The YES! Weekly Blog: Theatre Art Galleries of High Point

Showing posts with label Theatre Art Galleries of High Point. Show all posts

Frances Griffith named new Education Coordinator at Theatre Art Galleries

"Theatre Art Galleries welcomes Frances Griffith as its new Education Coordinator. Mrs. Griffith is an art therapist with four years of experience facilitating art workshops with all ages in a variety of settings, including schools, community centers, hospice care, and inpatient and outpatient mental health settings. Most recently, Frances spent a year in Tanzania learning about the functional art making practices and cultural perspectives of women and children in the villages of Kondoa.

Frances has diverse education interests, such as the role of art in promoting cross-cultural learning, but she has a particular interest in coordinating community-wide art programs to encourage creativity and cohesion among diverse groups. Frances will bring this passion for community cohesion to TAG in the 2015-2016 school year.

TAG will continue their in-school art education program—ArtSmart—combining art education, history, and appreciation to help elementary school students reframe their identities as artists in the context of the commercial art world. You’ll also see the TAG table at High Point community events and festivals throughout the year as a part of ArtOut, offering engaging and accessible art activities for children and adults. Finally, Frances will be partnering with Millis Regional Health Education Center to offer a new program—Art for Health, using art as a vehicle to increase awareness of healthy lifestyles in the High Point community through educational programming and public art around town.

Frances will also continue conducting summer art camps at Theatre Art Galleries throughout the remainder of the summer. All summer camps are still open for registration and include: Mega Monsters, Portrait Dolls, Wacky Weavings, Miniature Tree Houses, and Drawing Skills. All camps run from 9:00 am - 12:00 pm Tuesday through Friday. The cost is $90 for TAG members and $100 for Non-Members. For more information and to register online, please visit www.tagart.org

Theatre Art Galleries is located in downtown High Point at 220 E. Commerce Ave. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday from 12:00-5:00 p.m. For more information contact the TAG office at 336-887-2137 or visit www.tagart.org."

- A Press Release

Upcoming Exhibits at Theatre Art Galleries in High Point

Theatre Art Galleries announces the opening of its summer exhibitions curated by guest curator Tom Patterson. Stitched, Stuttered and Screened: Recent Works by Woodie Anderson opens Thursday, June 4th with an Opening Reception on Thursday evening from 5:30-7:30 p.m. The exhibition will remain on view through August 21, 2015.

The Main Gallery will feature Artist and designer Woodie Anderson employs printmaking, drawing, sculpture and written language to explore the areas where identity, personal history and society intersect. While studying fine art and graphic design at Appalachian State University, she began experimenting with the tensions between fine art and commercial applications of visual language--areas she continues to explore in much of her work through the use of text, info-graphics and other collected graphic materials. Often starting with well-worn household fabrics, she employs a variety of processes including stitching, dyeing, screen-printing and drawing to build layered, textural pieces that are full of life. Letterforms and texts--including original and appropriated writings--are integral to much of her work. Her current series, “Flags of Our Mothers,” is formally inspired by banners and pennants dating from the Middle Ages, while its content centers on women whose roles in history, myth, or present-day events have interested her in particular.

Anderson lives and works in Winston-Salem, where she teaches printmaking at the Sawtooth School for Visual Art and participates in the Art-o-mat® (Clark Whittington’s vintage cigarette vending machines repurposed to dispense original artworks). Anderson’s work is featured in The Art-o-mat® “Unpacked” Book and in “Art Quilts at Play” by Jane Davila and Elin Waterston. She has exhibited at regional and national venues including the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and The Turchin Center for the Visual Arts at ASU.

**********

Ben Towle is a cartoonist whose graphic novel Oyster War will be published this fall. His previous book, Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean (a graphic novel for young adults) was released in 2010. A Junior Library Guild selection, it received accolades from The New York Times and Publishers Weekly, among other publications. Towle’s previous work includes the historical fiction graphic novel Midnight Sun as well as an earlier volume of comics folk tales. He has been nominated three times for the prestigious Will Eisner Comics Industry Awards.

Towle’s exhibition in Gallery B will feature original pages from his three graphic novels and one of the folk tales in its entirety.

**********

The Hallway Gallery will host Carol Meetze Moates who works primarily in watercolor but also enjoys oils. She states, “Painting is my passion, and I paint for the process. To me, the medium is mysterious and exciting, and creating art is about the basic need to experiment with the process.” Her work is primarily in watercolor but she has a great love for oils as well.

Since retiring she has devoted herself full time to painting and teaching. She teaches a watercolor class and a calligraphy class each week at Uptown Artworks in Greensboro.

The Kaleidoscope Youth Gallery will host the Annual Triad Middle School Art Exhibition with works from 8 area middle schools.

- A Press Release

Theatre Art Galleries of High Point, NC will open its 2015 exhibition season with “Vernacular Expressions: Contemporary Folk Art from Three Private Collections”

"Opening Thurs., Jan. 22 with an Opening Reception from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., the show will bring together more than 50 works by American self-taught artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, all loaned from the private collections of Piedmont Triad residents.

James Harold Jennings

Widely known artists represented in the exhibition include Eddie Arning, David Butler, Raymond Coins, Howard Finster, James Harold Jennings, Eddie Owens Martin (aka St. EOM), Willie Massey, Carl McKenzie, Bruce New, Melissa Polhamus, Royal Robertson, Jack Savitsky, Mary T. Smith and Inez Nathaniel Walker. The exhibition represents a broad spectrum of work created by artists who haven’t undergone any formal academic training. Often loosely categorized as folk art, such work has also been tagged with the contested designation “outsider art,” and some of it has been characterized as visionary. The works to be shown deal with a range of themes, including wild nature, farm life, religion and spirituality, American history, industrial labor, romantic love and celebratory gatherings. These works have been generously loaned for the exhibition by Tom Fairchild, Sarah McWhorter and Chris Roulhac, all of whom live in Greensboro. Fairchild is a native of High Point.

This will be the third in a series of exhibitions guest-curated for Theatre Art Galleries by writer and independent curator Tom Patterson, a resident of Winston-Salem who is internationally known for his books, articles, and essays on contemporary folk art.

Gallery B will host textile artist Elaine O’Neil. Growing up in rural Maine as the daughter of an ardent seamstress, she became inspired to study textiles at the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science. Her work has been shown in galleries up and down the East Coast as well as in the mountains of North Carolina. Elaine regularly does commissions and has created pieces for clients in Russia, England, Greece, Italy, and France, as well as in many states in the U.S. Her work is also in the collections of many colleges, businesses, and hospitals, on the cover of several books and publications, and she has illustrated two children’s books.

Elaine says of her work, “My artistic process begins with the simple, pure memories of my childhood. I strive to conjure up the essence of those good times and capture them through whimsy and color, stitching them together with a sense of humor and delight. My process begins by approaching each textile collage with a simple sketch. Then through snips and cuts, my scissors, like a painter’s brush, slowly reveal the image. Layer upon layer of fabric, stitched into place using a variety of colors and textures, brings the piece to life. In each piece I create, my hope is to evoke the kind of pleasure and delight of childhood, when life is simple, sweet, and full of endless possibilities. For me, place is more about embodying the essence and the emotionally salient aspects of a location rather than ensuring physical accuracy. I strive to make my pieces LOOK the way you FEEL when you’re at a place. A touch of whimsy here and there allows me to create a place people happily recognize and relate to without re-creating it’s precisely. I hope my art will make you smile each time you look at it.”

The Hallway Gallery will feature “IGNITE HIGH POINT: Updated”. This exhibit will serve as a progress report on new projects that are creating a vibrant center city here in High Point.

And once again, the Kaleidoscope Youth Gallery will host the Annual TAG High School Art Exhibition. Participating schools include Dudley High School, Grimsley High School, High Point Christian Academy, Doris Henderson Newcomers School, Southern Guilford High School, Weaver Academy, Wesleyan Christian Academy, and Westchester Country Day School.

- A Press Release

High Point's Theatre Art Galleries announces the opening of a Fall/Winter Exhibition

"Theatre Art Galleries announces the opening of a Fall/Winter Exhibition curated by Guest curator Tom Patterson titled, “CLOSE TO THE TREE: Works by Cher Shaffer and Gabriel Shaffer” opening Friday, Nov. 21 with an Opening Reception on Friday evening from 5:30-7:30 p.m. in the Main Gallery. The exhibition will remain on view through Jan. 2, 2015.

Painter Cher Shaffer and her son Gabriel Shaffer will share the Main Gallery in a dual exhibition. Cher Shaffer grew up on a small farm in Fairburn, Georgia. Her mother’s ancestry was Cherokee and Melungeon, and her Southern Baptist father was of German descent. Her early paintings, which she began producing in the late 1960s, depicted scenes from her childhood. She pursued her art more seriously after her mother’s death in 1978. By that time she had moved to southeastern Ohio, where her three children were born. A health emergency she suffered in 1985 led her to reevaluate her life, and her art subsequently took a turn toward more expressive, primal imagery. Her work began to reach a national audience in 1989, when she was among the artists featured in the book O, Appalachia: Artists of the Southern Mountains, by Ramona and Millard Lampell, and a related traveling exhibition. She moved to rural Ashe County, N.C., in 2004.

Gabriel Shaffer grew up watching his mother make art and interact with art dealers, collectors and other artists. The oldest of her three children, he apparently inherited her talent, and he maintained a casual drawing practice throughout his childhood. He also excelled early on at writing, which he pursued more seriously. After he finished high school, and following his parents’ divorce, he took a job with the produce distribution company his father managed in Columbus, Ohio. Over the next few years he underwent an identity crisis that manifested in reckless drug experimentation, suicidal behavior and temporary hospitalization. He survived the worst of it to spend most of his twenties writing, doing performance poetry and singing in modestly successful rock bands. At 27 he belatedly tried his hand at painting and realized he wanted to pursue it more seriously. After a brief residency in Wilmington, N.C., he moved to Chicago, where he worked as a waiter and used his spare time to paint, visit art galleries and museums and learn what he could about art history. Encouraged by his mother, he began showing his work to collectors and had a show of his paintings in New York in 2004. Later that year he moved to Asheville, N.C., where he has continued to develop his work. His paintings and collaged drawings, increasingly layered in their treatment of personal and cultural themes, suggest compacted excerpts from an open-ended narrative involving a panoply of familiar and unfamiliar characters.

Gallery B will host “The Chair as Art Form: an exhibition in collaboration with members of the American Society of Furniture Designers and the Bienenstock Furniture Library”. There are many talented, professional photographers in the area that work in the furniture and decor industry. Some of the best were invited to select one of the featured chairs from the exhibit and express themselves creatively using the chair as the subject of their photograph, but capturing something unexpected and familiar. Taking the subject out of its usual domestic setting and truly treating the “chair as art form”.

The Hallway Gallery will feature “Works from the 512 Collective”. The 512 Collective is an artist collective and gallery in High Point that hopes to bring the growing local art community together to create a culture of locally supported artists and makers. The 512 Collective is located at 512 E Washington Street.

And once again, the Kaleidoscope Youth Gallery will host the Annual TAG Lower School Art Exhibition. Participating schools include Florence Elementary, High Point Christian Academy, Johnson Street Elementary, Montlieu Academy, Northern Elementary, Parkview Elementary, Pilot Elementary, Southwest Elementary, Union Hill Elementary, and Wesleyan Academy.

- A Press Release