Petersbug is going to be screened in this February. Petersburg Area Art League (PAAL) will be opening two new exhibitions beginning February 10th, 2012. PAAL’s downstairs will feature “The Art of Screen Printing”, which will showcase three Richmond artists and screen printing collectives. The upstairs will be host to “HOMAGES: New Paintings by Virginia State University Students”. Both openings will be held in conjunction with Friday for the Arts from 6:00-9:00 P.M.

Screen Printing is an affordable printing technique that many artists and businesses use to make prints, t-shirts, and other media. The process involves pushing ink through a mesh screen to create a print that is easy to duplicate. “The Art of Screen Printing”, features works by Team Eight, Itty Bitty Press, and Shawn Gisriel.

Team Eight is a group of artists, illustrators, designers, developers and screen printers based in Richmond, VA. They collaborate on a wide range of visual projects including original screen prints and show posters.

Itty Bitty Press is a whimsical husband and wife team of screen printers from Richmond, Virginia. With a world full of inspiration, viewers can find in their work anything from nature to music to an overheard sentence usually addressed with the lightest of hearts.
Screen printing is a medium with a wide range of techniques, and they enjoy exploring them. Their illustrations can be transferred to screen by hand using inked vellum, or hand cut rubylith, and/or sometimes digitally produced using halftones. Hand-mixed inks range from opaque to completely transparent, often on the same screen, by exploring the split fountain technique. However they choose to make them, the results are beautiful prints with a pop sensibility.

Shawn Gisriel is a graphic designer and print maker living in Richmond, Virginia. He began screen printing in his mother’s basement in early 2005. There he translated his ideas onto t-shirts and poster board for local music support using different tools to obtain the desired effects. His ideas grew into personal art projects stemming from living in a variety of different circumstances and lifestyles – from run down row houses in Maryland’s Baltimore City to the affluent “burbs” and wildlife of Great Falls, Virginia. His work ties together vibrant colors and busy ornamental patterns with unusual animals that keep viewers smiling as they identify with familiar topics depicted in unusual formats. Shawn’s print work and graphic composition has been displayed at galleries and collectives throughout Virginia as he continues to spread his imagery.

“HOMAGES: New Paintings by Virginia State University Students”, are selections from JC Gilmore-Bryan’s Fall 2011 Painting class at VSU. Included in the exhibition is Robert Henderson’s multi-panel painting of all of the VSU presidents.

PAAL is located at 7 E. Old Street, across from the Farmer’s Market.
For more information about PAAL, call 804-861-4611 or visit www.paalart.org .
PAAL is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with the mission of supporting and nurturing the visual arts in the Petersburg area. Thanks in part to a grant from The Cameron Foundation, its building at 7 E. Old Street in Petersburg has recently been renovated and expanded to include an Education Center. Additionally, the City of Petersburg has generously donated the lot adjoining the PAAL building, which is currently being transformed into a public sculpture garden. All PAAL public programming is partially supported by the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Opening January 13, 2012, Petersburg Area Art League (PAAL) will be showing “American Art (1840-1940), Selections from the Collection of Alexander C. Graham, Jr.”.   PAAL’s upstairs will be hosting a collection of works from Petersburg resident Pat Abbott-Ryan.

Alexander C. (“Sandy”) Graham, Jr. began collecting American art about 7 years ago after many years of collecting American Queen Anne, Chippendale and Federal furniture. While his decorative arts collection also includes English, French and Russian paintings, this exhibition focuses only on the 35 American paintings, mostly oil on canvas, created between 1840 and 1940.

The paintings selected are largely landscapes and seascapes, with a few portraits. Some were actually painted in Petersburg and Richmond. Exhibited in chronological order from the date of the earliest painting, the collection shows a progression from works by practitioners of Realism and the Hudson River School style to the time when young American artists began to embrace Impressionism and the plein air style of Monet and his French contemporaries.

Representative paintings in the exhibit include a portrait of Algernon Sydney Jones painted in Petersburg in 1841; a New York landscape by Hudson River School follower, David Johnson, painted in 1867; a Vermont campfire scene by John George Brown dated 1879; “Orange Sails”, a pastel by Abbott Fuller Graves, created in Venice in 1885; and “Monhegan Island”, Maine by McClelland Barclay, a well-known American illustrator, in the 1920′s.

Patt Abbott-Ryan was born in Bloomington, Indiana in 1931, and had her first show in 1937 at her schoolhouse  She moved to Petersburg, Virginia in 1940 and studied with PAAL founder Anna Mercer Dunlop.   She has studied art at Indiana University, the Richmond Professional Institute(now VCU), University of Maryland, and Skowhegan School of Art and Sculpture.  Her art has been shown through out the East Coast, with notable shows in New York and Washington DC.  In the 1980′s she moved back to Petersburg with her husband and helped revitalize the Petersburg Area Art League after the 1993 tornado, that had destroyed the building.  In 2012, Mrs. Ryan and her husband will be leaving Petersburg.  This show will celebrate her artwork and her dedication to PAAL.

Both exhibits will be on display January 13, 2012 to February 4th, 2012, and will open in conjunction with Friday for the Arts on January 13 from 6pm-9pm.

Due to filming PAAL, will not be open from December 14-19.  We will re-open on December 20 at 12pm.

In PAAL’s main gallery, artwork from four ARGS teachers will be on display.

David Bartlett has worked at ARGS for over 12 years. He received his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and has spent ten years as an illustrator, while teaching illustration and drawing classes.  David studied classical drawing and painting techniques at the Schuler School of Fine Arts in Baltimore, MD.

Bizhan Khodabandeh is a published designer, illustrator, artist and activist, particularly fascinated by how art and design can be a catalyst for social change. He has received numerous international and national awards for his design work, including placing in the Adbusters One Flag Competition, the Good 50×70’s poster project, the Green Patriot poster project, Poster for Tomorrow, and has received recognition by the American Institute for Graphic Arts. In addition to teaching at ARGS, Khodabandeh is the Design Director of Gallery5 and freelances under the name Mended Arrow.

Patricia Lyons is the chair of the Visual Art Department at ARGS and teaches traditional “wet” photography, digital photography, and art history. She is a professional artist and has been an art educator for over 15 years.

Susann Whittier is a professional artist and teaches sculpture and painting at ARGS. She also works at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond as the Youth Program Coordinator.

Venture to our upstairs gallery to see the big winners of June’s Member Miniature show. There was a three-way tie between works by Elizabeth Longstreet-Titmus, Garry Curtis, and Ginny Dumouchelle.

November is membership renewal month at PAAL.  We want to let you know how deeply we appreciate your past support that helped fund the wonderful exhibitions and special arts programs for residents of the greater Petersburg and Southside Virginia region. Membership demonstrates our communities’ commitment to making art an important part of life in our community and we hope you’ll make that commitment again this year.  If you are not yet a PAAL member, we invite you to join today.

At PAAL, we embrace our mission to enrich and engage the community through the arts.  Art classes remain at the core of our mission. This past summer, PAAL instructors taught adults the techniques of screen printing, batik, stenciling, drawing, collage, oil, and acrylic painting.  Children attended two sessions of Summer Camp, staffed by volunteer teachers, and enjoyed a field trip to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.  Four art classes for youth are taking place in the fall giving this age group an opportunity to experiment with comic book creation, stop motion animation, mask making and Native American Art.

The revolving exhibitions in our art gallery have drawn visitors from inside our community and beyond.  Among the standouts were the thirty-first annual Trees of Christmas, Dann Hall’s The Art of Identity, Melted (art works by encaustic artists), and Undisclosed by Jennifer D. Anderson.

2011 has been an especially exciting and productive year for PAAL. With gifts from Boehringer Ingelheim, the City of Petersburg, Downtown Petersburg, Inc., The Virginia Commission for the Arts, Dr. and Mrs. James Ryan, and others, we completed the Art Park’s first phase, transforming the neglected parcel of land beside our headquarters into a green pocket park.  We sponsored free outdoor concerts in the park featuring Tempy Barbru, The Fort Lee Stage Band, The Appomattox Chamber Ensemble, and Old Towne Celtic.  We look forward to presenting another Summer Concert Series next year.

In addition to helping provide art for the community, membership also brings advantages for you, including discounts on renting the building, purchasing art, and taking classes and an invitation to participate in our annual members’  show.  Since PAAL is a 501(C) 3 not-for profit institution, your membership is tax deductible.

You can also renew or join online by simply clicking the join button to the left.  Financial assistance from supporters like you is what makes our programs and exhibitions possible.

Session B $18 Online Registration + $5 Materials Fee for Members

Tomorrow evening marks the opening of “Melted” join us from 6pm-9pm to view the exhibit.  Our last artist to feature is Heather Harvey, a former Virginian resident.

Artist Statement –Melted, October 2011

I am interested in mental and emotional landscapes and internal, private, unfolding thought processes. While working, I pay attention to and exploit materials’ inherent qualities to see what they are physically capable of doing and what metaphors they can carry. It is significant that the works in Melted are made with a built-up stratigraphy of wax and plaster; in essence a record of my studio time. Importantly, both materials have been used all over the world and as far back in history as we can remember for both practical and artistic ends. These humble materials have helped people survive and thrive; for centuries plaster lined walls and floors of homes, kept people warm, dry and clean, while wax preserved food supplies and provided light. Attention to this materiality yields philosophical and mechanical insights into the how the physical world operates and what it feels like to inhabit a body. I hope to make these familiar, mundane things seem unfamiliar and strange again. It is a way of re-enchanting the world and drawing attention to the profound mystery of things we take for granted.

Time and its passing, suspension, or unfolding is a central theme in my work. Wax and plaster start out liquid and then solidify, thereby freezing the fleeting moment when the liquid congealed. This makes them inherently useful metaphors of time. Their suspended fluidity captures and sustains ephemeral moments, evincing a tenderness towards the material world, and the fleeting instant when things are made, changed, or destroyed.

All of this has to do with mortality as well. The pours, bubbles, plops, and stains reference the tragicomedy of inhabiting a human body. Interestingly, plaster’s chalky, white hardness and wax’s supple, organic softness are reminiscent of skeletons and the flesh they support. In this way, they become an almost literal stand-in for the body itself.

Biography

Heather Harvey was born in Syracuse New York. Her work is included in public and private collections, and she regularly exhibits around the country, including venues such as the Delaware Center for Contemporary Arts, in Wilmington, Delaware, the Anderson Gallery in Richmond, VA, Denise Bibro in New York City, the McLean Project for the Arts in McClean, VA, Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, Page Bond Gallery, Richmond, VA, Hunt Gallery in Staunton, VA, McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas, TX, the William King Museum in Abingdon, VA, PLAYsPACE in San Francisco, CA, and the Claremont Graduate University Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. She has an M.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University, and an M.A. in Anthropology from The College of William and Mary.

Harvey has received several awards including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Artist Fellowship 2009-2010 and was a fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts in 2003. In addition, Harvey is an art critic for publications including Art Papers, Sculpture Magazine, and NYArts, and was gallery director at the Charles Harris Library Gallery from 2008-2010. She is currently an assistant professor of art at Washington College.  More information on her work is available at heather-harvey.net.

Heather Harvey

www.heather-harvey.net

Petersburg’s own Aimee Joyaux will be featured in this week’s “Melted Exhibits”  here are two of her works Oil and Drop and a little bit about Aimee.

Aimee Joyaux holds an MFA in Photography from the University of Oregon. She has exhibited her mixed media work throughout the United States with featured exhibitions in Chicago, Philadelphia, and at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Joyaux has been the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Residency Grant at the Center for Book and Paper through Columbia College in Chicago and an Individual Artist Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission.

An educator for more than twenty-five years, Joyaux has been recognized for her teaching by the Presidential Scholars Program and The Alliance for Young Artists and Writers. She has taught at the university, community college, and high school levels as well as the Penland School of Craft and Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts. Joyaux is currently the Interim President and CEO of the Visual Arts Center of Richmond. She lives in Petersburg VA in a recently renovated cotton warehouse.