Ladies Luncheon Tickets are sold out.  If you would like to be put on a waiting list, please call PAAL today at (804)861-4611.

PAAL will be opening two brand new exhibitions in April, The Art of Ceramics: Selections from the Private Collections of Petersburg Residents and Every Child is an Artist: A Showcase of Homeschool Art.

Continuing the theme of exploring different media of art at PAAL through exhibitions, PAAL is pointing its eye to ceramics for April. Often overlooked as a traditional art form, ceramics is one the oldest forms of art in human history and remains popular and innovative today.  A group of Petersburg art enthusiasts share this value and have a vibrant selection of ceramics in their personal collections.   PAAL has been fortunate enough to have this group of area collectors allow their private collections to be shown to the public for the first time ever.

This year PAAL has opened its doors to homeschoolers south of the James, and has held weekly classes for 10 students from the ages of 5 to 12.  It has provided an amazing oppurtunity to the Tri-Cities community and brought together families and children through art.  “Every Child is an Artist” will display the works the students have created since the class started at the beginning of the year.  “Every Child is an Artist” is held in conjunction with MINDS WIDE OPEN: Virginia Celebrates Children and the Arts 2012, a statewide collaboration of artists, arts organizations, and other institutions to present programs focusing on Children and the Arts. Learn more by visiting www.artsva.org.

Both exhibits will open April 13, 2012 in conjunction with Friday for the Arts, from 6pm-9pm.  They will remain on display till May 5th.

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.