

Tom Knight Gallery

An installation of eight abstract oil paintings, Humboldt County Lost & Found investigates cycles of loss and renewal. The work uses color and form to integrate cycles of yearly seasons, of monthly seasons and hours of the day, with cycles of breath, and death, and birth. The project approaches these shared cycles of loss/transformation through a lens of singular experience, locating personal loss within larger, more neutral and more powerful processes of change.

Ralph Johnson: Riding the Border of Chaos and Order

WILLIAM THONSON GALLERY

June 1 through July 9

In this collection of paintings, drawings and sculptures by the late Ralph Johnson, the title theme comes from one of his last art works, created in his home studio in Trinidad, CA. Riding the Border of Chaos and Order embodies the spirit, intellect, and wit that threads throughout Johnson’s forty years as an artist. His work turns form and structure inside out, concealing and revealing hidden spaces. Johnson’s work explores both abstract and tangible ideas, incorporating found objects and the written word in surprising ways. In the artist’s words, “I like shapes – they beguile me into thinking that the unknown is becoming known.” Ralph Johnson was one of the founding members of the UC Davis Art Department, where he taught for thirty years. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Johnson grew up on a farm near Vancouver, Washington, a landscape and climate that drew him to the Humboldt coast where he lived in the last decade of his life.

Personal Space

by Linda Mitchell

MAY 24TH THROUGH JULY 2ND

Anderson Gallery

“During the pandemic, the world’s constantly evolving ‘normal’ challenged my productivity, my social connections, and my relationship to the spaces where I live and work. In the beginning of the pandemic my home and studio, long sources of refuge, took on the patina of prison cells. Welcome solitude shifted into loneliness, isolation, and uncertainty. With an unpredictable future, I had to adapt to and focus on the here and now in order to cope.” In the exhibition, paintings of the places where the artist “sheltered in place” alone or with the limited number of those in her “pod” transition to paintings of new gathering places filled with people as the pandemic restrictions eased. The text panels accompanying the paintings in the exhibition explain the significance of the interiors Linda Mitchell chose to paint

Exhibition partially underwritten by the Humboldt Arts Council/Faben Artist Fund

 Ever Giving

Clea Felien

January 27th through February 26th

Clea Felien been exhibiting her work in Midwest and East Coast galleries and museums for over fifteen years. Including group shows at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in N.Y., the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) as a featured artist, Mia (the Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Figge Museum, as well as gallery representation in Chelsea New York.

Felien has thirteen years of study in art schools. She received her BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and her MFA from Vermont College in painting with an emphasis in art theory . She also studied five years at the Atelier in Mpls (a 19th Century French Academic realist portrait painting school) and, 1 year studying anatomical drawing at the Art Students League in New York City. Her work is predominantly painting and drawing.

T/HERE: Ceramic Sculpture & Installation

by Annakatrin Burnham

January 18th THROUGH March 12th 2023

T/HERE: Ceramic Sculpture & Installation by Annakatrin Burnham is a survey of sculptural works created between 2015-2022 in Berlin and Humboldt. A cross between German Minimalism and roots in California Funk Art find a collaborative interchange within Burnham’s sculptures. Her installations, sculptures and collage works investigatecolor, form and the surrounding space.

Egyptian Masks by Freshwater Elementary School Students

April 1st through april 30th

Youth Gallery

Freshwater students study ancient Egypt unit for the month of January. They learn science, history, art, writing and even math through the lens of the ancient Egyptians. The unit culminates in the students making personalized death shroud masks in the style of the ancient mummified pharaohs.

Brush Work

by Stock Schlueter

MARCH 29TH THROUGH MAY 21ST 2023

William Thonson Gallery

Exhibition partially underwritten by the Humboldt Arts Council/Faben Artist Fund

Exhibition Sponsored by John & Sally Biggin

Stock Schlueter’s landscapes depict the landscapes of the North Coast and surrounding areas, as well as imagery from his travels, and offer a subtle array of qualities concerned with both the subject matter and a pure love of design. Initially these scenes strike the viewer as realistic renditions of the landscape with intriguing trees, attractive skyscapes, bodies of water, country roads and other such trappings that come with the territory. The eye is drawn toward the depth of space he creates and the liveliness it lends to the interplay of these compositional elements.

Morris Graves: From the Humboldt Arts Council Permanent Collection

APRIL 1ST THROUGH MAY 14 2023

Anderson Gallery

In a baby book, Graves’ mother recorded his first word as “see.” In looking at a life of work it seems that this is what he has asked himself and us as viewers to do all along- to see, to look beyond the surface of the objects and catch sight of their inner nature. This exhibition invites the viewer to explore the work of Morris Graves from the HAC Permanent Collection and to see glimpses into a world of natural harmony and ethereal beauty..