The Roanoke Marginal Arts Festival decided not to take chances this year.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be odd, bizarre, cutting-edge art experiences mixed into the festivities. It’s the weather they don’t want to gamble on.

For the past four years, the festival has tied its schedule to Mardi Gras, which meant it sometimes has taken place in the heart of winter. Founder Brian Counihan counts his blessings that the colorful and strange Marginal Arts Parade through downtown Roanoke has never been snowed out.

“We dodged a bullet every year,” said Roanoke artist Ralph Eaton, another of the festival’s organizers. So the artists running the festival decided to move it back a few weeks. (Eaton joked that he wished it could be held April Fool’s Day.)

The lineup this year includes an appearance from the Society for Creative Anachronism, famous for wearing medieval garb and battling with rattan swords, a contest to write a novel in 48 hours, experimental poetry, experimental art, experimental theater, and workshops that might help you understand what all these experiments are getting at. “We have a lot of professional artists involved,” Counihan said.

Of course there’s the parade at noon March 30 and the absurdist street carnival that immediately follows. This year, the festival ends with Vaudeville Night, a performance at the June M. McBroom Theater in Community High School at 302 Campbell Ave. S.E. Themes for the festival include Easter eggs, the Mexican holiday Day of the Dead, and lucha libre, the sport of Mexican professional wrestling.

Click here to read the rest of the story.

From my Inbox to you:

Dan Estabrook Artist-in-Residence and Tanja Softić: Migrant Universe open on March 14

The Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University is pleased to announce the opening of two new exhibitions.  Dan Estabrook: 2013 Frances Niederer Artist-in-Residence and Tanja Softić: Migrant Universe will both open on Thursday, March 14, with an opening lecture by artist Tanja Softić at 6:00 pm, in the Niederer Auditorium of the Visual Arts Center.  Artist-in-Residence Dan Estabrook will present a lecture on Thursday, April 18 at 6:00 pm, also in the Niederer Auditorium.

Estabrook is a leading expert on 19^th century photographic processes.  In recent years, he has added pencil and paint to his negatives and prints to create contemporary work that explores universal themes such as love, sexuality and death.  Estabrook attended Harvard University and earned his MFA from the University of Illinois.  He has exhibited widely and received several awards, including an artist’s fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.  Estabrook lives and works in Brooklyn. The Frances Niederer Artist-in-Residence program allows Hollins University to bring a nationally recognized artist to campus every year.  While in residence, the artist creates work in a campus studio and teaches an art seminar open to all students. During their time at Hollins University, the Artist-in-Residence is a vital part of the campus and greater Roanoke community.

While many Americans think of immigration in terms of recent politics, Tanja Softić focuses on human migration in a global sense.  Merging appropriated visual material within her drawings and paintings, she addresses concepts of cultural hybridity, chaos and memory.  Softić earned her MFA in Printmaking from Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, following study at the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Sarajevo.  She received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2009 and her work is included in collections worldwide. Tanja Softić: Migrant Universe was organized by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, College of Charleston School of the Arts.

EVENTS:

Thursday, March 14, 6:00 pm

Exhibition opening and lecture by exhibiting artist Tanja Softić, who will discuss the concepts, influences, and process of making the Migrant Universe cycle.  Niederer Auditorium, Visual Arts Center.  Reception to follow.

 Thursday, April 18, 6:00 pm

2013 Frances Niederer Artist-in-Residence Dan Estabrook discusses his artistic process in conjunction with his exhibition at the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum. Niederer Auditorium, Visual Arts Center. Reception to follow.

For more information visit www.hollins.edu/museum or call 540.362-6532.

 

 

This poster from Olin Hall Galleries director Talia Logan has the details:

From my Inbox to you:

MARGINAL ARTS FESTIVAL RETURNS FOR 2013 – MAR 25- 30

 

The regions only contemporary art festival is back for its sixth year and it is still as out of place in Roanoke as a rubber chicken at a gun show! Performance art, vaudeville, film screenings, absurdist theater, curated exhibitions in ephemeral spaces, absurdist carnival, a parade full of artist-built floats, giant paper mache heads and art on wheels—everything the festival organizers claim is normally excluded from Roanoke’s art scene.

Workshops, demonstrations and lectures begin March 25 and festivities proper will begin on Thursday, March 28^th  with the final festival event ending around 11pm, March 30th.

Education focused on making contemporary art more accessible will be a large component of this year’s festival:

Lectures, master classes, and hands-on workshops will take place at 16 West Marketplace on Church Street, and Community High School on Campbell Avenue, as well as a few other locations in downtown Roanoke. This “Lyceé Marginal” will include a lecture by curator Brian Sieveking on how the popularity of wrestler Sputnik Monroe in the 1950’s led to desegregation in the South. Avant-garde historian and performer Olchar E. Lindsann will be giving a lecture on the history of the Readymade from 1830 to 1930. Virginia Tech and Hollins drawing students will work together to complete a collaborative drawing mural at 16 West Marketplace early festival week, while silkscreen printing workshops and food preparation demonstations will be among the other educational offering provided by the Lyceé Marginal. Read more »

Are you planning to check out the butterfly garden when it opens? Sound off in the comments.

Beauty comes at a cost.

The Science Museum of Western Virginia moved about 30 varieties of plants into its future butterfly garden at Center in the Square Friday, a major step in creating a livable habitat for the fluttering occupants to come.

“This is the first living organism to be introduced into the exhibit,” said Derek Kellogg, the museum’s lead animal care specialist.

“It’s great to have everything coming together,” he said, but it also heralds the start of a hectic schedule that involves giving the plants time to cycle pesticides out of their systems, acquiring necessary permits from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and shipping in butterfly pupae in time to have a lively population when the exhibit opens.

The plan is to have the butterfly garden ready for Center in the Square’s May 18 grand reopening, said museum spokesman Michael Hemphill.

The science museum will charge separate admission for the butterfly garden — at present, prices are expected to be $4, members $2 — in order to help with the maintenance expense . The museum will also seek sponsorships for that purpose, Hemphill said.

Click here to read the rest of the story.

From Sunday’s column:

Chicago nanny Vivian Maier, who died in 2009, might be the Emily Dickinson of black-and-white photography.

Dickinson, acknowledged as one of the giants of American poetry, wrote almost 1,800 poems, but only a handful were published while she lived. The rest were discovered after her death in 1886.

Maier took more than 100,000 photographs of street life in Chicago, but apparently never attempted to show them, and even left thousands undeveloped. The accidental discovery of those photographs by a Chicago real estate agent and historian eventually led to an international sensation.

“The release of every fresh image on the Web causes a sensation among the growing legion of her admirers,” wrote a photography blogger for The New York Times, and a review in the same publication called her “a new candidate for the pantheon of great 20th-century street photographers.”

Soon Roanoke Valley residents won’t have to travel far to experience this new photography phenom. “Photographs of Vivian Maier” opens with a reception at 7 p.m. Friday at the O. Winston Link Museum and remains until May 6.

“They are truly a time capsule of mid-century Chicago and one woman’s experience as she traveled its streets,” wrote Link Museum Marketing and Public Relations Coordinator Erin Wommack in an email.

 

 Click here to read the rest of the column.

I’m pleased to present another art review from Hollins University art professor Ruth Epstein’s art criticism class, this written by junior Abigail Minor. “STATE OF THE ART: Virginia Crossroads” remains on display through Feb. 23.—MikeA

STATE OF THE ART: Virginia Crossroads
By Abigail Minor

Works by nine regional artists battle for attention on the walls, floor, small tables and racks in a single white gallery at the Taubman Museum of Art in State of the Art: Virginia Crossroads. John Clingempeel, David Freed, Ann Glover, Charles Goolsby, Reni Gower, Chris Gregson, Sam Krisch, Taliaferro Logan, and Robert Sulkin hail from Virginia, a requirement that creates surprising depth.

Standout pieces include Robert Sulkin’s imaginary mix-media machines. Found objects such as lights, wire, tires and skeletal fragments, generate repetitive forms and spontaneous sparks, frozen in the medium of photography. In Man and Beast, Sulkin’s gripping scene of tension between organic and manufactured objects, an animal skull and vertebrae arch to follow the circular forms of a bicycle and wagon wheel, respectively, held together with ropes and wires.

John Clingempeel’s distinguished paintings on plywood display a deep understanding of the interaction between light and dark. Using beeswax to build up thin layers of color, Clingempeel deconstructs natural elements into abstraction. The artist’s charcoal compositions, lacking in color, evoke a different, somber mood. In Untitled (2011) tendrils extend upward from a nucleus of white at the bottom right toward the top of the canvas, slashing through the dark charcoal strokes. The contrast of white and black, intermingled with greys, presses the lighter elements of the composition into the viewers’ space.

Equally distinctive are Reni Gower’s hanging strips of mesh and metal grating, covered with vibrant paint splatters. Like three-dimensional Pollocks, Gower’s constructions pleasantly assault the eye with a visual feast of color, texture, and no discernable pattern.

A mix of traditional media and innovative techniques, State of the Art: Virginia Crossroadspresents an impressive array of work from the region. Curators thoughtfully pieced together a multitude of styles and subjects that Virginia artists are choosing to explore today.

Alison Hall first went to Italy 12 years ago while she was an art student at Hollins University. Traveling with her professors Bill White and Jan Knipe, she visited the chapel of St. Francis of Assisi in Umbria and saw for the first time the frescoes attributed to early Renaissance master Giotto di Bondone.

“In the winter in Italy it feels so medieval,” the Martinsville native said, but then going inside the spectacularly painted chapel, “it’s like ‘The Wizard of Oz’ in Technicolor.”

After that first tour of Italy, “I just wanted to make a life there somehow,” she said.

Now an art teacher herself, at Hollins and the University of Virginia, Hall’s gone back to Italy every summer, and visited both the St. Francis of Assisi chapel and the Arena Chapel in Padua, where Giotto also contributed frescoes.

Her visits to those chapels provided the inspiration for “Alison Hall: Pilgrimage,” which opened Jan. 29, the first of five new exhibitions at the Taubman Museum of Art.

The other four, “50 Great American Artists,” “John Cage: The Sight of Silence,” “Jean Helion: A Painter’s Journey in Life and Art,” and “Time and Indeterminacy in John Cage’s Legacy: Tyler Adams and Sabine Groschup,” all open Friday.

On display through May 11, “Pilgrimage” is Hall’s first museum show. It’s meant to evoke a chapel in its configuration, with a large painting opposite the main entrance to the regional gallery and three smaller drawings on the walls to each side, similar to how frescoes or stained glass windows would be placed.

Click here to read the rest of the column.

From my Inbox to you:

Radford University alum Shaun Whiteside was awarded ‘Best in Show’ for his painting ‘Rise’ at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art’s “New Waves 2013″ exhibition. The group exhibition will feature Whiteside’s painting until April 28th.

Shaun C. Whiteside works with acrylic paint in a style most influenced by Abstract Expressionism, with an emphasis on the metaphysical and emotional realm, rather than on optical reality. Using several layers of thin glazes, partially washed away, he creates oppressively dense atmospheric environments, with biomorphic, liquid shapes within them. Whiteside graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts from Christopher Newport University in 2007, and received his Master of Fine Arts at Radford University in 2011. He has recently been awarded both a Best in Show at the Peninsula Fine Arts Center’s 2010 Biennial Exhibition, as well as a 2011-2012 VMFA Fellowship grant, and his works are in several private collections across Virginia.

Whiteside’s work explores the metaphysical realm of emotionality through a painting and drawing process that employs physical forces.  By working on vertical, horizontal, or slightly inclined surfaces, the artist uses gravity itself as a medium to develop imagery that is directed by natural law.  Water erosion and sedimentation also determine parts of the visual outcome, as pigments are swept away from certain areas, and deposited in others where water accumulates and evaporates.  Whiteside uses the visual forms that develop to depict emotional forces and energies that are unseen very real powers in the world. Read more »

From my Inbox to you:

“Red Letter Day” by Nancy Stark[/caption]

Nancy Stark Guest Artist at The Electric Company in February

The Electric Company Artists’ Co-op presents work by guest artist Nancy Stark during February.  Stark, who is from Roanoke, has won numerous awards for her work which she has shown throughout the region.  “My paintings are a response to the pattern, shape, texture and line observed in the world around me,” Stark says.  “In composing my subject I zoom in for a close-up view.  And whether rendering trains, chairs or flowers I leave out as much or more of the subject as I paint.  The viewer is invited to enjoy the artwork and fill in the missing pieces.”

The Electric Company Artist’s Co-op is an artist owned and operated gallery located at 207 East Depot Street in Bedford.  Currently the gallery features work by over 20 local artists all of whom are showing new work in February and March.

An opening reception with the artists will be held during 2nd Friday in Centertown, February 8, 5:00-8:00 pm.

For more information contact, TECAC207@gmail.com or (540) 491-2585